'Kristina Olsson's mother lost her infant son, Peter, when he was snatched from her arms as she boarded a train in the hot summer of 1950. She was young and frightened, trying to escape a brutal marriage, but despite the violence and cruelty she'd endured, she was not prepared for this final blow, this breathtaking punishment. Yvonne would not see her son again for nearly 40 years.
'Kristina was the first child of her mother's subsequent, much gentler marriage and, like her siblings, grew up unaware of the reasons behind her mother's sorrow, though Peter's absence resounded through the family, marking each one. Yvonne dreamt of her son by day and by night, while Peter grew up a thousand miles and a lifetime away, dreaming of his missing mother.
'Boy, Lost tells how their lives proceeded from that shattering moment, the grief and shame that stalked them, what they lost and what they salvaged. But it is also the story of a family, the cascade of grief and guilt through generations, and the endurance of memory and faith.' (Publisher's blurb)
Boy, Lost
2022
Fortitude Valley
:
Playlab
,
2023
25441394
2022
single work
drama
'Boy, Lost is a true story of a boy’s lifelong search for his mother.
'Adapted from Kristina Olsson’s award-winning memoir, Boy, Lost is a dynamic new production by Queensland Theatre’s 2020 resident company, Belloo Creative. A true story of a boy snatched from his mother’s arms and their journey back to one another, this is an ultimately uplifting story of survival.
'Travelling down the train tracks of the east coast of Australia and spanning fifty years, the play ricochets from post war Brisbane to Cairns and Sydney as it follows one boy’s life long search and a family’s journey from loss to redemption.
'Told in Belloo Creative’s signature style of fluid storytelling and physicality, Boy, Lost combines dramatic storytelling and nuanced music theatre to create a testament to the tenacity of the human spirit.
'From the book by Kristina Olsson
'Adapted for the stage by Katherine Lyall-Watson' (Production summary)
'This article reads Kristina Olsson’s Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir (2013, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.) as a postmemorial text. The memoir centres on the moment, six years before Olsson was born, when a thirteen-month-old baby was abducted from Olsson’s mother’s arms. The article relies on Marianne Hirsch’s (2012, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. ProQuest.) theory of postmemory to examine the way the memoir is motivated both by the confusion Olsson feels about the way her own life was shaped by this hidden, traumatic past and by the responsibility she feels to write towards a sense of justice for her mother. The article dwells on the ethical concerns that arise at the point of tension between the writer’s desire for recovery and the mother’s silences, and it examines the aesthetic strategies Olsson employs to negotiate this tension. The article also draws on Meera Atkinson’s (2017, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Bloomsbury. ProQuest.) work to discuss the way Olsson situates her family’s trauma within the context of the cultural and social factors that precipitated it. The article argues that Boy, Lost offers a methodology for an ethical postmemorial project through the way it balances Olsson’s story with her mother’s and with the country’s.' (Publication abstract)
'IMAGINE YOURSELF A bird, huge, flying out of time through a smoky sky, back, back through millennia. Further than your own memory, deeper than your instinct: about 226 million years. Gondwana floats, massive, around the polar south. Umbilical. The shape of Australia, the place that will one day be your home, is still lost, a speck in the supercontinent, just recognisable from above if you know what you’re looking for. Still, you beat through temperate air; from your high currents you can make out great mountains and gouged valleys, the shapes of trees, small plants – delicate, lacy – and horsetails, mosses. Tree ferns, woody conifers, seed-bearing ginkgos. And there, between swamp and mountain, early dinosaurs – therapods. Young, toothless.' (Publication summary)
'This article focuses on the trauma memoir as an identifiable type of creative writing. It begins by tracing its popularity, especially in the 1990s, in the process recognising what can be proposed as key works internationally, many of which—but not all—are American, as well as how these texts were received by critics and readers, in order to place the Australian trauma memoir in this broader context. The so-called ‘misery memoir’ is also discussed. As little investigation has focused on the Australian trauma memoir as a form of memoir, this article will profile some (mostly recent) examples of Australian trauma memoir in order to begin to investigate what these texts contribute to our understanding of the trauma memoir as a form of creative writing. This recognises debates over the literary and social value of memoirs.' (Publication abstract)
