Tasmanian Gothic

The neo-gothic convict church at Port Arthur.

Tasmanian Gothic is an artistic and literary genre that merges the traditions of Gothic Literature with the history and natural features of Tasmania.

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 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 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.

History

Nineteenth century

Grave stones on the Isle of the Dead at Port Arthur.

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. 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.

Twentieth century

Ruins at Port Arthur.

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 at the Studio Theatre of the Victorian Arts Centre by the Playbox Theatre Company in 1985.

Modern variations

"Killer Zombies of the Weld", a characteristic painting by Elizabeth Barsham .

Later works by novelist Richard Flanagan 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.

See also

• Ozploitation / Australian Gothic
• Australian Literature
• Gothic Literature
• Dark romanticism
• Category: Gothic Revival architecture in Australia