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Exploring the Genre of Australian Gothic

A while back (like about a year ago) I wrote a piece about my love of the US Southern Gothic genre. Since then, and primarily because I am interested in writing a story in this vein, I have been researching the Australian Gothic genre as well.

At the moment, I have about four story ideas in the works, one which is completed but needs to be edited down, and three others where I have finished at least five chapters each. The most recent to take form will be an Australian Gothic novel.

A quick recap: The term “Gothic” refers to bleak backdrops, unseen terrors, supernatural elements, and the potentially seedy underbelly of small towns, abandoned country roads, persecution, and repressed matter that threatens to return. The plots tend to revolve around themes of anxiety, poverty, uncertainty, danger, desire, taboos, boundaries, and their transgression.

Examples of early Gothic Literature include “The Castle of Otranto” (1764) by Horace Walpole, and the entirety of Ann Radcliffe’s back catalogues. On a more recent note, Anne Rice’s “The Vampire Chronicles”, as well as the complete works of Flannery O’Connor, anything by Cormac McCarthy, The “Twilight” franchise, and “The Haunting of Hill House” all feature.

Initially, the idea of an Australian Gothic aesthetic was unfathomable, given Australia’s lack of European History or ivy-clad ruins. Since that time however, many examples of Australian Gothic have emerged, including Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, George Miller’s Mad Max films, Albert Tucker’s 1956 painting Apocalyptic Horse, Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel Wake in Fright, as well as Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue’s “Where the Wild Roses Grow?”

These works all belong to an Australian Gothic tradition that took root alongside colonisation. Earlier works gave Australian writers and artists a medium to examine the “dark side” of the Australian experience, including the hostility of the environment, the violence of colonisation, convicts’ experiences of exile and entrapment, settlers’ feelings of alienation, and European fears of the racial Other.

All of these experiences make for a perfect backdrop to the Gothic genre. Especially Queensland, which is sometimes known as the “Deep North,” due to it’s traditionally politically conservative leanings, crocodiles in the canals, and the pervasively racist mindset in some communities there. A far cry from its typical portrayal as a land of plenty, in works such as Marcus Clarke’s “For the Term of His Natural Life” (1874), as well as Henry Lawson’s “The Bush Undertaker” (1892), and Barbara Baynton’s “Bush Studies” (1902), Australia is painted as a menacing and claustrophobic hell. The bush is haunted by a “weird melancholy”, and the landscape imprisons and threatens.

Anxieties about Australia’s colonial past have also been explored more recently in Gothic literature and film. Kate Grenville’s “The Secret River” (2005) returns to the Gothic bush to confront the guilty legacy of colonisation. The novel traces convict William Thornhill’s determination to possess a land plot along the Hawkesbury River, and the desire, fear, and greed that lead him to participate in the massacre of its Aboriginal owners. Indigenous writers, such as Alexis Wright and Kim Scott, have also appropriated the Gothic, overturning tropes that cast Indigenous people as the monstrous Other and instead positioning colonisers as terrifying figures. I would even go so far as to insinuate that some of Tim Winton’s literary works have a Gothic bent to them (such as Dirt Music). Sometimes, the Gothic intercepts the Crime genre, in works such as 2006′s “Jindabyne,” or 2001′s “Lantana.”

The subgenre of Tasmanian Gothic (see the works of Richard Flanagan and Rohan Wilson) often reveals anxieties about the colonial genocide of Aboriginal people, and present-day environmental degradation. For example, the extinct Tasmanian Tiger haunts Tasmania’s landscape in the 2011 Daniel Nettheim film “The Hunter,” based on the 1999 novel by Julia Leigh. There is also “The Nightingale” (2018), where Clare, a young Irish convict, chases a British officer through the rugged Tasmanian wilderness and is bent on revenge for a terrible act of violence the man committed against her family. On the way, she enlists the services of Aboriginal tracker Billy, who is marked by trauma from his own violence-filled past.

The Australian Gothic genre increasingly finds new sits to play out its terrors as well, constantly reinventing itself. Australian Gothic increasingly finds new sites to play out its terrors. In Jennifer Kent’s 2014 film “The Babadook,” the Gothic moves into the urban, domestic space of an Adelaide terrace house where a mother and child are terrorised when the horrifying “Babadook” emerges from a child’s pop-up book. The film has been read as an exploration of grief and the terrors of childhood and parenting, demonstrating Australian Gothic’s ability to tackle diverse topics.

Tropical and subtropical Australia have also been portrayed as “Gothic” in the novels of Janette Turner Hospital and Thea Astley, and in the recent Netflix series “Tidelands” in which supernatural sirens inhabit the waters off the Queensland coast.

As literary scholars David Punter and Glennis Byron have observed, the Gothic genre flourishes most at times of upheaval. It allows us to share fears, subvert norms, and point towards what might be overlooked in our history and culture. The COVID-19 pandemic, the rise in housing prices, and social justice issues such as poverty and increasing homelessness, when interwoven with the key Gothic elements mentioned previously, could also provide extra creative fodder for this genre. Gothic will remain a popular mode for Australian writers, filmmakers, and other artists as long as anxieties about the colonial past, race, gender, and difference remain with us. Some of these elements are unfortunately universal and eternal (there will always be some sort of difference between individuals), so it could be concluded that the Gothic genre will remain around forever. I can’t wait to finish my book.

(P.S.A.: I took all of the above photos in Montville, which is part of the Sunshine Coast Hinterland. Very atmospheric, imo).

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I can definitely attest to this. Yods in Astrological Synastry, if the relationship fails, are heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching, and simply soul-destroying. It can feel like a lifetime before you are able to build yourself back up again.

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