Hinterland Gothic: Reading and Writing Australia’s East Coast Hinterlands as Gothic Spaces

Emma Doolan Bachelor of Fine Arts: Creative and Professional Writing (Hons First Class)

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Creative Writing and Literary Studies

Creative Industries Faculty

Queensland University of Technology

2017

Principal Supervisor: Dr Lesley Hawkes

Associate Supervisor: Dr Glen Thomas

Keywords

Hinterland, Gothic literature, Australian Gothic, ecofeminism, spatial theory, heterotopia

Hinterland Gothic: Reading and Writing Australia’s East Coast Hinterlands as Gothic Spaces i

Abstract

This practice-led thesis comprises an exegesis, titled Hinterland Gothic: Reading and Writing Australia’s East Coast Hinterlands as Gothic Spaces, and a novel, At Devil’s Elbow, a Gothic family drama set on the Blackall Range in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast hinterland. When Debbie James—artist, mother, wife—vanishes after leaving a party, her family, friends, and the police are willing to believe she has left town of her own accord. But Callie, her sixteen-year-old daughter, is not convinced. She sets out on an investigation of her own, one which takes her along the winding roads of the hinterland mountain range and into the entanglements of adult lives. When, months later, Debbie’s badly decomposed remains are discovered tangled in lantana on a hillside not far from the family home, the police turn their attention to Callie’s father, and Callie no longer knows who she can trust.

The hinterland, literally the “land behind” or the region “lying beyond what is visible or known” (Oxford English Dictionary 2008) is a central feature in At Devil’s Elbow and an important, if critically neglected, space of Australian cultural life. Identifying an emerging tradition of Hinterland Gothic literature, to which At Devil’s Elbow belongs, this thesis brings together spatial, postcolonial, feminist, and ecocritical theories under the umbrella of Gothic studies to investigate representations of Australia’s east coast hinterlands as heterotopias, liminal counter-sites in which cultural norms can be tested, inverted, or reaffirmed (Foucault 1986).

In Hinterland Gothic texts, the natural environment is a key focus and marginalised—especially female, but also Indigenous and ecological—voices are privileged. Through a regionally specific web of Gothic metaphor (Sedgwick 1980, 7) drawn from the hinterland landscape, these texts articulate, or gesture towards, the silenced stories of place. The thesis argues that Australia’s lush, fertile, and green east coast hinterlands disrupt essentialist depictions of uniformly dry, barren, and brown Australian landscapes with which the development of an Australian literary tradition and national identity have been bound up. On the alternative ground of the hinterland, dominant cultural narratives can be unsettled and rescripted.

ii Hinterland Gothic: Reading and Writing Australia’s East Coast Hinterlands as Gothic Spaces

Table of Contents

Keywords ...... i Abstract ...... ii Table of Contents ...... iii List of Figures ...... v Statement of Original Authorship ...... vi Acknowledgements ...... vii Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 Background ...... 3 Hinterland ...... 8 Scope ...... 15 Context ...... 20 Research Questions ...... 26 Significance...... 27 Thesis Outline ...... 28 Chapter 2: Literature Review ...... 33 An Australian Gothic Literary Heritage ...... 33 Australian Gothic Scholarship ...... 35 The Australian Landscape Myth ...... 41 Regional Australian Gothic ...... 45 Towards a Hinterland Gothic ...... 61 A Hinterland Gothic Literary Tradition ...... 68 Conclusion to the Literature Review ...... 75 Chapter 3: Research Design ...... 77 Introduction to Research Design ...... 77 Practice-Led Research ...... 77 Gothic Heterotopia ...... 80 Postcolonial Gothic ...... 84 EcoGothic ...... 85 Female/Postfeminist Gothic ...... 87 Spatial History ...... 89 Ground Truthing ...... 92 Reflective Practice ...... 94 Conclusion to Research Design ...... 96 Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the Blackall Range, QLD ...... 97

Hinterland Gothic: Reading and Writing Australia’s East Coast Hinterlands as Gothic Spaces iii

Glasshouse Mountains ...... 97 The Blackall Range ...... 104 Indigenous Population ...... 113 Bunya ...... 115 Maleny ...... 123 Witta ...... 125 Conondale ...... 126 Return ...... 129 Montville ...... 131 Chapter 5: A Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor...... 141 Introduction to A Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor ...... 141 Water ...... 148 Weeds ...... 153 Trees ...... 161 Animals ...... 170 Earth ...... 172 (Hu)man-made ...... 176 Conclusion to A Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor ...... 180 Chapter 6: At Devil’s Elbow (abridged) ...... 183 Chapter One–Chapter Seventeen ...... EMBARGOED Chapter Eighteen–Chapter Thirty-One (Synopsis) ...... EMBARGOED Chapter Thirty-Two–Chapter Forty ...... EMBARGOED Chapter 7: Reflective Practice ...... 184 Introduction to Reflective Practice ...... 184 The Dark Writing of the Sunshine Coast Hinterland ...... 186 Female Hinterland Gothic ...... 194 The Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor in At Devil’s Elbow ...... 199 Narrative Voice, Structure, and Point of View...... 209 Conclusion to Reflective Practice ...... 215 Chapter 8: Conclusion ...... 217 Findings and Significance ...... 219 References ...... 225 Appendices ...... 265 Appendix A Sunshine Coast Hinterland, Queensland ...... 265 Appendix B Gold Coast Hinterland, Queensland ...... 266 Appendix C Northern Rivers Region, New South Wales ...... 267 Appendix D At Devil’s Elbow Chapter Eighteen–Chapter Thirty-One ...... EMBARGOED iv Hinterland Gothic: Reading and Writing Australia’s East Coast Hinterlands as Gothic Spaces

