# data[].attributes.headline
Australian Gothic on the Borderline of Old and New

# data[].attributes.subject
Australian Gothic on the Borderline of Old and New

# data[].attributes.body
This dense and detailed article is useful for information on the unique characteristics that make up Australian Gothic fiction; it talks about what makes Australian Gothic so “uniquely, originally Australian” and how various authors have achieved this. Meant for a mature reader, the language of the article implies that the Gothic fiction of Australian literature comes from a complicated background, one never seen before. According to the article, Australia was “a land peopled by monsters” before it was found and explored. The fact that it was a holding place for convicts before civilians meant many viewed it as a dark and gothic place - the Antipodes; it was a “dark subconscious of the United Kingdom” that was known as the "dungeon of the world". This article also references Barron Field, the author of the first book of verse to be published in Australia, and Frederick Sinnet, an author that lived in the mid-1800s. They both suggest that Australia was no match for England’s antiquity and romance, but instead stood as a new element in the world, a colony that “blended elements” of realists and romantics.

“…their exploration of the anxieties of the convict system, the terrors of isolated stations at the mercy of vagrants and nature, the fear of starvation or of becoming lost in the bush, are distinctly Gothic in effect — and dare one say, uniquely, originally, Australian.”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Long before the fact of Australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters. The idea of its existence was disputed, was even heretical for a time, and with the advent of the transportation of convicts, its darkness seemed confirmed. The Antipodes was a world of reversals, the dark subconscious of the United Kingdom. It was, for all intents and purposes, Gothic par excellence, the dungeon of the world. It is perhaps for this reason that the Gothic as a mode has been a consistent presence in Australia since European settlement. Certainly, the fact that settlement began in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, during the rise of the Gothic as a sensationalist and resonantly influential form, contributes to its impact on the literature of Australia.

There may be other reasons for its appeal. It is probably possible to argue that the generic qualities of the Gothic mode lend themselves to articulating the colonial experience in as much as each emerges out of a condition of deracination and uncertainty, of the familiar transposed into unfamiliar space. It is this very quality which Sigmund Freud identified as the condition of the uncanny, where the home is unhomely - where the heimlich becomes unheimlich - and yet remains sufficiently familiar to disorient and disempower. All migrations represent a dislocation of sorts, but Australia posed particularly vexing questions for its European immigrants. Nature, it seemed to many, was out of kilter. To cite the familiar cliches: "its trees shed their bark, swans were black rather than white, and the seasons were reversed." Moreover, while these features represented a physical perversion, it was widely considered to be metonymic of an attendant spiritual disease.

This sense of spiritual malaise is often communicated through the Gothic mode, that is, through a literary form which emphasises the horror, uncertainty and desperation of the human experience, often representing the solitariness of that expertise through characters trapped in a hostile environment, or pursued by an unspecified or unidentifiable danger. From its inception, the Gothic has dealt with fears and themes which are endemic in the colonial experience: isolation, entrapment, fear of pursuit and fear of the unknown. Moreover, for each, the possibility of transformation, of surviving the dislocation, acts as a driving hope. If the Gothic is itself a hybrid form - a mode delineated by borrowings and conflations, by fragmentation and incompletion, by a rejection of set values and yet a dependence on the establishment - then it is ideal to speak the colonial condition.

For many the very landscape of Australia was Gothic. To Lieutenant Daniel Southwell, one of the First Fleet arrivals, the outcrop of rocks framing the landscape of Port Jackson (now Sydney Harbour), suggested the "charming seats, superb buildings, [and] the grand ruins of stately [Gothic] edifices." Soon real buildings would emerge to complement the imagined ones so that by the 1840s it was both fashionable and commonplace. In 'Gothick Taste in the Colony of New South Wales' (1980), James Broadbent and Joan Kerr have argued that Gothic architecture in Australia "was strongly associational - a symbol of a colony's maturity." However, Australia's "maturity" - particularly in matters literary - was far from universally accepted. Australia was dismissed by many as too immature for proper history, and definitely for a romantic literature, to exist there.

As in many countries, there was in Australia a long-running debate over the importance of realism in, and the unsuitability of romance to, the colony's literature. For some, the idea of the romantic was linked to Europe and its landscape and could therefore never be reproduced in the "new" worlds since they lacked antiquity. A number of critics maintained that given this failing it was critical that other virtues be celebrated. For some, since Australia had no history to speak of, one needed to honour its future potential; for others, the basis for a truly important national literature could emerge only through the celebration - not an exoticising - of the local: dialect, experience, space.

Barron Field (1786-1846), the author of the first book of verse to be published in Australia, adhered to the first view, that in a land without antiquities anticipation was all. In 'On Reading the Controversy Between Lord Byron and Mr Bowles' (1823), he claimed that in Australia, "Nature reflecting Art is not yet born; A land without antiquities, with one, [...] And only one, poor spot of classic ground (That on which Cook first landed) - where, instead of heart-communings with ancestral relics [...] We have nothing left us but anticipation. Where's no past tense; the ignorant present's all [...]." Barron Field may well have prefaced his poem with the epigraph, "Anticipation is to a young country what antiquity is to an old," but he nevertheless concluded his work by suggesting that the only bit of poetry to be found in the "prose-dull land" was a ship which would carry him away - which indeed it did in 1824.

