Tasmanian Gothic

Tasmanian Gothic is a genre of Tasmanian literature 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 Meanjin article by Jim Davidson, titled ''Tasmanian Gothic''. 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 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 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 ''The 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. Elements of Tasmanian Gothic art and literature also merge Aboriginal tradition with European gnosticism, rustic spirits and the faerie.

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"''. The extensive Georgian architecture, including vast abandoned ruins such as Port Arthur Historic Site, reputed to be haunted, provide extensive inspiration for contemporary Tasmanian gothic.

History

Nineteenth century

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.

Duterrau's painting provided the foundation for later works, including the first major work of Australian Gothic literature, Marcus Clarke's ''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 gold rush switched the focus of attention to Victoria, Tasmania began to lose its importance in the Australian economy; " neof 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, 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 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.

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 convict escapees (''"bolters"''), cannibals, corrupt and 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 West Coast in the 1930s became the subject of ''The Golden Age'', an important Tasmanian Gothic work by playwright Louis Nowra, first performed by the Playbox Theatre Company at the Victorian Arts Centre's Studio Theatre in 1985.

Contemporary Tasmanian gothic

Works by novelists Richard Flanagan, Christopher Koch and Chloe Hooper are regarded as a continuation of the Tasmanian Gothic tradition. Flanagan's 2001 novel ''Gould's Book of Fish'', winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, is a fictionalised account of Van Diemonian painter William Buelow Gould, focusing on his years spent imprisoned at the notorious convict settlement of Macquarie Harbour. According to Carmel Bird, Helen Hodgman

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