List of Figures

Figure 1. South East Queensland and northern New South Wales hinterlands ...... 16 Figure 2. Tibrogargan from Matthew Flinders rest area, Steve Irwin Way (2015)...... 100 Figure 3. Tibrogargan from Steve Irwin Way, past Nursery Road (2015)...... 102 Figure 4. Bald Knob and transmission tower, from Mountain View Road (2015)...... 106 Figure 5. View from Maleny Mountain Wines (2015)...... 108 Figure 6. Glasshouse Mountains from Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve (2015)...... 110 Figure 7. Bunya pines off Curramore Road (2015)...... 116 Figure 8. Baroon Pocket before dam construction ...... 119 Figure 9. Obi Obi Creek (2013)...... 120 Figure 10. Devil’s Elbow Lane, Maleny-Kenilworth Road (2015)...... 126 Figure 11. Montville Clock Shop (2015)...... 132 Figure 12. Connemara Cottage, Montville (2015)...... 133 Figure 13. Montrose water wheel, Montville (2015)...... 134 Figure 14. Moreton Bay fig and bunya pine, Oehmichin Road (2015)...... 137 Figure 15. Sunshine Coast hinterland map ...... 265 Figure 16. Gold Coast hinterland map ...... 266 Figure 17. Northern Rivers map ...... 267

All images in this document are from the author’s own collection, unless otherwise indicated.

Hinterland Gothic: Reading and Writing Australia’s East Coast Hinterlands as Gothic Spaces v

Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature: ______

Date: ______

vi Hinterland Gothic: Reading and Writing Australia’s East Coast Hinterlands as Gothic Spaces

Acknowledgements

A lot can change during the time it takes to write a PhD thesis, and the list of people

I have to thank for their help and support over the last few years, both inside and outside the university, could fill a book of its own. Those of you who aren’t named here, I hope you know who you are.

I would like to acknowledge, particularly, my Principal Supervisor Dr Lesley

Hawkes, who has provided invaluable guidance, support, and expertise throughout the PhD process, and who has always gone above and beyond. Lesley, I can’t thank you enough. I’d also like to thank my Associate Supervisor Dr Glen Thomas, as well as Dr Kate Cantrell, who was looking at drafts of At Devil’s Elbow as early as 2011.

Mirandi Riwoe, Penny Holliday, Laura Elvery, and Sam George-Allen—bless you for the food, wine, coffee, and pep talks. I’m also indebted to my excellent writers’ group, The Margawriters—Mirandi, Laura, Andrea Baldwin, Kathy George, and Madeleine Bendixen—who have read, encouraged, and workshopped the novel.

Liz Ellison, Mark Piccini, and Emily O’Grady have given valuable support and feedback at different times throughout the research and creative writing processes.

The Indecent Artists of L221, especially Sasha Mackay, provided advice, friendship, and support in tough times, as did the new friends I made in Z2-202.

Window ghost—thanks for the company.

I’d also like to acknowledge the excellent staff in the Creative Industries faculty and the HDR support team who have given their time, advice, and assistance over the last few years.

Finally, I’d like to thank my parents for all those weekend drives, walks, climbs, and camping trips in the hinterland, which I’m sure I complained about endlessly—who knew I’d grow to appreciate them so much?—and the friends and family who have, over the years, helped me explore some of the hinterland’s different faces.

Hinterland Gothic: Reading and Writing Australia’s East Coast Hinterlands as Gothic Spaces vii

Chapter 1: Introduction

This practice-led thesis comprises an exegesis, titled Hinterland Gothic: Reading and

Writing Australia’s East Coast Hinterlands as Gothic Spaces and a novel, At Devil’s

Elbow, a Gothic family drama set in the Blackall Range in Queensland’s Sunshine

Coast hinterland. When Debbie James—artist, mother, wife—vanishes after leaving a party, her family, friends, and the police are willing to believe she has left town of her own accord. But Callie, her sixteen-year-old daughter, is not convinced. Callie sets out on an investigation of her own, one which takes her along the winding roads of the hinterland mountain range and into the entanglements of adult lives. When, months later, Debbie’s badly decomposed remains are discovered tangled in lantana on a hillside not far from the family home, the police turn their attention to Callie’s father, and Callie no longer knows who she can trust. The hinterland landscape is a central feature in At Devil’s Elbow, providing the inspiration for the story and its ongoing development.

