Why the Tasmanian gothic is a dangerous fraud
I helped invent Tasmania’s most gothic mass experience, ghost tours at Port Arthur.
It was the mid-1980s, I was an undergraduate and working at Port Arthur as a summer guide. The writer and historian Terry Whitebeach was my fellow guide. Together we thought it would be educational to conduct what we called evening tours.
We could use the quiet, lingering dusk to encourage visitors to reflect more deeply on what life was like for convicts in the empire’s prison city; how it must have felt to be lifted from the noisy slums of London and dumped in a silent prison, or delivered from the season-ruled life of a farm labourer to Port Arthur’s clock-controlled factory floors. But our dream retreated in the face of the demand for more spine-tingling ghost stories.
I’m not against ghost stories. Port Arthur’s provide a fascinating insight into how the site has been seen by successive generations. That’s why Terry Whitebeach and I told some. But pretty soon we realised visitors wanted those stories for their own sake. After we left, the pretence was removed and troubled spirits became the point of the tour.
This was my first experience of how the Tasmanian gothic overshadows all other ways of telling Tasmanian stories. I saw with my own eyes how, because the Tasmanian gothic is so ubiquitous, audiences have come to expect Tasmania is portrayed that way.
It wasn’t an immediate revelation. As a north-west farm boy in Hobart to study, I enjoyed the theatre, books and political debate of the capital. Running through the culture of the inner city at that time was an elevated gothic about Tasmania’s many secrets and dark history. This seemed to explain the repression then experienced by environmental defenders, First Nations leaders, LGBTIQ+ people, and dissenters and outcasts of all kinds.
But there was also a patronising side to this city culture, one that felt The Tale of Ruby Rose and Louis Nowra’s Golden Age gave us permission to laugh at old-fashioned, interconnected rural communities, not unlike the one I was from. Slowly I began to realise the dangers of seeing Tasmania’s ranges, forests and ruined penitentiaries through the gothic compound of fear, menace, the grotesque and the haunted. Slowly I woke up to the fraudulence of the Tasmanian gothic and the far more interesting reality it obscures.
Gibbet Hill
There are two posthumous biographies of the 19th century Tasmanian entrepreneur and evangelist Henry Reed, one by his wife Margaret published in 1908 and one by his grandson, Sir Hudson Fysh, a co-founder of Qantas, published in 1973. Both are based on Reeds’ own journals and both include Reed’s first-hand account of a pivotal moment in his life.
A convict named McKay had murdered a traveller just north of Perth. He was hanged in Hobart in 1837 and then gibbetted beside the road where the crime was committed as a warning to others. The place is now called Gibbet Hill. It was the last gibbetting in the British Empire. McKay’s tarred, rotting corpse raised a great debate at the time about mediaeval punishments and whether Van Diemen’s Land was, or could ever be, part of the civilised world. The tale has been a staple of grisly, gothic story-telling since. But Reed’s link was more personal. On his way to a revival meeting he rode near McKay’s body. He says he reflected on how easily he may have been McKay’s victim, having travelled the path taken by the actual victim “but a short time before”. Rather than pass on, he stopped, dismounted, knelt before the gibbet, “had it out with hell”, “hurled defiance at the Devil” and declared victory with a shout of “hallelujah!”
In Margaret Reed’s biography, this episode fits a time-honoured pattern of hope-filled spiritual writing. Following his conversion, Henry’s career as an evangelist was “a remarkable one” during which “a glorious work of conversion broke out”. Naturally this drew Satan’s attention and soon Reed was tested by the Prince of Darkness. That test was on Gibbet Hill where Henry proves he is not a clanging cymbal and is ready for whatever the Almighty has in store for him.
Hudson Fysh sees his forebear’s story very differently. He admits feeling cut off from his grandfather’s outlook by the “new way of life” arising from the scientific and technical advances that gave him his fame. He calls Henry’s spirituality “tough” and “extreme” and puts it down to the “evil”, “depravity” and “unhappiness” “rife” in early colonial Tasmania, as symbolised by McKay’s gibbeting. For Fysh, Gibbet Hill is an entirely gothic tale, devoid of hope, Christian or otherwise.
Consistent with the benighted world he is describing, Hudson Fysh places Reed’s spiritual encounter on Gibbet Hill “at eerie midnight”, and reports his grandfather as declaring, “On the evening of which I have spoken I had to pass by this gibbet. A cloud scud was flying across the moon, and as it passed over the dim light revealed the body swaying to and fro in the wind, and as it moved the iron chains creaked and jarred with a most dismal sound.”
However, if we compare this passage to the seemingly identical passage from Margaret Reed’s biography we note one word is different. In the earlier work, Reed declares he encountered McKay’s body in “the morning” not “the evening”. This sleight of hand by Fysh changes everything.
The story that was originally about evil and despair yielding to a spiritual dawn symbolised by an actual day-break is transformed into one of bleak horror and bizarre spiritualism. The significance of this single word substitution cannot by over-estimated. Not only does it change the entire meaning of the passage, it shows how the logic of the Tasmanian gothic disregards the more nuanced truth of a traditional story. It shows how easily a story of triumph can be transformed into a one of terror.
