“The world is full of missing persons, and their numbers increase all the time. The space they occupy lies somewhere between what we know about the ways of being alive, and what we hear about the ways of being dead.” Andrew O’Hagan, The Missing (1996), p98
“Going missing presented those left behind with a void. While other losses may be uncertain, missingness was not only uncertain but also intangible. What had happened was unknown and what might happen was entirely outside the control of those left behind. [They] found it difficult to grieve because of the uncertainty about what exactly it was they were grieving.” Julie Clark, Adult Siblings of long-term missing persons: Loss and “unending not knowing” (2007), p17
When a missing persons case is discussed in the media, the focus seems primarily concerned with the mystery and drama associated with the disappearance, and on the logistics of the investigative process marshalled in hope of finding this person. Perhaps captured by the dramatic conventions of television crime shows, the stories about missing persons that circulate throughout the media sphere almost always propose disappearances as cases that will eventually be solved, with the victim rescued or located and the villain punished. In its simplest formulation, public discussions around missing persons cases work under the assumption that in such cases the case will be closed, and answer will be found. In many cases this is correct, with 86% of the 30,000 persons reported missing each year found within seven days. But those statistics leave a great many people unfound.
What is almost always lost in this focus on the mystery of the missing person is the plight of those left behind. Recent research estimates that each missing persons case directly affects the lives of twelve other people, and be they family, friends or community members, the journeys of the left behind are far from straightforward. As Julie Clark observes in the second epigraph, the left-behind must exist in a state of not-knowing, left ‘stuck’ or ‘frozen’ in a state of grief in which they cannot ever be sure what it is that they are grieving for, leaving everyday existence as “a void”. version 1.0’s The Disappearances Project quietly traces the edges of this void, hoping to shed light on the emotional journeys and trajectories of hope of those left behind, with the great hope that we as a society might begin better helping those faced with experiences.
David Williams, Bathurst, April 2011
version 1.0 Blog 
This is a great piece of work – an elegantly crafted assembly of the words of real people that create over the arc a the play a very moving portrait of loss, pain and adjustment. The words, the film, the sounds together create a picture that everybody who has never experienced a missing person case should see.