The thesis brings together spatial, postcolonial, feminist, and ecocritical theories under the umbrella of Gothic studies to investigate Australia’s east coast hinterlands as Gothic spaces in literature. I argue that the hinterland, literally the

“land behind”, or the region “lying beyond what is visible or known” (Oxford

English Dictionary 2008), functions as a liminal, heterotopic zone, a “counter-site”

(Foucault 1986, 24) in which the natural environment is a key focus and marginalised—especially female, but also Indigenous and ecological—voices are privileged. Lush, fertile, and green, the hinterland disrupts essentialist depictions of uniformly dry, barren, and brown Australian landscapes with which the development of an Australian literary tradition and national identity have been bound up. On the

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

alternative ground of the hinterland, dominant cultural narratives can be unsettled and rescripted.

Australia’s east coast hinterlands have been neglected in terms of both cultural analysis and literary production. However, this thesis identifies a distinct and heretofore unrecognised strain of what I term Hinterland Gothic emerging from these regions. These novels, including Sarah Armstrong’s Salt Rain (2004), Melissa

Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby (2013), Jessie Cole’s Deeper Water (2014), and Inga

Simpson’s Nest (2014), are predominantly written by women and published after the turn of the millennium. Like At Devil’s Elbow, they all feature female protagonists, often young girls, in lush, excessive hinterland environments dominated by masculine power and threat, in which mothers are missing, emotionally absent, or otherwise aberrant. These are recognisably the key elements of the Female Gothic tradition that can be traced back to the eighteenth-century novels of Ann Radcliffe, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which centre on mother-daughter relationships, the terror of uncertainty, female entrapment and disenfranchisement, and gendered violence. Likewise, just as the Female Gothic castle is often linked with the female sexual or maternal body (Holland and Sherman 1977; Kahane 1985), in At Devil’s Elbow and other Hinterland Gothic novels, the hinterland landscape is strongly identified with not only female but also Indigenous bodies.

I argue that in these novels the hinterland environment, both natural and built, is a locus of Gothic energies. Hinterland Gothic foregrounds stories of ecological violence and marginalisation as conduits through which to metaphorically explore or gesture towards repressed histories—and ongoing realties—of violence towards women and Indigenous people. By analysing a selection of Hinterland Gothic texts as well as reflecting on my creative work, I identify a regionally specific set of

2 Chapter 1: Introduction

Gothic symbols that function as what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a Gothic “web of metaphor” (1980, 7): a set of conventions that are in some ways all “‘about’ the same thing, that […] encompass the same content” (ibid., 6).

In Sedgwick’s view, Gothic metaphors exist in a system of interrelations, speaking to and about one another—although she avoids identifying any single meaning underlying the whole system (ibid., 5). Rather, Gothic metaphors are capable carrying content of “different sorts” (ibid., 6). I argue that Hinterland Gothic draws its metaphors from the landscape—lantana, creeks, rainforest, barbed wire— and links them to female and Indigenous bodies through shared experiences of violence and marginalisation. The metaphors of Hinterland Gothic connote liminality and excess, manifesting the texts’ thematic concerns with the unspeakable and repressed. I make use of the Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor to experiment with the Gothic energies in At Devil’s Elbow as they play out themes of violence and repression—of the female, Indigenous, and ecological—on the hinterland landscape.

Background

The research was motivated by my interest as a creative writer in depicting a landscape that was an integral part of my experience of the Australian environment, but that I had not seen represented in literature, film, or television. The Blackall

Range in the Sunshine Coast hinterland is an area familiar to me from childhood. My family lived just south, at Caboolture, and visited for camping trips and weekend drives. As I grew older, I continued visiting the wineries, quaint villages, scenic lookouts, and rainforest walking trails on the range. The landscape always struck me as irreconcilably different from the kinds of landscapes popular culture insisted were quintessentially Australian. In books, films, and on television images of the red

Outback and dusty eucalypt bush seemed to stand for the majority of Australia, with

Chapter 1: Introduction 3

the coast defined by beaches and cities. The hinterland, barely visible in representation, seemed out of place, even un-Australian. It appeared to not belong.

On overcast days, with its rolling hills and dark stands of forest, the hinterland looked like something out of a Brontë novel. And then, in the sunshine, it was beautiful, idyllic, with views all the way out to sea. Not only the Blackall Range but also Mt Tamborine in the Gold Coast hinterland and the Northern Rivers hinterland district in New South Wales, visited on family holidays, seemed to share these qualities, along with the label “hinterland”.