Frederick Sinnett (1830-1866) suggested that romance was inappropriate to Australian letters. Like Barron Field, Frederick Sinnett understood that Australia could not compete with English antiquity, but that its literature of every day should stand on equal ground. That his view of the romantic was largely informed by a specifically Gothic vision is made clear in an extract from his famous essay, 'The Fiction Fields of Australia' (1856), it must be granted, then, that we are quite debarred from all the interest to be extracted from any kind of archeological accessories. No storied windows, richly dight, cast a dim, religious light over any Australian premises. There are no ruins for that rare old plant, the ivy green, to creep over and make his dainty meal of. No Australian author can hope to extricate his hero or heroine, however pressing the emergency may be, by means of a spring panel and a subterranean passage, or such like relics of feudal barons. [...] There may be plenty of dilapidated buildings, but not one, the dilapidation of which is sufficiently venerable by age, to tempt the wandering footsteps of the most arrant parvenu of a ghost that ever walked by night. It must be admitted that Mrs Ann Radcliffe's genius would be quite thrown away here, and we must reconcile ourselves to the conviction that the foundations of a second 'Castle of Otranto' can hardly be laid in Australia during our time.

While there may have existed a rhetorically clear line dividing the realists from the romantics, in point of fact much writing produced in the colony blended elements of each, and it is perhaps in this way that Australia began to map out a specifically local variant of the Gothic mode, one which turned to the specifications of the domestic landscape and voice to articulate the fear and exhilaration of the colonial condition. Writers such as Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke, William Astley, Barbara Janet Ainsleigh Baynton and Henry Archibald Hertzberg Lawson produced detailed and localised texts anchored in the language, scenery and circumstance of their country. Though they may have insisted on the realist dimension of their work (Henry Archibald Hertzberg Lawson, for example, would have been aghast to be called a romance writer), their exploration of the anxieties of the convict system, the terrors of isolated stations at the mercy of vagrants and nature, the fear of starvation or of becoming lost in the bush, are distinctly Gothic in effect - and dare one say, uniquely, originally, Australian.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Australian Gothic on the Borderline of Old and New

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Long before the fact of Australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters. The idea of its existence was disputed, was even heretical for a time, and with the advent of the transportation of convicts, its darkness seemed confirmed.

# data[].attributes.headline
Australian Gothic: Film Weirdness from Down Under

# data[].attributes.subject
Australian Gothic: Film Weirdness from Down Under

# data[].attributes.body
Including summaries of Wolf Creek, Dead End Drive In and Wake in Fright, this article is written as an expansion on another article published by the Sydney Morning Herald. Author James Barrett writes about the sense of Australia’s landscape as a major theme in the creative arts. He explains that the “fragile European eye” views Australia as a horrifying stretch of wild emptiness, a hotspot of fear and disappointment. He is succinct in his introduction, writing, “Getting lost, disappearing, being trapped or escaping or going mad in the outback are staple themes in Australian Gothic.” This article is useful for someone wanting an insight on some of the most classic Australian Gothic films, especially if they have a lot of time; Barrett has included trailers of movies, and sometimes even the full movie themselves, along with the summaries of such films.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Two days ago, I saw a vehicle that would haul that tanker. You want to get out of here? You talk to me."
(Gibson only had 17 lines of dialogue in Mad Max 2, for many the epitome of Australian Gothic)

I fell in love with what is termed Australian Gothic films in the late 1980's when I was a teenager. Australia does not have a strong tradition of making genre films, but we do have a strong sense of the land and environment (for better or worse) which is also a major theme in our creative arts.

"Long before the fact of Australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters. The idea of its existence was disputed, was even heretical for a time, and with the advent of the transportation of convicts its darkness seemed confirmed. The Antipodes was a world of reversals, the dark subconscious of Britain. It was, for all intents and purposes, Gothic par excellence, the dungeon of the world. It is perhaps for this reason that the Gothic as a mode has been a consistent presence in Australia since European settlement. Certainly the fact that settlement began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during the rise of the Gothic as a sensationalist and resonantly influential form, contributes to its impact on the literature of Australia. There may be other reasons for its appeal. It is certainly possible to argue that the generic qualities of the Gothic mode lend themselves to articulating the colonial experience inasmuch as each emerges out of a condition of deracination and uncertainty, of the familiar transposed into unfamiliar space. It is this very quality which Freud identified as the condition of the uncanny, where the home is unhomely - where the heimlich becomes unheimlich - and yet remains sufficiently familiar to disorient and disempower. All migrations represent a dislocation of sorts, but Australia posed particularly vexing questions for its European immigrants. Nature, it seemed to many, was out of kilter. To cite the familiar cliches: its trees shed their bark, swans were black rather than white, and the seasons were reversed. And while these features represented a physical perversion, it was widely considered to be metonymic of an attendant spiritual dis/ease." Turcotte, G, Australian Gothic, in Mulvey Roberts, M (ed), The Handbook to Gothic Literature, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1998, 10-19.

"This is what it has come to".

The heart of the Gothic in Australia is 'the outback', terrifying expanses of seeming wilderness (to the fragile European eye) populated by fear and disappointment. An article on Australian horror films in the Sydney Morning Herald describes this Australia as, "a scary place. The size of the United States, but with only the population of greater Los Angeles, its outback means you can get about as far away from civilisation as it's possible to get." Getting lost, disappearing, being trapped or escaping or going mad in the outback are staple themes in Australian Gothic.

