'Australia is often seen as Gothic by its visitors, settlers and its indigenous people. Its landscapes and creatures are unsettlingly different and its myths of disruption, violence and beauty emerge from rivers, dystopian swamps and lakes, lurking in forests, deserted mines and whaling stations, plantations, claustrophobic homes and on deadly road trips. This chapter begins with a discussion of some foundational settler-invader texts by Marcus Clarke and Rosa Praed which evoke Australia’s dangerous grandeur and its mythic creatures, before turning to Thea Astley’s versions of brutal histories, isolated compulsions and loneliness, and Alexis Wright’s dystopian post-Anthropocene future in The Swan Book (2013).
Just as its sunshine coasts mask its contested haunted histories of invasion, theft and genocide, Australian Gothic is dark, duplicitous, uncanny and dangerous. Its most famous fictional serial killer (Mick Taylor of Wolf Creek [2005]) bears the same friendly, bluff, workmanlike name as its legendary Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee, and in contemporary horror tales its holiday beach towns are infiltrated by predatory transients. How Australia constructs and represents itself in literature and film is necessarily Gothic, replete with hidden, misrepresented and misunderstood histories and a consistent concern with guilt, identity, contradictions and confusions, producing a range of haunted lives, inherited and recent memories, and a hauntology of invaded or erased spaces and diverse pasts. In suggesting that ‘the Gothic itself is a narrative of trauma’ (Bruhm 268), Jessica Gildersleeve sees in the Australian Gothic ‘a sense of shame or guilt about the consequences of Australia’s colonial origins as well as the significance of its early mythologies, such as the Australian Legend’ (‘Contemporary Australian Trauma’). Contemporary Australian Gothic thus builds on and beyond trauma, becoming now ‘a site for political resistance and for social and cultural disruption’ (Gildersleeve, ‘Contemporary Australian Trauma’). In beginning to take a view of a longer history of Australian Gothic in literature and film, it is important to appreciate the mixed relationship of, on the one hand, the overwhelmingly Other landscape, climate, people and living things which the settlers invaded, and which they tried to incorporate, enculturate, relabel or destroy, and, on the other, the parallel lives and ancient histories of those displaced and represented as Other, and the importance of relationship to country, which lies at the heart of Aboriginal culture.'
Source: Abstract
