Tasmanian Gothic

Add links
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The neo-gothic convict church at Port Arthur

Tasmanian Gothic is a genre of Tasmanian literature[1] that merges traditions of Gothic fiction with the history and natural features of Tasmania, an island state south of the main Australian continent. Tasmanian Gothic has inspired works in other artistic media, including theatre and film.

Origins

The genre was named by in a 1989

medieval imagery, crumbling Gothic architecture and religious ritual. Instead, the Tasmanian gothic tradition centres on the natural landscape of Tasmania
and its colonial architecture and history.

A densely populated Europe of the

faerie
.

Port Arthur Historic Site, reputed to be haunted, provide extensive inspiration for contemporary Tasmanian gothic.[6]

History

Nineteenth century

The skull of Alexander Pearce, held at the State Library of Tasmania

The dramatic landscape and impenetrable rainforests of Tasmania and the real and imagined brutality of the original penal colony provided a ready source of horror stories. Unsettling events such as the story of Alexander Pearce, the wandering cannibal who roamed through Van Diemen's Land in the 1820s, also influenced the bleak and sinister atmosphere that provided an ideal setting for gothic fiction. Benjamin Duterrau's historical epic painting, The Conciliation, which depicts the signing of a treaty between George Augustus Robinson and Indigenous freedom fighters, provided a foundation for Tasmanian Gothic.[7]

Duterrau's painting provided the foundation for later works, including the first major work of Australian Gothic literature,

For the Term of his Natural Life. Clarke provides a highly sensationalised account of the adventures of a convict unjustly transported to Van Diemen's Land for murder. It was first published as a novel in 1874 while the notorious prison settlement at Port Arthur
was still in operation.

When the

inbred, parochial
, and out of touch with civilisation.

Given Tasmania's relatively recent colonisation, artists and authors of the gothic tradition had little to draw on in terms of non-indigenous history. What indigenous history was available to them, however, was mysterious and misunderstood enough to be drawn upon to support Gothic imagery.

There are families (for example, the Jones family at Lower Marshes) who still own the land originally granted to their ancestors in the early years of the 19th century and still live in the houses built by their grandfathers. These families passed on stories of hardship, of encounters with Aboriginal people, convict servants, bushfires and floods as surrounding forests were cleared for farmland. This intersection of past and present informed the island's gothic character.[9]

Twentieth century

During the 20th century, a new generation of artists and authors living and working in Tasmania began to explore the gothic sensibility, drawing on Tasmania's colonial and more recent history for bizarre people and events, factual or imagined, and creating a uniquely Tasmanian stock of gothic characters and situations: deranged

drunken officials, tough women, troubled and homesick immigrants, malevolent forest spirits, deformed halfwits and feral backwoodsmen
, set among spectacular mountains, remote forest camps and Tasmania's crumbling penal colony infrastructure.

The alleged discovery of a small degenerate community on the

Victorian Arts Centre's Studio Theatre in 1985.[10]

Contemporary Tasmanian gothic

Works by novelists

Past The Shallows, 2011) have also been aligned with Tasmanian Gothic.[14]

Tasmanian tiger. Described as being in the "best tradition of Tasmanian gothic",[16] the novel won the 2000 Kathleen Mitchell Award, and was adapted into a 2011 film of the same name. The story of Alexander Pearce was made into two feature films: The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce (2008) and Van Diemen's Land (2009). The 2008 horror film Dying Breed
is about Pearce's fictional descendants in the backwoods of Tasmania.

In 2011, Tasmanian art collector David Walsh opened the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, the Southern Hemisphere's largest privately owned museum. The popularity of MONA — with its theme of "sex and death" — and the wider Tasmanian Gothic movement, has led Tasmanian tourism operators to promote the state's "dark, eerie, cold and bracing history and climate".[17] MONA launched Dark Mofo, a winter festival focusing on the winter solstice and pagan themes in 2013[18] Sister event, the Huon Valley Mid-winter Festival, is also held annually. Television series The Kettering Incident (2016) and The Gloaming (2020) are also regarded as examples of Tasmanian Gothic. Further examples include The Outlaw Michael Howe and The Nightingale, and Heidi Lee Douglas' award-winning short film Little Lamb.

The Stranger with my Face Film Festival ran a Tasmanian Gothic Short Script competition from 2015-2017.[19]

See also

References

  1. ^ Auslit – Literature of Tasmania
  2. ^ "AustLit: Literature of Tasmania - Tasmanian Gothic and its discontents | AustLit". www.austlit.edu.au.
  3. ^ Port Arthur Gothic
  4. ^ Mennell, Philip (1892). "Sinnett, Frederick" . The Dictionary of Australasian Biography. London: Hutchinson & Co – via Wikisource.
  5. ^ Turcotte, Gerry (1998). "Faculty of Arts – Papers". Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive). Retrieved 27 April 2008.
  6. ^ van Raay, Lara; Walker, Ian. "Inside the dark heart of Australia's scariest city". Atavist.
  7. ISBN 9781922079961
    .
  8. ^ Skemp, J.R. (1959). Tasmania Yesterday and Today. Macmillan and Company.
  9. ^ Davidson, Jim. "Tasmanian Gothic". Meanjin 48.2-page 318, 1989
  10. ^ Nowra, Louis (1989). The Golden Age (revised ed.). Currency Press.
  11. ISBN 1921834196
    , p. iii
  12. ^ Cyrill, Christopher (20 September 2003). "The Alphabet of Light and Dark", The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2 December 2012.
  13. ^ Rintoul, Stuart (30 April 2011). "Novel revives debate over 'vile' Melbourne founder", The Australian. Retrieved 5 December 2012.
  14. ^ Edwards, Rachel (20 June 2011). "Review: Past the Shallows", The Book Show (ABC Radio National). Retrieved 10 December 2012.
  15. ^ Murdoch, Anna (19 October 1989). "Inspired by a fatal shore". The Age.
  16. ^ Review of The Hunter by Andrew Peek Archived 16 May 2005 at the Wayback Machine
  17. ^ Fitzgibbon, Rebecca (29 August 2012). "Time to embrace our dark side", The Mercury. Retrieved 4 December 2012.
  18. ^ "The Aesthetic of Dark Mofo: Emotion, Darkness and the Tasmanian Gothic". Histories of Emotion. 26 July 2015.
  19. ^ "How Tasmania became the gothic muse of Australian film and TV". The Guardian. 24 November 2016. Retrieved 26 July 2020.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tasmanian_Gothic&oldid=1211151282"