No matter where you are on this beautiful isle – the centre of a barren forest, where ghost gums reach to the sky like the bare tips of skeletal fingers, or standing in a cold, abandoned and echoing cell block at Port Arthur – someone is bound to say it. You can’t even sit down for a beer at your local anymore without a rasping voice at the next table waxing lyrical about the creaks and thuds that come after dark.
The death that permeates all of these old buildings like a rising damp just won’t wash out, won’t dry up.
Gothic. That’s what they say. Somewhere along the line, the notion of the gloomy, the threatening and the supernatural became synonymous with Tasmania – beginning, perhaps, with Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life and Rufus Dawes’ brutal treatment in ye olde Van Diemen’s Land, before rolling onward with increasing intensity to the present day; to MONA’s shadowy, alluring galleries defined by sex and death, and its festivals of bacchanalian revelry, epicureanism and nude swimming in bitingly cold salt water.
The rising marketability of crime fiction in this state through such televisual and literary events as Victoria Madden’s The Gloaming and Kyle Perry’s The Bluffs, make just as much of advertising their Gothic influences as any stylistic intent that they might have borrowed from Scandinavian noir, and now it seems that no story of a teen disappearing into the mist is complete without some bigger suggestion of secrecy, ritual or forbidden knowledge, something in the dark that reminds us that this island is defined by the unknown, the untamed, and the unsafe.
Elizabeth Barsham paints landscapes in which eyes creak open in the tangled, gnarled boughs of trees, where ships are torn asunder on rocks shaped like gnawing teeth, and gaunt, sinuous figures stand on distant clifftops in faceless repose. It’s evocative, certainly, and it feels Tasmanian in its way.
But is this really us?
Robbie Arnott certainly doesn’t think so. In an address titled “Fictionalising Tasmania” which he gave as the University of Tasmania’s inaugural Hedberg Writer in Residence, the author of The Rain Heron decried the generic trappings of the Gothic in Tasmania as a false prison for writers: a tired trope born of the rippling tremors of colonial past that we continue to drag around with us, as if the chains of Gothic sensibility somehow pay penance for our blood-soaked history.
He certainly has a point. These deranged convicts, these cannibals, malevolent spirits and impenetrable forests, all serve to privilege this last bastion of land before the blinding white chill of Antarctica as a place where harshness and cruelty are de rigueur, where brutality is as much a part of life as breathing, and where the only conceivable solution must be violence or domination. This is not a natural genre that is born of the land as it is. It is the perspective of an invader, blatantly ignoring Aboriginal relationships and practices of cultivation, and instead serving only those interests that have been fought against as the dominant narrative on this island for generations.
Perhaps the notion of a Gothic Tasmania was most useful in the past because of its value as a chilling, water-logged antidote, to the exhaustingly pervasive perception of Australia as the “sunburnt country”, but now our dark aura is often regarded as a tired cliché of its own, the storytelling equivalent of yet another looming mountain, infusing all of our fictional endeavors with dismal shadows of melancholy.
And yet, and yet …
It is low-hanging fruit for storytelling, perhaps, but the apples remain ripe for export. The international markets fall for it every time: this image of an imposing, inaccessible place without mercy that becomes home only to those who can be hardened; where bodies and clandestine knowledge lie buried in every dark cave and cavern. There is a thrill to pondering the unknown, certainly, and Tasmania has embraced this lack of knowing in a way that other parts of the country simply can’t. As a result, the world is hungry for our secrets.
I understand the temptation to pull away from the Tasmanian Gothic. It is okay, perhaps, to film something on this island with a colour palette that moves slightly beyond grey-blue, or to write a novel in which the local children living at the edge of a forest can play in the trees behind their house without constant whispers of “the thing in the woods”. As much as mainstream Australian fiction has an obsession with the glorification of “the battler”, perhaps Tasmanian fiction has its own languid fixation on darkness, and it should be allowed to open the curtains and thrust open the window, letting a little light and air in.
But that said, you can’t shake a ghost out of a house without first facing and exorcising it. You can’t wash away your skin, and even less the stuff beneath it: your DNA, your bones, and your beating heart.
You can’t kill history.
We will, without doubt, continue to have cycles of the Tasmanian Gothic in our popular culture, and even when we don’t it will always be there: a pulse beating slowly beneath everything. After all, it is us – as quintessentially emblematic of our island life as wearing a black down jacket, driving a Subaru Forrester, or trying to convince your friends on the mainland to move back home.
Tell me that it’s not. Tell me that you don’t see it in the recent offer of $500,000 for information leading to breakthroughs in all of those awful, whispered historical crimes, as the Tasmania Police Facebook page becomes a frightening photographic litany of the unresolved. Tell me you can’t feel it when you emerge from that forest onto the cliffs – dolerite stacked like the spires of a cathedral – or as you stare down into the black glass of that still lake, a mirror pulling the world into it and reflecting everything back at you like a portal to elsewhere, the morning’s wet mist swirling like smoke, like ghosts, like memory.
Tell me that you don’t do it too, whispering it under your breath like a prayer. You can’t help it, can you? Like it or not, it’s who you are.
Gothic.
Lyndon Riggall is a northern Tasmanian writer and English teacher at Launceston College and co-host, with Annie Warburton, of the Tamar Valley Writers’ Festival Podcast. His first picture book for children, Becoming Ellie, was published by Forty South in 2019. He can be found at www.lyndonriggall.com.