"We call what we do 'Australian Gothic'," says Everett DeRoche, a key figure in Australian horror who wrote the scripts for classics such as Patrick (1978), The Long Weekend (1978) and Razorback (1984). The term was coined to describe Razorback, and anyone who has seen this smoky, heavily backlit tale of a giant pig terrorising the outback will understand why. "Australia doesn't have that iconic 'haunted house' that we are familiar with from American movies. But it does have the outback, and people's fear of that, that agoraphobia."

The Herald article mentioned a few classic works of Australian Gothic on film, I thought I would expand on it:

Wake in Fright (Full Film)

Wake in Fright (1971)(Outback)
"Have a drink, mate? Have a fight, mate? Have some dust and sweat, mate? There's nothing else out here."

John Grant, a young teacher, looks forward to a holiday in the outback but instead finds himself trapped in a nightmarish small mining town where everyone seems to have some sort of mental instability. Succumbing to alcoholism and male rape, the teacher starts to lose his grip as his city ways are stripped away and a new, more brutal, self emerges.
The Cars that Ate Paris (1974)
Peter Weir 's first full-length feature length film, this film has something of a punk aesthetic to it.

A small town in rural Australia (Paris) makes its living by causing car accidents and salvaging any valuables from the wrecks. Into this town come brothers Arthur and George. George is killed when the Parisians cause their car to crash, but Arthur survives and is brought into the community as an orderly at the hospital. But Paris is not problem free. Not only do the Parisians have to be careful of outsiders (such as insurance investigators), but they also have to cope with the young people of the town who are dissatisfied with the status quo. Written by Mark Thompson {mrt@oasis.icl.co.uk}

A man's car breaks down in a country town, somewhere in New South Wales. His brother has been killed, and his fear of cars has returned full-blown, yet accidents around here are more common than strict coincidence would allow, and just leaving the town becomes a problem all of its own. Especially when the various factions in town start a feud that has been brewing for a long time... Written by David Carroll {davidc@atom.ansto.gov.au}

Inn of the Damned (1975)
The tale revolves around the mysterious vanishing of guests from a hostel deep in the Australian rain forests of Gippsland, Victoria in 1896, run by the Straulles, an Austrian couple. Unfortunately the owners of this wayside inn are simply not as sinisterly menacing as Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates in Hitchcock's classic, `Psycho'. Originally an outstanding stage actress, Dame Judith Anderson (Caroline Straulle, who is obviously fussy about the social standing of her guests/victims, bemusingly objecting to a whore) gave a more convincing performance as the chillingly malicious housekeeper Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock's 1940 version of Daphne Du Maurier's `Rebecca', for which she was deservedly nominated an Oscar. Her co-star (Joseph Furst) prior to this, seems to have made a career out of playing caricature mad Austrians, as in the Bond movie `Diamonds Are Forever'. There is an attempt at an ominous moodiness in the guesthouse but it is hardly developed to any great level and the various murders are weakly staged, accompanied by Bob Young's strangely clonkingly unsuspenseful music, which at other times can be jauntily, and even eerily, melodic. One wonders why the victims didn't just simply get out of bed rather than screaming hysterically whilst waiting to be crushed by the slowly descending canopy?

"Listen to the sound of evil. It is out there, waiting". (The Long Weekend)

The Long Weekend (1978)
When a suburban couple go camping for the weekend at a remote beach, they discover that nature isn't in an accommodating mood. The pair show incredible disrespect for nature, especially Peter, such as polluting, killing a dugong, throwing lit cigarette butts in dry bush, and spraying insecticide, among other transgressions. As tensions between the couple escalate, nature is not pleased with their environmental wrongdoing and starts to strike back, first by an eagle and possum attacking Peter, and then through more insidious means...

Razorback (1984)
A wild, vicious pig terrorizes the Australian outback. The first victim is a small child who is killed. The child's granddad is brought to trial for killing the child but acquitted. The next victim is an American TV-journalist. Her husband Carl gets there and starts to search for the truth. The local inhabitants won't really help him, but he is joined by a hunter and a female farmer to find the beast.
The pig is played by a Volkswagen Beetle in leather. It was directed by Russell Mulcahy who made videos for Duran Duran and other early MTV stars. A full sized, fully animatronic model razorback cost $250 thousand to build and is seen for a single second in the movie.

Dead End Drive In (1986)
"There's a party every day, a movie every night, and all the junk food you can eat. What more can a kid want... except to get out."

While not set in the outback, Dead En Drive In is a personal favorite of mine. It is an adaptation of a Peter Carey short story (Crabs, 1972) that brings anarchy and the road warrior aesthetic to the fore. A review from IMDb:

After the world's economy has collapsed, Australia is turned into a wasteland where the unemployed youth use the streets as a battlefield and the law is forgotten. To fight this, the Government uses a Drive-In to lock them and keep them controlled using fast food and movies. A young man named Crabs (Ned Manning) is trapped in this way, but instead of becoming a conformist member of the nihilistic youth, he decides to fight back and escape no matter the cost.

Crabs is trapped in an apparent paradise where he can get all the fast food he wants and do nothing but live each day, but instead he chooses to fight back and try to escape from the Drive-In and to return to his family. He knows this "paradise" is false, and that the only thing worth fighting for is real freedom.

"Welcome to terror's new dead end".

