Facing the Minotaur in the Australian Labyrinth: Politics and the Personal in Requiem for a Beast

Requiem for a Beast: A Work for Image, Word and Music by Matt Ottley (2007) is an Australian mixed-media text for young adults that intertwines the myth of Theseus with the story of a boy's coming of age in the Australian Outback. Told through paintings, fragments of graphic novel, diary entry, spoken memories, dreams, and song cycle, it takes young readers into a series of physical, emotional, and historical labyrinths. Physically, the labyrinths appear in the Australian landscape, a place of sweeping beauty but also hot, bare, and threatening (to non-Indigenous people). Emotionally, the labyrinths appear in the boy's backstory: a troubled childhood and a broken relationship with his father. They also appear in the complex history of Australian colonization and the damage done to the Indigenous peoples of the country by colonial settlers and governments. As the boy goes into those labyrinths, he becomes a modern Theseus. He encounters a Minotaur formed by generations of trauma: the trauma visited on the Australian Aborigines and the generational guilt of settlers' descendants. The boy (who as an everyman figure remains unnamed in the book) must face the Minotaur and conquer it in order to begin the process of healing the wounds of the past: his own, his father's, and those of the Aboriginal figures in the book - an elderly Bundjalung woman who was stolen from her parents as a child (through a system of institutionalized racism) and an Aboriginal teenager who was killed in a moment of casual cruelty by a friend of the boy's father. The connected stories of different generations of White and Black Australians interweave with the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur to form a politically charged and deeply felt work, showing the power of young adult fiction to take on difficult subjects and to help young readers negotiate labyrinths of their own.