I became interested in the kinds of places we in Australia call hinterlands, and in the poetic resonances of the term itself, which seemed to hint towards something secret, some mysterious other land. In early drafts of At Devil’s Elbow, Gothic imagery and atmospheres began to emerge that seemed in keeping with these connotations, connected as they were to the landscape, to images of tangling, excessive lantana, and steep, winding mountain roads. And hinterland, I realised, was in fact a term with a peculiar relevance in the Australian context. As Philip Drew

(1994, 29) points out, colonial Australian settlement developed in accordance with classic centre-hinterland patterns, a series of isolated cities strung out along the coastline, each serving and served by a hinterland, and the same patterns remain largely intact today. Drew argues that although Australians have imaginatively displaced our national centre or locus of myth and identity into the interior, the continent’s red, dead heart, in fact Australia has multiple centres, and they are distributed around the coastal edge (ibid., 34). Each of these coastal centres has its own hinterland; not only the state capitals, but also other major cities such as Cairns in Northern Queensland, Newcastle on the New South Wales Central Coast, or

Broome in Western Australia.

4 Chapter 1: Introduction

On the east coast, those hinterlands with which I was familiar were, I realised, part of a network of geographically, historically, and perhaps conceptually similar spaces stretching from Cairns down to Gippsland in Victoria. Although ranging in climate from tropical through subtropical and temperate, these hinterlands nonetheless share certain characteristics. Situated between the coastline and the eastern reaches of the Great Dividing Range, which runs like a raised scar from off the tip of Queensland down through Tasmania, Australia’s east coast hinterlands were the landscapes over which the colonial frontier advanced. Pushing north and west from early settlements in the south east of the nation, colonists slaughtered, poisoned, and displaced Indigenous people in order to gain possession of what remains some of the most fertile, well-watered land on the continent.

Hilly and mountainous, Australia’s east coast hinterlands contain a large proportion of the nation’s forests (Australian Government Department of Agriculture

2014, 3), including substantial areas of rainforest and protected national parks. These lands were—and are—as precious to Indigenous people as they became to colonial timber-getters, pastoralists, and farmers. Today, Australia’s east coast hinterlands are areas of growing suburban development, easily accessible from coastal cities. They are the landscapes of Australians’ everyday experiences, as residents, as visitors, as predominantly coast-dwelling people. Yet hinterlands remain largely absent from representation outside tourism discourse.

Tourism campaigns and websites render the hinterland a familiar space even for those who have not directly experienced it. Hinterlands are promoted for their proximity to cities and beaches, represented as ideal weekend getaways. East coast hinterlands’ cooler climates, lush rainforests, wineries and vineyards, quaint villages, and spectacular views over the coast make them attractive local and international

Chapter 1: Introduction 5

tourist destinations. One Sunshine Coast hinterland tourism website provides a typical example of hinterlands’ representation in this context:

The beautiful Sunshine Coast Hinterland is not much more than an hour north

of Brisbane and only 30 minutes from the Sunshine Coast, Queensland,

Australia. With an average elevation of 450m, the cooler climate offers

unique attractions in each of the different seasons.

[The] charming, historic towns and villages of Maleny, Montville and

surrounding areas, are rich with skilled artisans, innovative professionals and

vibrant businesses, all passionate about their local community and

environment (Hinterland Tourism Sunshine Coast 20161).

Natural beauty and proximity to cities are also promoted on Mt Tamborine tourism websites, and linked to rest and relaxation away from the bustle of everyday life:

Located in the peaceful and picturesque hinterland only an hour from

Brisbane and the Gold Coast, Tamborine Mountain is one of Queensland’s

secret treasures. The Tamborine Mountain, (Mount Tamborine, Mt

Tamborine) tropical rainforest, populated with distinctive, brilliantly

colourful, exotic birds and many interesting variations of flora and fauna

provides a peace and tranquility that is a complete contrast to the incessant

daily noise and never ending demands on our time (Tamborine Mountain

Chamber of Commerce & Industry 2017).

1 The website has since been updated and this copy can no longer be accessed.

6 Chapter 1: Introduction

The Byron Bay hinterland in northern New South Wales is similarly described in terms of natural beauty, history, and consumer experience:

With its green rolling hills, fertile farmlands, historic towns and rainforest, it

offers a scenic and cultural contrast to Byron’s beach lifestyle. Cruise the

maze of country roads and you’ll soon discover numerous eco-friendly,

alternative lifestyle communities and tiny, picturesque villages. The

hinterland is home to some of the state’s best fine dining experiences and

shopping, as well as World Heritage-listed tracts of ancient, untouched

rainforest (Atkinson 2017).

As indicated by these descriptions, artistic, artisan, and alternative lifestyles are strongly associated with Australia’s east coast hinterlands. The most prominent example is Nimbin in the northern New South Wales hinterland, the self-proclaimed cannabis capital of Australia, frequently in the headlines for its residents’ campaigns to have marijuana legalised, including its annual MardiGrass festival (Lismore City

Council 2017). Spiritual, especially Buddhist, retreats are also popular hinterland attractions, including Chenrezig Buddhist retreat and Vipassana Centre in the

Sunshine Coast hinterland; the Springbrook Rainforest Retreat in the Gold Coast hinterland; and the Crystal Creek Rainforest Retreat in the Tweed Valley. At Devil’s

Elbow represents this aspect of the hinterland through the character Debbie, who regularly attends such retreats, including one where participants take a vow of silence, as at the Vipassana Centre (ADE Chapter Six)2.

