Tasmanian Gothic
Encyclopedia
Tasmanian Gothic is an artistic and literary genre
that merges the traditions of Gothic Literature with the history and natural features of Tasmania
.
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 industrial revolution
prompted Urban Gothic
literature and novels like Robert Louis Stevenson
's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde
's Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). But in sparsely populated colonial Australia, especially the penal colony of Tasmania, the religious zeal of some prison wardens (akin, in many ways, to the institutionalised religion of the Inquisition
; a theme reflected in European gothicism) and the mysterious rituals and traditions of Tasmania's indigenous Aboriginal
inhabitants lent itself to an entirely different gothic tradition.
Frederick Sinnett (founder of the Melbourne Punch
), writing in 1856, considered traditional gothic romanticism inappropriate to Australian literature
precisely because the colony lacked the requisite antiquity
. For many, however, "the very landscape of Australia was gothic".
Elements of Tasmanian Gothic art and literature also merge Aboriginal
tradition with European gnosticism, rustic spirits and the faerie.
s of Tasmania
and the real and imagined brutality of the original penal colony provided a ready source of horror stories. 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; "[one] of Tasmania's principal exports during the first twenty years of this century was her young men". As time passed, those who remained on the island became the butt of jokes by "mainland" Australians, who regarded them as inbred, insular and parochial
.
Given Tasmania's relatively recent colonisation, artists and authors of the gothick tradition had little to draw on in terms of non-indigenous history. What indigenous history was available to them, however, was myterious and misunderstood enough 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 Aborigines
, convict servants, bushfires and floods as surrounding forests were cleared for farmland. This intersection of past and present informed the island's gothic character.
escapees ("bolters"), cannibals, corrupt
and drunken officials, tough women, troubled and homesick immigrants, malevolent forest spirit
s, 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 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.
and painter E.M. Christensen (now Elizabeth Barsham) are considered a continuation of the Tasmanian Gothic tradition.
Julia Leigh's novel The Hunter, which won the 2000 Kathleen Mitchell Award
, is a story set against forests and landscapes described in the "best tradition of Tasmanian gothic".
In 2008, as part of the annual Mountain Film Festival, filmmaker Rachel Lucas ran a workshop that produced four short Tasmanian Gothic films.
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
that merges the traditions of Gothic Literature with the history and natural features of Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
.
Origins
Although it deals with the themes of horror, mystery and the uncanny, Tasmanian Gothic literature and art differs from traditional European Gothic Literature, which is rooted in medieval imagery, crumbling Gothic architectureGothic architecture
Gothic architecture is a style of architecture that flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture....
and religious ritual. Instead, the Tasmanian gothic tradition centres on the natural landscape of Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
and its colonial architecture and history.
A densely populated Europe of the industrial revolution
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...
prompted Urban Gothic
Urban Gothic
Urban Gothic was a horror based series of short stories shown on Five running for two series between May 2000 and December 2001. Filmed on a comparatively low budget, it nonetheless acquired a cult following despite its late air time and the patchy coverage of Five...
literature and novels like Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
's Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). But in sparsely populated colonial Australia, especially the penal colony of Tasmania, the religious zeal of some prison wardens (akin, in many ways, to the institutionalised religion of the Inquisition
Inquisition
The Inquisition, Inquisitio Haereticae Pravitatis , was the "fight against heretics" by several institutions within the justice-system of the Roman Catholic Church. It started in the 12th century, with the introduction of torture in the persecution of heresy...
; a theme reflected in European gothicism) and the mysterious rituals and traditions of Tasmania's indigenous Aboriginal
Tasmanian Aborigines
The Tasmanian Aborigines were the indigenous people of the island state of Tasmania, Australia. Before British colonisation in 1803, there were an estimated 3,000–15,000 Parlevar. A number of historians point to introduced disease as the major cause of the destruction of the full-blooded...
inhabitants lent itself to an entirely different gothic tradition.
Frederick Sinnett (founder of the Melbourne Punch
Melbourne Punch
Melbourne Punch was an Australian illustrated magazine founded by Edgar Ray and Frederick Sinnett, modelled closely on Punch of London which was founded just fifteen years earlier....
), writing in 1856, considered traditional gothic romanticism inappropriate to Australian literature
Australian literature
Australian literature is the written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies. During its early western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies, therefore, its literary tradition begins with and is linked to...
precisely because the colony lacked the requisite antiquity
Ancient history
Ancient history is the study of the written past from the beginning of recorded human history to the Early Middle Ages. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, with Cuneiform script, the oldest discovered form of coherent writing, from the protoliterate period around the 30th century BC...
. For many, however, "the very landscape of Australia was gothic".
Elements of Tasmanian Gothic art and literature also merge Aboriginal
Australian Aborigines
Australian Aborigines , also called Aboriginal Australians, from the latin ab originem , are people who are indigenous to most of the Australian continentthat is, to mainland Australia and the island of Tasmania...
tradition with European gnosticism, rustic spirits and the faerie.
