Cirrus@Austlit

Sucking vampiric winds, cannibalistic red-skinned monsters, and demonic autophagic silhouettes and shadows exist in contemporary Aboriginal Australian horror and Gothic texts. Figures based on myth, they have names like Namorrados, Yara-ma-tha-who, Gherawhar, or Quinkan, and they bear some striking similarities to Western vampires. The fluidity of the vampiric image in Aboriginal Australia is heightened by its transformation across media and complicated by racial and cultural controversies. This essay is a transmedial analysis of the Australian Aboriginal vampire that traces its adaptations from orality to ink, and from celluloid to digitization. Both Indigenous and White Australian visions of the vampiric shape-shifter have permeated Australian narratives and media. In the 1990s, Alan McKee stated that in Australia "there is no readily accessible 'backfella' tradition of zombies and vampires:' as conventional Western figures in film (1997a, 123); this is still the case. Productions like The Zombie Brigade (1986) show vampiric contamination of an Indigenous community, and by proxy the continued intrusion or incorporation of classic vampires with Aboriginal myths. On page, the Aboriginal vampire is recreated by self-identifying Indigenous Australians in modern texts such as Mudrooroo's Vampire trilogy (1990-1998), D. Bruno Starrs' That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! (2011), or Raymond Gates's "The Little Red Man" (2013). It also appears in Australian vampire fiction like Jason Nahrung's Vampires in the Sunburnt Country series (2012-2016). By surveying the figure as it has filtered across media, I analyze its transformations in relation to transmedialitv and theories of adaptation espoused by scholars like Jens Eder and Linda Hutcheon. Significant variations in the Aboriginal vampire are visible in relation to the scientific apparatus of horror, the Antipodean footprint of Bram Stoker, and shadow and light in the Sunburnt Country. Each permutation reflects transitions in cultural context and from literary to multimedia traditions. Thus, after explicating a critical approach, this essay delineates the transformation of the Aboriginal Australian vampire in various White and Indigenous productions, taking into account the politics of transmediality. Underlying such an analysis is the issue of cultural identity . and appropriation, which feeds into the metamorphic quality of Aboriginal Australian vampires in textual and digital forms.' (Introduction) 

 

This essay seeks to unpack the nature and associated symbolic meanings of the vampires in Kirsty Eager's Saltwater Vampires (2010). Eager's text still remains a bestselling text for young adults in Australia, roughly corresponding to a time period in which it became increasingly clear that this country's meta-narrative was itself in a state of flux. As a vampire narrative its emphasis is naturally linked to "the symbolics of blood" is already located in a "liminal position" (Stephanou 2014, 5). However, this Young Adult fiction is even more so in that it also lies between several intersecting urtexts related to the Australian context and its underpinning history. In particular Eager has used the destruction of the Dutch East India trading vessel the Batavia, which ran aground off the coast of Western Australia on the fourth of June 1629 as an entree and mimetic foundation for her vampire narrative. As is often the case with historical narratives, and in particular vampire accounts, an initial destructive event then "fans forward, ... to become different moments of the one process of sensing" (Taussig 1992, 21). To further elaborate on this process and the context of this essay, "the connection between humans and vampires—whether constructed within fantasy, fiction, fandom or real-life emulation—is a symbiotic one, and one which is sustained by the umbilical cord of memory" (Bacon and Bronk 2013, 2). Wherever blood and memory are comingled in text, understanding the context is an imperative (Gilders, 2004). Therefore, as summarized in ensuing sections, in the Australian socio-historical and literary contexts the linking thread of actuality and memory is "the imperative of blood" (Brisbane 2009,400), of which the Batavia disaster is the first recorded instance.' (Introduction)