2 References to the creative work will use the abbreviation ADE and give the chapter number.

Chapter 1: Introduction 7

These cultural associations and uses of the hinterland seemed at once to suit and yet conflict with the Gothic imagery that flourished in At Devil’s Elbow, and which I soon identified as also present in a small selection of other hinterland-set texts. Examining the origins and uses of the word hinterland became my starting point for understanding the cultural landscapes that seemed to have developed where that label was attached.

Hinterland

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment at which the German term hinterland, meaning literally “land behind”, came into general English usage. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary (2017) is a quotation from The Spectator on July 19, 1890 discussing European imperialist activities in Africa, as competing powers attempted to expand their colonies on the east coast into the interior, each vying for control of the region surrounding the upper Nile (Davis 2000, 99).

However, in Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald was defining hinterland for its readers as the “back territory” in its coverage of the situation as early as June 19,

1890. Two years prior to this, geographer George Chisholm had also used the term3 in his Handbook of Commercial Geography (1888), spelling it “hinderland” and using it to refer to “the land which lies behind a seaport or a seaboard, and supplies

3 In 1914, another geographer, Andre Allix, sought to complement Chisholm’s definition by borrowing another German term, “umland”, meaning land around, to refer to regions surrounding inland centres that functioned similarly to what were seen as port-bound hinterlands (van Cleef 1941, 309; Encyclopaedia Britannica 2017). In 1941, geographer Eugene van Cleef noted that geographers still were “not agreed upon the definition of hinterland” (308), and sought to clarify the usage of hinterland and umland. He detached hinterland from any reliance on water courses or coastal ports, claiming that, like the umland, “it may be located anywhere” (ibid.). The differences between hinterland and umland came down to a question of remoteness. Umland had “a certain intimate or neighborly ring” (ibid., 311) which meant it should be used to refer to regions nearer the centre, whereas hinterland ought to refer to more remote, outer regions beyond the umland. Van Cleef concluded, however, that “Unfortunately, neither ‘umland’ nor ‘hinterland’ can be defined with great exactitude. These terms apply to human activities primarily and hence are conditioned on many circumstances” (ibid.). The Encyclopaedia Britannica (2017) and Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2015) in any case consider the two words to now be more or less interchangeable.

8 Chapter 1: Introduction

the bulk of the exports, and in which are distributed the bulk of the imports of that seaport or seaboard” (Chisholm 1908, 54). Chisholm himself marks the term’s introduction into English from around 1884, when it began to be used “in connection with the discussion that arose on the occupation of parts of the West African coast”

(ibid.).

In a cabinet memorandum on June 2, 1890 Lord Salisbury, then British Prime

Minister, scorned German claims to the disputed areas, which he said were based largely on the “doctrine of Hinterland”:

[T]he doctrine of ‘Hinterland,’ which [the Germans] have to a great extent

invented, […] appears to mean that, if you have possession in an uncivilised

country, you have a right to extend those possessions to an unlimited distance

inland from the sea, until you strike the frontier of another civilised country

(Salisbury in Cecil 1921, 283–284).

Salisbury’s comments and the dispute in Africa were widely reported and this seems to be the time that the term hinterland first gained currency in English.

According to Salisbury’s definition, the hinterland is an inland region, the space behind a frontier expanding inwards from the coast. It is an always-already owned space, possessed by virtue of the more tangible ownership of other regions— in possessing one territory, “you have a right” to the land behind it as well. It is with this definition of hinterland in mind that Douglas Kerr notes, “[t]o describe a place as

Hinterland might already be to make a territorial claim on it” (2008, 11). This territorial claim, is, however, uncertain. British and German powers disputed which of them had “a right” to the hinterland between their two frontiers. The claim is also

Chapter 1: Introduction 9

rendered uncertain by its projection over a space that is unfixed and only blurrily bounded. As the frontier shifts, so too does the hinterland, remaining always a region

“lying beyond what is visible or known” (OED 2008), dependent for its definition on another, fixed location.

In this aspect, the hinterland is like Foucault’s heterotopic mirror space:

The mirror functions as a heterotopia in the respect that it renders this place

that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the looking glass at

once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and

absolutely unreal, since, in order to be perceived, it has to pass through this

virtual point, which is over there (Foucault 2008, 17).

Like the heterotopia, the hinterland, “in order to be perceived” must first pass through another point “over there”. The hinterland is the “land behind” something, somewhere, else. Like the mirror space, the hinterland disrupts distinctions between inside and outside, over here and over there. The heterotopic mirror space gives back a reflection, “a sort of shadow that gives me my own visibility, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent” (ibid). It is this reflective property that brings forth

Foucault’s theory that heterotopias function to show a society to itself in perfected or inverted terms (as discussed in Chapter 3: Research Design). The hinterland, then, exists on the periphery, the margins, but in line with Salisbury’s definition, it is also the “land between” two or more shifting frontiers. It is uncanny, liminal space.