Bad Boy Bubby (1993)
Fantastic film. The first thirty minutes of "Bad Boy Bubby" are great horror. Bubby (Nicholas Hope), a strange, retarded man-child, has been imprisoned by his mom (Claire Benito) for thirty years. He hasn't left the house, can't leave the house, because mom's been busy having sex with him and perverting his sponge-like mind. She tells him the world outside is filled with poison gas and because they only have one gas mask he can never leave the room they are in. Early on, the film alienates viewers by throwing in a scene involving the killing of a cat. After an act of violence which frees him Bubby ventures into the outside world and has a series of amazing, hilarious adventures in which his outsider status is often misinterpreted. He dresses as a pastor. He fronts a rock band, gets intimate with a real disabled woman (Heater Slattery), and discovers life beyond the walls of his prison. The film is extremely original and daring, and Hope's performance as Bubby is totally believable. It was shot over a long period by a number of cinematographers.

Merry Christmas from the dark heart of the outback.

"We are white men, Sir, not beasts. Oh, he sits up there in those melancholy hills; some say he sleeps in caves like a beast, slumbers deep like the Kraken. The Blacks say that he is a spirit. The Troopers will never catch him. Common force is meaningless, Mr. Murphy, as he squats up there on his impregnable perch. So I wait, Mr. Murphy. I wait."

Rural Australia in the late nineteenth century: Capt. Stanley and his men capture two of the four Burns brothers, Charlie and Mike. Their gang is held responsible for attacking the Hopkins farm, raping pregnant Mrs. Hopkins and murdering the whole family. Arthur Burns, the eldest brother and the gang's mastermind, remains at large has and has retreated to a mountain hideout. Capt. Stanley's proposition to Charlie is to gain pardon and - more importantly - save his beloved younger brother Mike from the gallows by finding and killing Arthur within nine days. Almost unbearable violence is used like a paint brush, spraying us with the cruel colonial process as it destroys the oppressed (Aboriginal, Irish, Women) and uses those who believe in it to achieve ends they don't understand. The soundtrack is also a masterpeice. The trailer is HERE.

The is no place you want to be lost in less, than the Australian outback.

More Australian Gothic Horror films can be found at The Encyclopedia of fantastic Film and Television site for Australian Horror.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Australian Gothic: Film Weirdness from Down Under - James Barrett - Medium

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Two days ago, I saw a vehicle that would haul that tanker. You want to get out of here? You talk to me."(Gibson only had 17 lines of dialogue in Mad Max 2, for many the epitome of Australian Gothic) I fell in love with what is termed Australian Gothic films in the late 1980's when I was a teenager.

# data[].attributes.headline
Peter Weir's first work: The Cars That Ate Paris

# data[].attributes.subject
Peter Weir's first work: The Cars That Ate Paris

# data[].attributes.headline
The Monster Within: Australian Gothic emphasises the terror of the familiar

# data[].attributes.subject
The Monster Within: Australian Gothic emphasises the terror of the familiar

# data[].attributes.body
Written by Lisa Thatcher, this article is produced by The Essential, an Australian company that presents an “Australian perspective” on modern and classic cinema and music from both Australia and around the world; it is bound to provide its readers with an in-depth explanation of the nature of Australian Gothic films and novels. This article discusses what separates Australian Gothic from the rest of the world - the monster within. The “white Australian psyche”, how social forces impact it and the journey the psyche takes the “wandering individual lost in a decaying world” are exemplified through Australian Gothic, rather than the physical monsters, such as Frankenstein and Dracula. Thatcher expands on the works of “the most obvious originator of the Australian Gothic” - Peter Weir - and how his well-known films, such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Cars That Ate Paris, have become staples in the definition of Australian Gothic. The Night, The Prowler, produced by Jim Sharman, is another Australian Gothic novel-made-film that she unpacks. She draws the conclusion that the “strain between the ugly and the ordinary” is unique to Australian Gothic films and that they have a way “of building the remarkable on the unremarkable”. This article is particularly helping in learning about the history and origins of Australian Gothic fiction and the “monster within”.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
White-heritage Australians have been making films that can be identified as Australian Gothic (primarily a literary style rather than a genre) since the early 1970s, picking up where the rest of the world left off - particularly Americans, who languished in films like Rebecca (Hitchcock 1940) and the Euro influence of Frankenstein and Dracula, but who had incorporated the exhausted genre as a whole into horror films. Gothic as literature was big in the late 1700s but was being parodied by the start of the next century and started to lose its value. In the early 1900s with the advent of mainstream film making, there was a reignited interest in the styles of Gothic as genre, but that interest gave way to the advent of the horror film, a genre deemed to break open the boundaries of the gothic film and gothic novel. Since then, contemporary film gothic tends to be represented by films like Interview with the Vampire, the multiple Frankenstein films, Edward Scissorhands, Sweeny Todd and most other Tim Burton films.

