Cirrus@Austlit

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

'My love affair with museums began when I was seven. I saw a bunyip’s head in a glass case, a strange, unsettling creature with a one-eyed blind stare, a cycloptic monster. I was small and I stood up on my toes to see the creature through the glass. On show, the bunyip was mounted in a tall, ornate nineteenth-century wooden cabinet. The typed paper label gave scientific verification: ‘A bunyip’s head, New South Wales. 1841.’ I recall the palpable shock of it, and my mixed childhood emotions: bunyips were real. With its long jawbone wrapped in fawn-coloured fur, it was a decapitated Australian swamp-dweller preserved.  Yet, the horrific creature looked so sad, and with its sightless eye, gaping mouth and cartoonish backward drooping ears. It was a creature of pathos—a gormless, goofy redhead, a ranga, a total outsider.' (Introduction)