In Victor Turner’s sense, the liminal is that which is “betwixt and between”

(1964, 48). It is a threshold space or state of transition or flux, suspended between two “fixed or stable” (ibid., 46) categories. Turner makes no distinction between the

10 Chapter 1: Introduction

liminal (the between) and the marginal (the edge); he refers interchangeably to the

“margin (or limen)” (ibid., 47) and “marginal or liminal phases” (ibid.). That which is betwixt and between is also on the periphery; marginalised.

The hinterland is liminal in this double sense, on the edge but also in the middle, outside but also within. Gerry Turcotte’s vision of the Gothic resonates with such a concept of the hinterland:

[T]he Gothic has always been fascinated with those forces outside the

‘centre’—the odd, the unaccepted, the unknown. It is a literature which has

sought to represent or to criticize the margins; conversely, its probing eye has

penetrated the outskirts, the excluded, often to show […] how inextricably

‘related’ is the margin to the centre, thereby blurring the very basis upon

which such fraudulent polarities are established (Turcotte 2009, 22).

For Turcotte, the chief domain and concern of the Gothic is the periphery, the margins—the hinterland—and Gothic works to blur and destabilise the distinctions between centre and hinterland, inside and outside, civilised and uncivilised, known and unknown. Gothic space is, like the hinterland, liminal space, existing at and beyond the boundaries of the familiar and known.

In this sense, the hinterland troubles the binary distinctions of heartland- hinterland or centre-periphery/centre-margin theories. The hinterland, periphery, or margin in such theories is determined by its relationship to a fixed centre. Centre- periphery models assume a binary relationship between empire and colony, in which

Imperial Europe is the global economic and metaphysical centre, and everything outside the centre is “by definition at the margin or the periphery of culture, power

Chapter 1: Introduction 11

and civilisation” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 2007, 32) and figured as Europe’s

Other. The relationship between centre and periphery is figured as interdependent but unequal. Economic and governing power resides in the centre; resources are drawn from the periphery—the possessed hinterland. The hinterland in such a construction is marginalised as rural, remote, uncivilised, and backwards. In fact, a secondary dictionary definition of hinterland is “an area that is a long way from a town or city”

(Macmillan Dictionary 2015) or “a place that is far away from busy or interesting places” (ibid.). Synonyms such as “backwoods”, “backwater”, and “boonies”

(Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2015)—especially common in the United States— indicate some of the pejorative connotations of the term. However, recognising the liminal qualities of the hinterland means troubling the binary distinctions between centre and hinterland; not only reversing them but blurring them. This is perhaps particularly pertinent in the broader Australian context, where the nation’s centres are located on the edge.

As peripheral zones existing on the edges, hinterlands are often associated— and sometimes synonymous—with borders and frontiers. In this capacity, the no- man’s land between the two frontiers of the battlefield can be conceived of as a hinterland—and so can the enemy territory lying beyond. As the frontier advances and recedes, the hinterland shifts with it. Gothic space, as defined by Manuel

Aguirre, structures itself in a similar fashion, encompassing two realms—an ordinary, familiar, quotidian realm and a terrifying, numinous Other realm (Aguirre

2008, 3)—and the threshold between them, a liminal space that is itself already part of the Other space (ibid., 5).

Vincent Crapanzano employs the term hinterland in such a guise in his book

Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology (2004),

12 Chapter 1: Introduction

using the notion of hinterland as “a governing trope” (Crapanzano 2004, 2) through which to explore concepts of “openness and closure, [and] the way in which we construct, wittingly or unwittingly, horizons that determine what we experience and how we interpret what we experience” (ibid., 2). Hinterland provides for him a way of conceptualising the “fuzzy horizons” or “auras” (ibid.) at the limits of individual experience. The unfixed, shifting quality of hinterlands is of particular use in conceptualising the ways in which once the “beyond is articulated, a new horizon emerges and with it a new beyond” (ibid.). Like the colonial frontier or the shifting frontline of the battlefield, the horizons of the mind expand with new experiences, creating new hinterlands, new regions beyond the visible and known.

In Britain, hinterland is frequently used in this abstract context, as in the phrases “political hinterland” and “hinterland of the mind”, which refer to a person’s ideological or educational background. Edna Healy, writer and wife of politician

Denis Healy, is credited with the first usage of hinterland in this manner (Behr 2013, para. 12); in 1989, she reportedly said of Margaret Thatcher: “She has no hinterland; in particular she has no sense of history” (Healy quoted in Jay 2010, 139).

