Cirrus@Austlit

'South East Queensland’s subtropical hinterlands—the mountainous, forested country lying between the cities of the coast and the Great Dividing Range—are sites of a regional variation of Australian Gothic. Hinterland Gothic draws its atmosphere and metaphors from the specificities of regional landscapes, climate, and histories.

'In works by Eleanor Dark, Judith Wright, Janette Turner Hospital, and Inga Simpson, South East Queensland’s Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast hinterlands are represented as Gothic regions “beyond the visible and known” (“Hinterland” in Oxford Dictionaries Online 2019), where the subtropical climate gives rise to an unruly, excessive nature.

'In Gothic literature, excess is related to the unspeakable or the repressed. Bringing Gothic, postcolonial, and ecocritical perspectives to bear on the literature of South East Queensland’s hinterlands reveals a preoccupation with the regions’ repressed histories of colonial violence, which are written on the landscape through Gothic metaphors.'  (Publication abstract)

'The field of Gothic Studies concentrates almost exclusively on literature, cinema and popular culture. While Gothic themes in the visual arts of the Romantic period are well documented, and there is sporadic discussion about the re-emergence of the Gothic in contemporary visual arts, there is little to be found that addresses the Gothic in northern or tropical Australia. A broad review of largely European visual arts in tropical Australia reveals that Gothic themes and motifs tend to centre on aspects of the landscape. During Australia’s early colonial period, the northern landscape is portrayed as a place of uncanny astonishment. An Australian Tropical Gothic re-appears for early modernists as a desolate landscape that embodies a mythology of peril, tragedy and despair. Finally, for a new wave of contemporary artists, including some significant Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, Gothic motifs emerge to animate tropical landscapes and draw attention to issues of environmental degradation and the dispossession of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.' (Publication abstract)