Issue Details: First known date: 2014... 2014 'And in My Dreaming I Can Let Go of the Spirits of the Past' : Gothicizing the Common Law in Richard Franklin's No Way to Forget
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In this essay I will discuss how Richard Frankland's award-winning short film No Way to Forget (1996) approaches the topic of Aboriginal deaths in custody in gothic terms. As I will show, Frankland reverses gothic dichotomies, employs tropes of haunting and trauma, and ultimately exposes the fictional quality of the gothic itself in his representations of the Australian common law and its institutions. Through an appropriation and transformation of both this originally European mode and the English legal tradition, he thus creates his very own version of an Indigenous gothic. By asserting the cultural strength of that vast body of knowledge summarized as "Dreaming/Law/ Lore,” Frankland reclaims Aboriginal identity and subverts what he and others have described as the de-humanizing quality of the law in civic and spiritual terms? I will therefore first outline the benefits that the field of law and literature offers for questioning the factual discourse of law through the study of fiction before I turn to the dangers the use of the gothic mode holds for Aboriginal appropriations. The opportunities filmmaking offers for re-claiming Koori culture and identity will conclude my theoretical outline. I will also draw on the doctrine of reception and the legal foundations of the Australian common-law tradition in order to introduce my following analysis of Frankland's No Way to Forget. This analysis will be supplemented by readings of Frankland's 2002 play Conversations with the Dead, according to the author "a much heavier and harder version of 'No Way to Forget'".

Source: p.256.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Decolonizing the Landscape : Indigenous Cultures in Australia Beate Neumaier (editor), Kay Schaffer (editor), Amsterdam : Rodopi , 2014 8115701 2014 anthology criticism

    'How does one read across cultural boundaries? The multitude of creative texts, performance practices, and artworks produced by Indigenous writers and artists in contemporary Australia calls upon Anglo-European academic readers, viewers, and critics to respond to this critical question.

    'Contributors address a plethora of creative works by Indigenous writers, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and painters, including Richard Frankland, Lionel Fogarty, Lin Onus, Kim Scott, Sam Watson, and Alexis Wright, as well as Durrudiya song cycles and works by Western Desert artists. The complexity of these creative works transcends categorical boundaries of Western art, aesthetics, and literature, demanding new processes of reading and response. Other contributors address works by non-Indigenous writers and filmmakers such as Stephen Muecke, Katrina Schlunke, Margaret Somerville, and Jeni Thornley, all of whom actively engage in questioning their complicity with the past in order to challenge Western modes of knowledge and understanding and to enter into a more self-critical and authentically ethical dialogue with the Other.

    'In probing the limitations of Anglo-European knowledge-systems, essays in this volume lay the groundwork for entering into a more authentic dialogue with Indigenous writers and critics.' (Publication summary)

    Amsterdam : Rodopi , 2014
    pg. 255-274
Last amended 6 Apr 2017 12:05:56
255-274 'And in My Dreaming I Can Let Go of the Spirits of the Past' : Gothicizing the Common Law in Richard Franklin's No Way to Forgetsmall AustLit logo
Subjects:
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X