Douglas Kerr uses hinterland in both an abstract and a literal manner in his book Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing (2008). The notion of the hinterland is used to symbolise the geographic location of the Indian interior, as well as the “inner world” (Kerr 2008, 18) of Indian subjects, meaning both domestic space and psychological space. Hinterland comes to symbolise any “reserved spaces”

(ibid., 14), be they figurative or literal, that lie beyond the European gaze or understanding.

In Australia it is largely in the sense of a blurrily bounded territory beyond the settlements of the coast that the term hinterland has been used. At first,

Chapter 1: Introduction 13

Australians were somewhat bemused by the term. For approximately a year after

Salisbury’s memorandum, Australian newspapers made sure to define “hinterland” whenever it was used (see, for example, The Age 1890, 4; The Australasian 1890, 21;

The Queensland Times 1890, 2). An entry in the popular journal Table Talk decried what was seen as the incorrect usage of the term outside the context of German territorial claims, stating that “to say ‘the Sultan of Turkey claims that the

“hinterland,” lying South of Tripoli’ is just as absurd as it would be to write of the back blocks of Victoria as ‘the Victorian “hinterland”’” (Table Talk 1890, 4).

However, within a year hinterland was being applied to Australian territories4. When Lord Kintore, Governor of South Australia, travelled overland from Darwin to Adelaide in 1891, he referred to the interior of the Northern Territory as the hinterland, stating that “much of the ‘Hinterland’ stretching back roughly to the Daly Waters is practically valueless for pastoral or agricultural purposes” (Keith-

Falconer 1891, 4). Following this usage, the term gained traction in reference to other Australian territories. By 1893, regions surrounding Adelaide (The Adelaide

Observer 1891, 6), Townsville and Rockhampton (The Leader 1892, 22), and

Maryborough (The Sydney Morning Herald 1893, 4) had all been referred to as hinterlands, as had Australia’s interior more generally, considered a “vast hinterland for expansion” (The Age 1892, 12).

As becomes clear throughout this consideration of the range of applications and definitions, hinterland is a slippery concept. Geographically, the hinterland has no fixed or definite boundaries. It may be a rural area surrounding or lying inland

4 It is worth noting that German-language newspapers were already referring to Australian territories as “hinterland” as early as 1871. See, for example the South Australian newspaper Süd Australische Zeitung (1871, 3) in which the author discusses squatters’ rights to hinterland blocks in New South Wales. In this context, however, the term hinterland is divorced from the concept of the doctrine of Hinterland and has different connotations from those that adhere to it in English.

14 Chapter 1: Introduction

from a city or port. It may be detached from coastlines and waterways altogether, and refer to any peripheral region from which the central district draws its resources. This usage is common in the United States, where commercial centres are not chiefly located on the coast. Or, hinterland may refer to more abstract places—within the mind, in between, on the edge. This thesis works with a broad understanding of the concept of hinterland that encapsulates this complexity of meanings. It understands hinterlands as shifting territories, both abstract and physical, associated with thresholds, margins, peripheries, and frontiers. It accepts that hinterlands cannot be confined to the outside or the edge; they overflow their ill-defined boundaries, coming to occupy not just the threshold and the space to either side of it, but the centre itself—the heartland or interior. With this broad definition in mind, the thesis nonetheless focuses on a small selection of Australian landscapes to which the label hinterland has adhered in administrative, colloquial, and tourism discourses.

Scope

This thesis focuses primarily on the Sunshine Coast hinterland in South East

Queensland (see Appendix A for a map of this region), the setting for At Devil’s

Elbow. However, there is very little literature, either creative or critical, associated with this area. Therefore, the scope has been broadened to include samples of literature from the neighbouring Gold Coast hinterland (Appendix B) and the

Northern Rivers region of New South Wales (Appendix C). These are some of the best-known Australian hinterland regions, and share geographical, cultural, and historical similarities with the Sunshine Coast hinterland. Figure 1 shows the approximate locations of each of these hinterland regions.

Chapter 1: Introduction 15

Figure 1. South East Queensland and northern New South Wales hinterlands (Google Maps 2017; alterations my own).

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moments when each of these locations came to be called hinterlands; however, newspaper records give some indication of the likely time periods. In a 1926 article, writer, literary critic, and local resident

Nettie Palmer writes that Caloundra can “rejoice in such a hinterland” (Palmer

1926a, 19) as the Blackall Range, calling its mountain slopes “the most fruitful in

Queensland” (ibid.) and predicting that it will soon become a hub for tourism. From the late 1940s through the 1950s, hinterland was used increasingly to refer to the

South Coast (now Gold Coast) hinterland (South Coast Express 1950, 1) and North

Coast (now Sunshine Coast) hinterland (Morning Bulletin 1947, 1), as well as the

16 Chapter 1: Introduction

Northern Rivers region of New South Wales (The Farmer and Settler 1955, 1). By

1959, the names South Coast and North Coast had been replaced with Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast (The Good Neighbour 1959, 6) in a bid to boost tourism (The

Courier-Mail 1954, 3). These three hinterland regions have, then, an established history in Australian cultural life as destinations for holidaymaking, relaxation, and rest—places to which Australians will “run down in their cars at the least excuse of a holiday” (Palmer 1926a, 19). They have, too, further similarities.