However, examined via the literary tradition, Australians have been making a unique style of Gothic film since the 1970s and, seen through the tropes of the gothic novel, films that were first dismissed as rubbish or pretentious ( The Cars That Ate Paris, and The Night, The Prowler) become remarkable statements about the white Australian psyche. When the gothic novel first emerged in the mid-1700s it was a way to examine the unspoken, the sublimated fears as unexpressed motivators in the human psyche. Tropes of the gothic novel include: the depiction of a fallen world that impacts characterization, setting and theme; the wanderer in perpetual exile; and a journey to the sublime via human horror rather than temperance. Its ideas like this that gave birth to Frankenstein and Dracula, both entities very much connected to sex and (re)birth, death and loneliness, but also to the monster within, searching not for redemption but for a kind of beauty. In the case of the traditional gothic monster, he is a creature made from ourselves, our own psyches. Horror took this monster to the extreme, removing the subtleties and in the place of the relationship between terror/desire it emphasised the horrific death (fear) against sex itself and turned the monster into a completely inhuman force, determined on destruction and consumption. While horror was making its presence felt, Australians were quietly making films that, against trend, further absorbed and exemplified the monster within. The traditional gothic monster becomes what it was initially, an introverted sublimated impact of social forces on the psyche that operates through the wandering individual lost in a decaying world.

Peter Weir is the most obvious originator of the Australian Gothic, his more famous films of this period and genre being Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Cars That Ate Paris. Weir taps into the very uniquely white Australian problem of being a stranger in one's own land. White Australia has the psychic history of walking onto occupied land and claiming it, generating a feeling of great unease in our relationship with the physical earth in this country, and a strange unease with our identity as inheritors of European culture and displacers of Aboriginal heritage. Many cultures grapple with their historic crimes, but these films depict a specifically white Australian anxiety. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, and The Cars That Ate Paris, the message is about the unknown spirit of the land that can take over the white, troubled psyche. Weir started this exploration in Homesdale (1971) about a group of people who go to a country "retreat" and play a series of "games" that are set up by the staff of the resort. Each day the games involve a confrontation with the ideas of death and mortality. The "weakest" among them succumbs to the psychological pressure and murders one of the guests. In the closing scenes of the film, we see that the murderer has now become one of the staff at Homesdale and will remain when the other guests leave. This is all very Freudian, where psychological rather than supernatural forces become the prime movers in worlds where the protagonists are sure of neither themselves nor their neighbor. In 1979 Weir made The Plumber, a psychological horror about an unnerving tradesman who invades a home via the bathroom, that place where the unmentionable happens and we rid ourselves of our own generated filth and waste. Summerfield (1977) by Ken Hannam deals with rural Australia and the sublimated strangeness of small towns.

Landscape is a recurring theme in many Australian films, but its malevolence is never as powerfully captured as in Australian Gothic. Horror films such as Wolf Creek and The Babadook use the landscape as an eerie film setting, but they retain the firm resolution that the monster is a thing outside. Even in a film like The Babadook that obviously references the three components of the psyche, the monster is still externalized, even among all the metaphor. Films like The Proposition and Gallipoli use the barren Australian landscape to indicate danger and an environment working against the intentions of the human walking upon it, but its impact is superficial, cosmetic. It's harsh, and barren. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, the landscape is a monster that can devour two girls and a school teacher so that they are never seen again. It subsequently causes the suicide of two more people at the school and implicitly deals with European ideals at odds with the spirit of this strangely foreign land.

Australian Gothic incorporates an examination of society and directly involves it in the deterioration of the protagonist wanderer, who will discover that they are terrifyingly alone. In The Cars That Ate Paris, it is society turned inward that is the gothic monster, but certain themes of Weir's tell us that the monster is not confined to Paris. The brilliant opening sequences depict a couple designed to appear as if in a commercial, until they are devoured by the malevolent behaviors in Paris. It's a remarkable prediction and condemnation of film product placement that will become the norm a decade or so later, as well as an attack on the surface of ideal that cinema creates. The speech given by the mayor of Paris at the ball mirrors the speech heard earlier in the car as the Waldo brothers listen to the Australian prime minister. The appearance at the ball of the lobotomised crash victims with cereal packets over their heads is a shocking scene, made all the more so by the applause of approval the citizens of Paris give at their entrance. The cars that ultimately destroy the town are driverless machine monsters that attack the town as by-product of its sleazy revenue. When Arthur is finally able to drive again and escape the town, his freedom comes from committing a horrific murder, and complying with the towns creed. Liberation comes from engagement in society and then a process of destruction, and is a key to the psychological nature of the gothic in Australian cinema.

Around this time, Jim Sharman (of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fame) made The Night, The Prowler, a superb example of Australian Gothic written by our own Nobel prize winner Patrick White. It's a brilliant film that was inappropriately dismissed by the critics as pretentious, and was therefore never given proper analytical examination. Felicity is a psychological stranger in the wealthy 1960s inner Sydney suburbs, constantly at odds with her environment and her hyper-realised conservative mother. Her mental deterioration after she is sexually assaulted firmly places her outside of the society her mother wants her to dominate, as she becomes a prowler herself, gradually taken over by the psychological and societal forces that wealthy society is engaged in a perpetual war against. The film uses flashbacks and other disjointed narrative devices to concentrate the feeling of unease but it is the performances of Ruth Cracknell and Kerry Walker, both obviously physically 'wrong' for their roles that brings home the perfect marriage between image as farce and unpleasant truth as an ignored surface tension.

This strain between the ugly and the ordinary is singular and exclusive to Australian Gothic films and the way they have of building the remarkable on the unremarkable. While traditional gothic novels and films emphasise the supernatural, Australian Gothic is not concerned with these themes in the obvious sense, rather emphasizing the terror of the familiar and the ordinary, which is a distinctly under-examined and under-utilized visual and narrative theme.. Where Czech films like The Ear (1970) evoke an eerie relationship with the home because of an externalized oppressive force listening in (communism), Australian cinema emphasizes the everyday nature of white culture as the gothic monster threatening to destabilize, in films like The Plumber (1979) where a very personal environment becomes unfamiliar and dangerous because it is so familiar.

