Tasmanian Gothic
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tasmanian Gothic is an artistic genre. Although it deals with the themes of horror and the uncanny, it differs from the European horror tradition, rooted in medieval imagery, crumbling mansions, and ancient rituals. Frederick Sinnett, writing in 1856, considered Gothic romanticism inappropriate to Australian literature precisely because the colony lacked the requisite antiquity. For many, however, "the very landscape of Australia was gothic".[1]
[edit] History
The dramatic landscape and impenetrable rainforests of Tasmania itself, and the real and imagined brutality of the original penal colony provide a ready source of horror stories, and the first major work of Australian Gothic fiction, Marcus Clarke's For the Term of his Natural Life, a highly sensationalised account of the adventures of a convict unjustly transported to Van Diemen's Land, was published while the notorious prison settlement at Port Arthur was still in operation.
When the discovery of gold switched the focus of attention to Victoria, Tasmania began to lose its importance in the Australian economy. As the years passed, those who remained on the island became the butt of jokes by "Mainlanders", who regarded them as being inbred, insular and parochial in the extreme. The alleged discovery of a small degenerate community on the West Coast in the 1930s became the subject of The Golden Age, an important Tasmanian Gothic work by playwright Louis Nowra, first performed at the Studio Theatre of the Victorian Arts Centre by the Playbox Theatre Company in 1985.[2]
Tasmania was colonised by Europeans barely three lifetimes ago. There are families living here that still own the land originally granted to their ancestors in the early years of the nineteenth century, who still live in the houses built by their grandfathers. They still tell family stories of hardship, of encounters with Aboriginals, convict servants, bushfires and floods as their farmlands were hacked from the surrounding forest. This intersection of past and present informs the island's gothic character, according to Jim Davidson in his seminal article, "Tasmanian Gothic" [3].
Most of the writers quoted by Davidson were either complete outsiders or expatriate Tasmanians. In the years following publication of his article, a new generation of artists living and working in Tasmania has begun to explore the gothic sensibility, mining the brief colonial - and more recent - past for bizarre people and events, factual or imagined, and creating a uniquely Tasmanian stock of gothic characters and situations - deranged convict "bolters", cannibals, corrupt and drunken officials, tough women, troubled and homesick immigrants, deformed halfwits and feral backwoodsmen, set among spectacular mountains and remote forest camps. As ever, "gothic" is changing and adapting to suit local conditions.
Examples are works by novelist Richard Flanagan and painter E. M. Christensen. In 2008, as part of the annual Mountain Film Festival, filmmaker Rachel Lucas ran a workshop which produced four short Tasmanian Gothic films.