Transylvania
There are many more examples of how the Tasmanian gothic relies on literary deceit or mis-interpretation to sustain itself. Much has been made of the fact that the Tasmanian south west was called Transylvania in the first half of the 19th century. How many playwrights and novelists have invoked this name to demonstrate the degenerate, unnatural darkness and threat at the centre of the Tasmanian experience? But the name could not have had such connotations when it was ascribed. Yes, there were vampires in English literature – at least from the beginning of the 19th century – but it wasn’t until the end of the century that they are associated with Transylvania through the novels of Bram Stoker. When it was adopted in Tasmania, the term “Transylvania” meant no more than its Latin root says, “the land over the forest”. If you look at any detailed map of Tasmania you will see that this is exactly what it is, a land of button grass plains and rugged mountains on the other side of the dense southern forests that divide it from the settled valleys of the Huon and Derwent rivers.
Another example is the term “hollow land” used by the convict cannibal Alexander Pearce to describe the same region. It has appeared in films and documentaries about Pearce’s escape from Sarah Island and has come to be a metaphor for the brutality of his time and the denialism of ours. The connotation is of a place without substance, meaning or heart, a place that would unleash our worst impulses. But again, it is a descriptive term which originally lacked all such connotations. Pearce was born into a majority Irish-speaking part of Ireland. An Irish word for “marsh” translates into English as “hollow land” – that is, land that is not solid. Pearce was simply saying the south west of Tasmania was wet and boggy, a fact obvious to anyone who has been there (especially those with poor shoes and no food).
This is a pattern repeated endlessly across Tasmania. Place names that sound forbidding, like Mt Misery or Dismal Swamp, can have ironic, humorous or other unlikely origins but make their way into literature purely as symbols of an exceptional Tasmanian darkness. Take customs that rightly seem sickening and barbaric to us now, like the hanging of culled native animals from tree branches. This was practiced to such an extent on roads like the one between Oatlands and Interlaken that it created veritable avenues of death. This is peak Tasmanian gothic. But it was also an inheritance from pre-industrial Britain and Ireland that was about draining blood quickly to preserve the meat.
If such customs survived a little longer in Tasmania maybe that was because of particular social or environmental conditions, like the poverty of subsistence farmers on the edge of settled areas and the higher numbers of grazing marsupials in Tasmania than on most of the continent. It was not because Tasmanians have uniquely monstrous souls.
I could give a much longer list of words carefully edited or customs misinterpreted upon which the Tasmanian gothic is built. But I can already hear you asking, why does it matter? Surely, the Tasmanian gothic is just a bit of fun? Isn’t it better people are brought to an appreciation of Tasmanian landscape and history by some confected schlock than not at all? Shouldn’t we be proud of a genre that is all our own, that attracts novelists and film-makers, and which stakes out a distinct Tasmanian identity?
Isn’t the gothic a necessary antidote to the genocide-denying, convict-forgetting colonial narrative of Tasmania as a happy, untroubled, pastoral idyll? Doesn’t it serve the radical and subversive role I described earlier by explaining political and cultural repression? Isn’t it a form of truth-telling?
Besides, aren’t Port Arthur, gibbetting and cannibalism full of horror already? By criticising the Tasmanian gothic don’t I risk excusing those horrors or explaining them away? Whether we use it to attract film crews or subvert colonial narratives, surely the Tasmanian gothic, literary excesses aside, is a natural and inevitable way to present such a beautiful but eerie and blood-soaked land?
Apple Isle v Fatal Shore
To be clear, I am not against truth-telling, facing historical horrors, or outsider writers and film-makers telling our stories. I hope that’s clear from the many harrowing stories of historic homophobia I have written about and seek to embed in the island’s collective memory, as well as my willingness to work with non-Tasmanians to retell those stories. I’m also the first to acknowledge the eeriness of some Tasmanian places, an eeriness that seems deeply connected to sublime natural beauty.
My problem is this: the gothic casts its shadow over all Tasmanian story-telling, yet Tasmania and its stories are so much more than gothic horror. And even when there is horror, there is so much more to that horror than recycled, 19th century, penny-dreadful clichés. Far from being an anti-colonial narrative, the gothic devalues Tasmania, justifying the exploitation of its land and people.
Like any colonial narrative, the gothic puts our lives as Tasmanians at the very edge of human experience for others to define their identity against, not at the centre from where it can enrich humanity. Far from being a radical narrative, it reinforces the assumption Tasmania is stuck in the past, fatally flawed and incapable of real cultural, economic and moral progress. Far from being the best way to understand brutality, violence and horror, the Tasmanian gothic extracts these things from their cultural and historical context, and from their ordinariness and banality, by glazing them as incredible and preternatural, thereby putting their audience at a safe distance. Far from being a narrative that arises naturally from the land, the gothic is based on colonial fear and misunderstanding of the land.
This passage from the grandfather of Tasmanian gothic, Marcus Clarke, drips with such misunderstanding: “The soil (is) prolific only in prickly undergrowth and noxious weeds, while foetid exhalations from swamp and fen cling close to the humid spongy ground. All around breathes desolation, on the face of nature is stamped a perpetual frown.”
The Tasmanian gothic says the perception of Tasmania as a sunny Apple Isle is an illusion, and then sets up a false choice between that illusion and the truth of a grisly Fatal Shore. In reality, Tasmanian experience verifies, encompasses and transcends both. It is that Tasmania, the one beyond black and white, we must seek to understand. When we do, the rewards are much greater than goosebumps.
. . .
In Part 2 of this article, I will try to cut through the prickly weeds of Tasmanian gothic to see the more interesting stories beneath.
Rodney Croome grew up on a dairy farm in Tasmania's north-west and studied European history at the University of Tasmania. He worked on the campaign to decriminalise homosexuality in Tasmania, was a founder of Australian Marriage Equality, and currently serves as the spokesperson for the gay right and equality advocacy groups Just Equal and The Tasmanian Gay and Lesbian Rights Group.