More contemporary films that fall under this example of the Australian gothic are The Well (Samantha Lang 1997), Broken Highway (Laurie McInnes 1994) Bad Boy Bubby (Rolf de Heer 1994) and Dogwatch (Laurie McInnes 1999). Of these films, only Bad Boy Bubby was available for viewing in researching this article, despite my reading leading me to believe the others films are better examples of the Australian Gothic aesthetic. Dogwatch didn't even achieve theatrical release. Hopefully over time, "The Internet" (perhaps a new kind of gothic monster) will facilitate the freedom to view these fantastic Australian films, without the cringe-dominated distribution gatekeepers (controlled by our own refusal to spend money going to see these films) preventing us, so that a proper examination of this under-evaluated style of filmmaking can be further examined. If ever there was a clarion call in Australian arts, it should be to get over our fear of the pretentious, grow up and thoroughly examine our work for what it is - a unique and powerful contribution to the global creative voice.
References:
David Thomas with Garry Gillard - Ten Types of Australian Film Chapter 9: Gothic (2009)
Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka - The Screening of Australia Volume 2: Anatomy of a National Cinema (Currency Press, 2000)

Note: The two references above were instrumental in creating this paper and both expand on the brief analysis in this article, though the opinions expressed in this piece are my own.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Monster Within: Australian Gothic emphasises the terror of the familiar / Essential Down Under / The Essential

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
White-heritage Australians have been making films that can be identified as Australian Gothic (primarily a literary style rather than a genre) since the early 1970s, picking up where the rest of the world left off - particularly Americans, who languished in films like Rebecca (Hitchcock 1940) and the Euro influence of Frankenstein and Dracula, but who had incorporated the exhausted genre as a whole into horror films. Gothic as literature was big in the late 1700s but was being parodied by the start of the next century and started to lose its value.

# data[].attributes.headline
Wide Open Fear: Australian Horror and Gothic Fiction

# data[].attributes.subject
Wide Open Fear: Australian Horror and Gothic Fiction

# data[].attributes.body
“There’s simply something about the vastness of this land and the many weird, wild and dangerous creatures that populate it that lends itself to terrifying tales.” - Tehani Wessely

This is just one of the many quotes used in this article to provide readers with a melancholic and depressing outlook on Australia’s landscape and literature. For those who are looking to explore the Gothic side of Australia in depth with hard evidence, this website is just the place. Lisa L. Hannett weaves together different works from various authors, along with descriptive interpretations, to form a column that explains Australian Horror and Gothic fiction. She focuses on “the vastness of this land” that acts as the background to dark short stories. Hannett goes on to explain that bushfires and droughts are used as a metaphor of a bleak future by several authors; the dangers of the desert add “horrific [tones]” to pieces and the sunrise on the desert is compared to the “leaking [of hell]”. She is not afraid to dive straight into the centre of Australian Gothic and the nature of Australia’s landscape that provide the foundations of this literacy style.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In her introduction to Australis Imaginarium (2010), Tehani Wessely succinctly summarises an idea that has become something of a truism when it comes to discussing horror and dark fantasy stories with Australian settings:

There's simply something about the vastness of this land and the many weird, wild and dangerous creatures that populate it that lends itself to terrifying tales.

Looking at Australian short fiction published in recent years, we can see exactly what Wessely means. These stories are riddled with manifestations of 'Australian Gothic'. Many of them depict rural isolation: people alone in the desert, in the bush, by the sea. Underlining human and supernatural threats is nature itself, harsh and unforgiving; over it all hangs an endless, suffocating sky. The settings in these narratives are more than just unsettling or uncanny; there's an unheimlich quality to this country's wilderness, which makes it clear that most characters - human or otherwise - are unwelcome. Leave, they seem to say. You don't belong here.

When we think of Gothic literature - Australian or otherwise - several themes or features immediately come to mind: ghosts from the past (literal and metaphorical) rising up to oppress the stories' protagonists; a sense of discomfort, of being unwholesome, resulting from breaking social taboos; overwhelming darkness, hopelessness, claustrophobia, and disintegration. Australia's colonial/convict history is an obvious source of inspiration for this type of horror - but there are so many Australian Gothic stories set in the colonial period that we'll have to save discussing them for another time. Instead, I want to focus on stories that feature 'the vastness of this land' - either as a backdrop to dark short stories, or as a fundamental part of the horror itself.

In Sue Isle's 'The Painted Girl' (Nightsiders), we get the impression that nature is obliterating the past as well as shaping the present. Bushfires rage in this story's opening, ravaging the landscape and making it indistinguishable from Australia as we currently know it. At the same time, fire is a controlling force: it shepherds the characters, driving them inward, making them run. Bushfires function in a similar way in my story 'White and Red in the Black' (Dead Red Heart); burning-earth fences the characters in, keeping them contained, terrified within the confines of their homestead.In Paul Haines' 'The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt' (The Last Days of Kali Yuga), we don't see the fire itself, but its smoke. Like a bell jar descending on the city, a grey pall echoes the protagonist's increasingly dark thoughts, enhancing the sense that he's being stifled, suffocating in his life.