Nineteenth century
The dramatic landscape and impenetrable rainforestRainforest
Rainforests are forests characterized by high rainfall, with definitions based on a minimum normal annual rainfall of 1750-2000 mm...
s of Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
and the real and imagined brutality of the original penal colony provided a ready source of horror stories. The first major work of Australian Gothic fiction, Marcus Clarke
Marcus Clarke
Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke was an Australian novelist and poet, best known for his novel For the Term of his Natural Life.- Biography :...
's For the Term of his Natural Life
For the Term of his Natural Life
For the Term of His Natural Life, written by Marcus Clarke, was published in the Australian Journal between 1870 and 1872 , appearing as a novel in 1874. It is the best known novelisation of life as a convict in early Australian history...
, a highly sensationalised account of the adventures of a convict unjustly transported to Van Diemen's Land
Van Diemen's Land
Van Diemen's Land was the original name used by most Europeans for the island of Tasmania, now part of Australia. The Dutch explorer Abel Tasman was the first European to land on the shores of Tasmania...
, was published while the notorious prison settlement at Port Arthur
Port Arthur, Tasmania
Port Arthur is a small town and former convict settlement on the Tasman Peninsula, in Tasmania, Australia. Port Arthur is one of Australia's most significant heritage areas and the open air museum is officially Tasmania's top tourist attraction. It is located approximately 60 km south east of...
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; "[one] of Tasmania's principal exports during the first twenty years of this century was her young men". As time passed, those who remained on the island became the butt of jokes by "mainland" Australians, who regarded them as inbred, insular and parochial
Parochialism
Parochialism means being provincial, being narrow in scope, or considering only small sections of an issue. It may, particularly when used pejoratively, be contrasted to universalism....
.
Given Tasmania's relatively recent colonisation, artists and authors of the gothick tradition had little to draw on in terms of non-indigenous history. What indigenous history was available to them, however, was myterious and misunderstood enough 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 Aborigines
Australian Aborigines
Australian Aborigines , also called Aboriginal Australians, from the latin ab originem , are people who are indigenous to most of the Australian continentthat is, to mainland Australia and the island of Tasmania...
, convict servants, bushfires and floods as surrounding forests were cleared for farmland. This intersection of past and present informed the island's gothic character.
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 convictConvict
A convict is "a person found guilty of a crime and sentenced by a court" or "a person serving a sentence in prison", sometimes referred to in slang as simply a "con". Convicts are often called prisoners or inmates. Persons convicted and sentenced to non-custodial sentences often are not termed...
escapees ("bolters"), cannibals, corrupt
Political corruption
Political corruption is the use of legislated powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain. Misuse of government power for other purposes, such as repression of political opponents and general police brutality, is not considered political corruption. Neither are illegal acts by...
and drunken officials, tough women, troubled and homesick immigrants, malevolent forest spirit
Spirit
The English word spirit has many differing meanings and connotations, most of them relating to a non-corporeal substance contrasted with the material body.The spirit of a living thing usually refers to or explains its consciousness.The notions of a person's "spirit" and "soul" often also overlap,...
s, 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 West Coast in the 1930s became the subject of The Golden Age
The Golden Age (play)
The Golden Age is a 1985 play written by Australian writer and playwright Louis Nowra. It is based on the story that Nowra heard from an academic about "a strange group of people in the wilds of South-West Tasmania just before World War II".-Plot summary:...
, an important Tasmanian Gothic work by playwright Louis Nowra
Louis Nowra
Louis Nowra is an Australian writer, playwright, screenwriter and librettist.He is best known as one of Australia's leading playwrights...
, first performed at the Studio Theatre of the Victorian Arts Centre by the Playbox Theatre Company in 1985.
Modern variations
Later works by novelist Richard FlanaganRichard Flanagan
Richard Flanagan is a novelist from Tasmania, Australia.-Early life:Flanagan was born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961, the fifth of six children. He is descended from Irish convicts transported to Van Diemen's Land in the 1840s. His father is a survivor of the Burma Death Railway. One of his three...
and painter E.M. Christensen (now Elizabeth Barsham) are considered a continuation of the Tasmanian Gothic tradition.
Julia Leigh's novel The Hunter, which won the 2000 Kathleen Mitchell Award
Kathleen Mitchell Award
The Kathleen Mitchell Award is an Australian literature prize for young authors. It was established in 1996 and is awarded every second year with a sum of A$7,500 ....
, is a story set against forests and landscapes described in the "best tradition of Tasmanian gothic".
In 2008, as part of the annual Mountain Film Festival, filmmaker Rachel Lucas ran a workshop that produced four short Tasmanian Gothic films.
See also
- OzploitationOzploitationOzploitation films are a type of low budget horror, comedy and action films made in Australia after the introduction of the R rating in 1971. The year also marked the beginnings of the Australian New Wave movement, and the Ozploitation style peaked within the same time frame...
/ Australian Gothic - Australian LiteratureAustralian literatureAustralian literature is the written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies. During its early western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies, therefore, its literary tradition begins with and is linked to...
- Gothic Literature
- Dark romanticismDark romanticismDark Romanticism is a literary subgenre. It has been suggested that Dark Romantics present individuals as prone to sin and self-destruction, not as inherently possessing divinity and wisdom. G. R...
- Category: Gothic Revival architecture in Australia