Cirrus@Austlit

'This dynamic multidisciplinary collection of essays examines the uncanny, eerie, wondrous, and dreaded dimensions of oceans, seas, waterways, and watery forms of the oceanic South, a haunted global precinct stretching across the Pacific, Southern and Indian Oceans, and around Australasia, Oceania, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa.

'Presenting work from leading scholars, the chapters contend with the contemporary fears and repressions associated with the return of environmental traumas, colonial traumas, and the spectres of the precolonial deep past that resurface in the present. The book examines the manifestations of these Gothic aesthetics and propensities across a range of watery spaces – seas, oceans, waterholes, and swamps – in vessels, ports, shorelines, journeys, strandings, and transformations, in amphibious bodies and the drowned, all of which promote haunted engagement with the materiality of water. This collection renews the interdisciplinary breadth of Gothic criticism and the relevance of Gothic affect and sensibility to understanding the histories and cultures of the oceanic South through an exploration of the rarely considered uncanniness of the oceans, waterways, and aqueous forms of the Southern Hemisphere, haunted by colonial and precolonial imaginings of the Antipodes, the legacies of imperialism, and the “double vision” between Oceanic and settler-colonial epistemologies, and the encroaching menace of climate change. Comprising diverse contributions from screen, literary, and cultural studies, environmental humanities, human geography, and creative practice in ecological sound art, and poetry, the collection examines the uncanny and the sublime in watery fictions and authentic settings of a range of aqueous southern forms – ocean surfaces and depths, haunted shallows and reefs, moist mangroves, moss and lichen, the awesome horror of tidal apocalypse.

'This book will be illuminating reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, area studies, and Indigenous studies.' (Publication summary)

'A recent spate of remakes of film titles dating from the Australian cinema revival in the 1970s suggests a renewed interest in this significant corpus. It has a deeper resonance insofar as the original films also represent landmarks in Australian Gothic aesthetics. In two of these productions, Storm Boy (2019) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (2018), the renewal of the Gothic discourses and the allied figure of the child are inflected by an optimistic vein of “post-millennial Gothic”. It is apparent in the styling and in the post-feminist and cultural consciousness of both productions, and the sense in which both remakes provide resolutions to the earlier films and embed layers of contemporary social pedagogy in the revised Gothic scenarios. Both of these productions suggest a recognition that the films of the cinema revival may not speak to a current generation, and this dissonance is particularly apparent in the revised figure of the lost child in the remakes.' (Publication abstract)

'‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ comprises eight essays, an introduction and conclusion, and the analysis of poetics and cultural geographies is focused on landmark films and television. The first section of the book, ‘Backtracks: Landscape and Identity’, refers to films from and before the revival, beginning with the 1978 film 'The Irishman' as an example of heritage cinema in which performances of gender and race, like the setting, suggest a romanticised and uncritical image of colonial Australia. It is compared to Baz Luhrmann’s 'Australia' (2008) and several other films. In the second chapter, ‘Heritage Enigmatic’, 'The Irishman' is also drawn into comparison with Charles Chauvel’s ‘Jedda’ (1955), as films that incorporate Indigenous performances in this heritage discourse through the role of voice and sound. In Part 2, ‘Silences in Paradise’, the first essay, ‘Tropical Gothic’, focuses on Rachel Perkins’s 'Radiance' (1998) as a landmark post-colonial film that questions the connotations of icons of paradise in Queensland. The discussion leads to films, in the next chapter, ‘Island Girls Friday’, that figure women on Queensland islands, spanning the pre-revival and contemporary era: ‘Age of Consent’ (1969), ‘Nim’s Island’ (2008) and ‘Uninhabited’ (2010). Part 3, ‘Masculine Dramas of the Coast’ moves to the Gold Coast, in films dating from before and since the current spike in transnational production at the Warner Roadshow film studios there, namely, 'The Coolangatta Gold' (1984), 'Peter Pan' (2003), and 'Sanctum' (2011). The final section, ‘Regional Backtracks’, turns, first, to two television series, ‘Remote Area Nurse’ (2006), and ‘The Straits’ (2012), that share unique provenance of production in the Torres Strait and far north regions of Queensland, while, in the final chapter, the iconic outback districts of western Queensland figure the convergence of land, landscape and location in films with potent perspectives on Indigenous histories in ‘The Proposition’ (2005) and ‘Mystery Road’ (2013). ‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ presents the various regions as syncretic spaces subject to transitions of social and industry practices over time.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The dubbing of the voices of Aboriginal actors in The Irishman (Crombie, 1978) and Jedda (Chauvel, [1955] 2004) is discussed, first in a general context of the prevalence of post-sychronization of cinema sound in past and contemporary practices. The Irishman is thereafter considered through the spectacle of DVD packaging with commentary, a para-cinematic device that works – through a similar mechanism to dubbing – to influence the reception of the feature film; then Jedda is approached with reference to the various accounts that have emerged of the dubbed voices, none of which seem to conclusively indicate the grounds or status. Concluding reflections on these histories are drawn to wider institutional and industrial conditions, and also to contemporary films that address the voices and silences of Indigenous people.' (Author's abstract)

'Drawing on a range of representations, Allison Craven examines the significant role of landscape in deriving narrative places in Queensland and explores the state's most enduring mythic association.'

Source: Abstract.