Drought, like fire, often turns the land to dust in these Australian stories, obliterating the past and making the future look bleak. After offering glimpses of scorched, otherworldly trees and black earth, the final lines of Sean William's poem 'Parched' (Sprawl) are a haunting refrain, and a promise of worse to come: "it never rains / for long / here." And in 'Virgin Jackson' (Australis Imaginarium) Marianne de Pierres takes us to an inhospitable, not-so-distant time in the future, where hot north-east winds "evaporated the fluid from your body in seconds" and "scoured the wayback into grotesque landforms, sharp gullies and dust ball plains." Images of dusty, desert (and deserted) plains feature most prominently in these short stories: often cast in shades of sunset, representations of the country's red heart seem to be used as shorthand for the wide open fear of the Australian landscape.

The dangers inherent in the desert are usually referred to within the first few pages - and often in the first paragraph - of these tales. Not just to set the scene; these descriptions instantly add a horrific tone to each piece, to suggest that things can only get worse in what's to follow. For example, Jason Fischer opens 'Undead Camels Ate Their Flesh' (Dreaming Again) like so:

With its usual efficiency, the sun blazed down on bugger-all. It was the Outback, with nothing for hundreds of miles but heat, dust and flies.

This offers a bleak, uncompromising picture of Australia, much like the first lines of Joanna Fay's 'Black Heart' (Dead Red Heart):

It was time to die. That was why she'd come here, to the red land. The sky swept over here, horizon to horizon, uncompromising scarlet. The colour of her unlife, like the sands stretched wide to meet it.

Likewise, Dirk Strasser's 'The Dark Under the Sun' (Australis Imaginarium) captures the feeling that this is not a place where life thrives:

There was red flatness as far as he could see, like a fire that had been trampled to death by a thousand feet, but which had somehow managed to keep its heat while its flames had been killed. Out of the heat grew clumps of grass and twisted, black-bodied trees, but they were so few and far between that it was as if rather than being in the process of living, they were in the process of dying.

Even when the stories take place after dark, the sun, the desert and its denizens are treated as pervasive, immediate concerns. Though sunset brings with it cooler temperatures, in 'Sun Falls' (Dead Red Heart) Angela Slatter reminds us of "the sounds of the night: cicadas, possums, snakes, lizards, hares, wallabies. All manner of nasties that don't come out in the sunlight." While Slatter's story cuts with black humour, Alan Baxter's 'Punishment of the Sun' ) adds a more melancholy edge to the land after sunset. Baxter describes a "world beyond stygian and dead" with "dry, dusty paddocks with dry, dusty horses, ribs like xylophone keys through thin, scabby hides. The orange desolation dragged on as far as hope would last in every direction. Too young to leave this desiccated hole, [Annie] grudgingly endured." This notion of Australia as a 'Hell' or a 'hole' to be endured is also present in the opening paragraph of Pete Kempshall's 'Signature Walk' (Sprawl), in which a little girl asks:

'Where's Australia, Granddad?' ... He held her gaze and pointed straight down at the ground. She shook her head. 'No, Granddad, you're wrong ... Australia can't be down there,' said the girl with absolute assurance. 'That's where Hell is.'

Marty Young also draws on hellish imagery to set the 'horror' tone of his story, 'Desert Blood' (Dead Red Heart):

The world began to bleed as the sun melted into the horizon. Hell was leaking, its blood seeping up from the sand and the sunset itself to reflect in the slow moving Cooper Creek next to them.

The sun setting over expanses of red sand lends itself to plenty of lovely Gothic imagery: crumbling buildings in silhouette, darkness limned with blood and crimson wastelands. However, the Australian sky is perhaps at its most frightening, its most suffocating, during daylight hours. "The sky was blue as a vein the day I killed my father," begins Stephen M Irwin's 'Hive' (Macabre), but it "wouldn't stay that way; the strange, ice-fire blue eventually gave way to eerie grey, then to the red of sick blood." The sky's disintegration from brightness to blood foreshadows the young protagonist's psychological turmoil, his vivid dreams and descent into a sort of temporary madness. Moreover, it reflects Michael's very personal horror. By contrast, the sky in Sean Williams' 'Passing the Bone' (Australis Imaginarium) is "a blue sheet pressing down on the world" that seems designed to stifle everyone, like a pillow pressed over the face. The vastness of the Australian wilderness is contained only by leaves and sky in Margo Lanagan's 'Pig's Whisper' (Agog! Ripping Reads)

The bush was vast around them, immense above them; its frail roof of leaves was a sky within a sky.

Out here, the children are frightfully exposed; they are plunged into Australian lore, and must figure their own way out.

Two stories published in recent years are standouts, in my opinion, for integrating characters and their plights from the world in which they exist. The first is 'Smoking, Waiting for the Dawn' (Dreaming Again) by Jason Nahrung. This piece marks its territory by describing dusty red land, but where many of the examples I've given above use Australia's unforgiving climate and its deserts as a backdrop to the action, this piece's setting is integral in conveying the weariness, exhaustion, and wonderful bleakness that are driving forces in the plot:

George stood by the bleached skeleton of the Wyandra stockyards, breathing in dust and sun-baked silence. The rust-red roofs of the township shimmered in the heat haze, and from what he could see, his old stomping ground hadn't fared much better than he had in the past twenty years: tired, forlorn, running out of time.

