Crossing Borders and Borderlands: Childhood’s Secret Undergrounds

Abstract

Childhoods are curious and inaccessible to adults. This chapter problematises children’s relationships with borders by exploring childhood under-grounds as subversive spaces that respond to borderlands and border crossings in children’s lives. It is centred on a tale of two childhoods, through which we examine the significance of children’s private border crossing practices embedded within the social and political contexts of their everyday realities. These childhoods are different from each other; however, they connect through the children’s experiences of the anxieties and excitements evoked in response to the borders in their lives. They tell a story of the complexity of navigating borders and living in borderlands, and experiencing both real physical borders and imaginary ones. One of the childhoods investigated is the story of a boy growing up in communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s, and his relationship to the borderlands separating his country from neighbouring Austria. This physical border could not be crossed: the land on which the boy looked out every day was a forbidden space, blocked by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers. The boy and other children around him developed a childhood underground, in which they discovered their own ways to cross the borders to this forbidden land: through their private stories and secret games. The other childhood borders that we analyse are of a girl born into a German community in Australia, and her culturally mediated border crossings.