Tracey Moffatt

Another possible way to formulate Moffatt’s deepest, animating subject is to say that her work dramatises, in many different ways, the primal violence of socialisation—the invariably traumatic way in which each individual must be “inserted” into an ever-widening set of social, institutional frames: family, school, community, nation. This is the entry into the “symbolic” realm of psychoanalysis—the whole social fabric of preordained and sanctioned positions, identities, stereotypes, ways of behaving and appearing. And this rite of passage is, for her characters, as for each of us, never a total success—indeed, it is often a botched job … Even when the landscape or the cultural citations are unmistakably Australian, this drama of socialisation is universal.²