This is Australian Gothic. Hopelessness and the certainty of defeat right from the word go. A relentless sense of doom ingrained in the very dirt. And the characters forging on, regardless. A similar effect is achieved in Nahrung's 'Wraiths' ( Winds of Change); there is a feeling of not-quite-acceptance, a stoic weariness in the face of 'natural' threats, established right from the first paragraph:

The dust wraiths struck with all the speed and surprise and finality of a slamming door. We should've felt it coming, but we didn't. Maybe it was the heat, dulling our senses with its touch of lazy. Maybe it was just our time and, on some level, down deep, we knew it and ignored the signs. Or maybe they'd just got tired of us and decided to end it, once and for all.

Heat, dust, sun and desert are embodied in Nahrung's characterisations; these people are the landscape, and its chilling horrors, personified - you can practically hear red dust grinding between their teeth, in their bones - which makes this authors' stories essential reading for anyone interested in Australian horror.

The second piece that shouldn't be missed is Paul Haines' 'Burning from the Inside' (The Last Days of Kali Yuga). Although this story is mostly set in Adelaide - it integrates city settings with the more iconic 'sunburnt country' imagery - it captures the spirit of Australian horror in an absolutely chilling way. In Haines' fiction, setting is never a trope or a cheap add-on. And in this piece in particular, it's impossible to separate the protagonist from his surroundings. From the first line, we're given insight into his mindset, and how Adelaide has helped to shape it:

I'd like to say I feel unsettled here, but I don't.

Right away, we learn that this setting is something we should be afraid of, something we should feel unsettled by. At the same time, this line immediately hooks us into the true point of the story: this city, this setting, can be unforgiving and scary, but it is the protagonist's perception of Adelaide - and his being so at home in this place - that makes us shudder to the core.

From my hotel room I can see the river Torrens snaking through the park, the lush of leaf in contrast to the desert sands that lap at the shoreline this city makes. The sun is settling on the horizon, finally a thing of beauty rather than the raging father in the sky, now its urgency is almost spent. One can imagine the river, that gurgle of water, a searing temptation for the heat bursting forth from the dead heart of this red island continent. A thirst to be quenched? Or something to be destroyed, the last bastion of hope holding back the inevitable conquest that shapes this dry land? Ornate spires reach for the heavens, dozens of them, over trees, nestled between crossroads and office buildings, the cross of Christ thrust up bold and true. One only has to glance in any direction to find the house of God here. From this spot alone I spy the Holy Trinity, Scots, St Patrick's, St Peter's, Christ's, Brougham Place and Immanuel. And here I am. In the City of Churches. Adelaide. My new home for the foreseeable future. The murder capital of Australia.

There are so many contrasts, so much tension in this paragraph alone: city/country, drought/drowning, heaven/hell, life/death, past/present; it is a complex and disturbing sketch of the city, and the land surrounding it. In this story, more than any other, the setting - with its deadly creatures, ruthless atmosphere and horrific history - possesses the main character. It haunts and inhabits him. It tears him apart even as it gives him purpose. It will not leave him alone.

This is Australian horror. And it is absolutely terrifying.
LISA L HANNETT If you enjoyed Lisa L Hannett's column, please consider clicking through to our Amazon Affiliate links and buying her fiction. If you do you'll help keep the This Is Horror ship afloat with a very welcome slice of remuneration.
Buy Lisa L Hannett fiction (UK)
Buy Lisa L Hannett fiction (US)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Wide Open Fear: Australian Horror and Gothic Fiction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In her introduction to Australis Imaginarium (2010), Tehani Wessely succinctly summarises an idea that has become something of a truism when it comes to discussing horror and dark fantasy stories with Australian settings: There's simply something about the vastness of this land and the many weird, wild and dangerous creatures that populate it that lends itself to terrifying tales.

# data[].attributes.body
This podcast features three guests: Professor Gerry Turcotte, Professor Ken Gelder and Dr Rachel Weaver. The presenter, Ramona Koval, prompts Prof. Turcotte and Prof. Gelder to delve into the history of colonial Australian Gothic; how the Gothic from Canada and the UK travelled to Australia and the “convict past” of the genre. She then moves onto how several modern works also include literary devices from Gothic fiction, allowing the three literature and culture experts to expand on it. After concentrating on certain authors and their works, they focus the light and dark aspects of Gothic fiction in general, such as the humour and history. Koval and her guests “delve into the brooding and melancholic side of Australian literature”, how the bush and the city are featured in different works and how gothic features can be seen in the two. For anyone who loves podcasts dense with information and history, this recording offers a tonne in a half-hour session. This is useful for learning how Australian Gothic came to be and how Australia’s outback and cities are brimming with hidden gothic features.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/bookshow/australian-gothic-fiction/3400242

# data[].attributes.headline
The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction 

# data[].attributes.subject
The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction 

# data[].attributes.body
This news article, though more than a decade old, points out that Australian Gothic fiction is gothic in the way that Australia is a country with a vast emptiness, rather than one filled with ancient castles. As author Lorien Kaye describes it, “[Australia’s] vast openness can become paradoxically claustrophobic.” This article also focuses on how Gothic fiction was a genre with widely known authors from around the mid-1800s to mid-1900s; most of the books of the genre were published in the 1890s. Additionally, Kaye writes about how colonial life in Australia was targeted through different authors and their works, such as William Astley’s “compelling” The Pegging-Out of Overseer Franke. This article is short and succinct - it would be useful for one looking for a brief overview of Australian Gothic fiction and the difference it has compared to other gothic works.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Venture carefully, the Australian landscape has a dark side.