The central contention of Kim Torney’s Babes in the Bush: The making of an Australian image is that ‘the lost-child image continues to resonate with Australians’. The cover illustration is from Frederick McCubbin’s famous painting Lost (1886), which Torney elevates to ‘the iconic image of the lost child story’. The task set out in these assertions, and iterations of them, is to find why the image continues to resonate in Australia now that the phenomenon of children lost in the bush is such a rarity, compared with the nineteenth century. (Torney quotes the alarming statistic from the Melbourne Argus index for the 1860s of seventy children fatally lost in the bush.)