In Year 8, students explore picture books and respond to this question: “All texts are about real people. Who is your chosen visual text about, and what does it say about them?” After preparing in advance, they write their essays under timed conditions.
This is Pradeepthi Sarvepalli’s thoughtful and unconventional response to The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan – an impressive piece with a unique perspective.
We follow rules every day. From the moment we’re born, these rules shape our lives, our behaviours, and our thinking. Some of these rules are good – they keep us and others safe. But I’m sure you can think of some that are pointless, that we still follow without thinking, ‘hang on, why do I need to do this? What good does it do me?’ If you’ve asked yourself this, the answer you probably gave yourself was, ‘everyone else is, and I want to fit in, so I’m just going to do it.’ It’s thinking like this that makes our world look a lot like the world of Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (2000).
The Lost Thing is a picture book about a boy living in a dull, career focussed world. The main character narrates the story, telling us (the readers) how he was collecting bottlecaps on the beach, and saw a creature which was a mix between a red teapot, a crab, and an octopus. A giant creature which no one notices. He realises it’s lost and takes it to a tall grey building (the Federal Department of Odds and Ends). He is about to leave the lost thing there when an odd janitor gives him a card with an arrow saying if he cared for the thing, he shouldn’t leave it here. Following the arrow, the boy and the lost thing find a haven of creatures that don’t really fit in that society. The boy leaves the now happy thing here, and the story concludes on him reflecting that he doesn’t see lost thing anymore, because he’s too busy.
This is a dystopian book, meaning that it takes aspects of our world and exaggerates them. The actual word comes from two Greek words: topos, meaning place, and dys, meaning bad. The world in this type of story often looks perfect at a glance, but digging deeper, you often find nasty secrets and harsh truths.
The aspect of our world Shaun Tan took to create The Lost Thing was our need and want to be like everyone else. The people in The Lost Thing – that’s us. The grey, uniform world is what our world could become. In The Lost Thing, people are so focussed on their seemingly meaningless tasks that they can’t, or they refuse to, see the special, different things that make life a little brighter. Remind you of anyone? It should.
In The Lost Thing, the main character is obsessed with collecting bottle caps. It’s all he thinks about and all he devotes himself to. All the other citizens are so busy (doing who knows what) that they don’t even notice the lost thing. Or maybe they choose to ignore it. And the buildings and houses – all the same, identical, with no sign of uniqueness.
Now look at your own world. Do you pay too much attention to things that don’t really matter? Don’t adults often spend all their mind on work and “discussing current events?” Letting it engulf them, seeping into everything they do, without even realising it? If we see something out of the ordinary, something unique and special, we look away, because our ‘rules’ don’t tell us how to deal with it, and we’re scared that if we do relate, we’ll be seen as different. Which no one wants. Our houses on our block – don’t they all look similar? With even spaces between and manicured grass?
Shaun Tan is showing us that without realising it, we are making our world uniform. Taking the uniqueness out of it, and shunning anything that makes us special. It’s a wake-up call. He’s telling us we are taking away from ourselves something we hold dear to reach a goal that we think we need but really is just going to hurt us. The citizens in The Lost Thing are us at our worst.
The Lost Thing is a mirror, showing us that we need to stop, and start to question, and observe the world around us. Dig deeper to see what’s really happening and not just be a sheep, following something you don’t really know, and believe in blindly. The Bible also tells us the same thing in Romans 12:2. “Do not be conformed by this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Paul is telling us the same message as Shaun Tan: don’t follow the world. Take your beliefs and make your behaviours show something else.