As Ruth Blair has noted, “In south-east Queensland and the far north of New

South Wales, the mountains come down to the sea—or close to it” (Blair 2007, 177).

Close to and overlooking the coast, these mountainous, forested hinterlands maintain strong connections with the sea. Whereas the Blue Mountains behind Sydney have sometimes been seen as antithetical to the sea, a distant barrier between coast and interior (Blair 2007, 179), in the hinterland regions examined in this thesis the mountains become part of “what ‘the coast’ means” (ibid., 178). Forest, too, is tangled up in this relationship of elements. Queensland’s first national park was declared at Witches Falls in Tamborine, in 1908 (Harper 2010, para. 2) and many east coast hinterland communities share a reputation for environmental conservation.

This reputation is tied in with both tourism initiatives, which encourage visitors to enjoy the regions’ natural beauty—rainforests, waterfalls, creeks, campgrounds, and scenic lookouts—and the association of Australia’s east coast hinterlands with alternative lifestyles.

Historically, northern New South Wales and South East Queensland hinterlands experienced similar patterns of European settlement. Following the convict period and early exploration, timber-getters seeking prized red cedar moved north from Botany Bay from the 1820s, and by the 1840s had reached both the

Chapter 1: Introduction 17

Tweed Valley in northern New South Wales (Stubbs 2006, 6), and the river valleys of the Sunshine Coast hinterland (McConville 2009, para. 7). The mountainous slopes of Tamborine and the Blackall Range were accessed slightly later, from the

1870s (Blair 2010, para. 3; Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve 2012a).

Pastoralists grazing sheep and cattle followed the timber-getters, and were followed in turn by small farmers, who experimented with crops to suit the steep slopes and subtropical climate, which was often out of step with the temperatures and weather patterns of the coast. The specificities of the hinterland climate and distinct seasonal changes were part of what I wanted to capture in At Devil’s Elbow, which is set during autumn and winter and marks the passage of time by depicting the changing leaves on the range’s imported maple trees, and the flowering and fruiting of native trees.

Early European farmers in these areas experienced failures and successes with a variety of crops including coffee, cane, bananas, citrus, pineapple, strawberries, macadamias, wheat, maize, arrowroot, tobacco, cotton, mangoes, coffee, tea, rice, opium poppies, and breadfruit (Heritage Office and Department of

Urban Affairs and Planning 1996, 61; McConville 2009, para. 15), and many small farms persist in hinterland regions today. Sugar cane and dairy became profitable industries in the late nineteenth century, although each experienced periodic slumps.

Sugar mills on the rivers and railways connecting towns along the coast accompanied this development, allowing farmers to transport their goods south to Melbourne and

Sydney.

Alongside this pastoral expansion was a violent displacement and dispossession of Aboriginal people. Historian Timothy Bottoms believes the

Queensland frontier, as it moved northwards and inland, was the bloodiest in

18 Chapter 1: Introduction

Australia’s colonial history (Bottoms 2013, 183), estimating that up to 50,000

Aboriginal people—men, women, and children—were killed in Queensland alone, representing, possibly, a quarter of the state’s original Indigenous population (ibid.,

181). In the Blackall Range, as discussed in Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the

Blackall Range, QLD, a combination of settler violence and the clearing of the region’s endemic bunya pines for timber and pastoral expansion put an end to the triennial bunya festivals that historians suggest were the largest gathering of

Indigenous people on the continent (Kerkhove 2012, “Preface”).

Pastoral activity and extreme violence are, thus, intrinsically linked in the

Blackall Range region—perhaps most notably around the enduring symbol of the bunya—but also in Australian history more broadly. The convict era did not see nearly such a large scale of slaughter as the pastoral one, as penal colonies did not require large tracts of land for their support, whereas pastoralists seized, cleared, and fenced huge portions of Aboriginal land, denying tribes access to food sources and sacred sites (Bottoms 2013, 17–18). Ironically, then, it was through the pioneer myth of the nationalistic 1890s that this violent history began to be erased (ibid., 7). The east coast hinterland regions examined in this thesis each celebrate their pioneer pasts, remnants of which persist in the small farms and villages that are such popular tourist attractions. However, At Devil’s Elbow and the other texts identified by this thesis as belonging to an emergent Hinterland Gothic tradition open cracks in the hinterland’s idyllic façade through which hidden and silenced stories of place begin to emerge.

The shifting nature of the hinterland both as a term and space has made it challenging to identify texts for analysis. In addition, as Jane Stadler, Peta Mitchell, and Stephen Carleton have discussed, challenges arise in attempting to map uncertain

Chapter 1: Introduction 19

or obscured literary landscapes. Where settings are “totally imaginary”, or “generic”, or have “nebulous boundaries”, are located “‘somewhere’ but not some place”

(Stadler, Mitchell and Carleton 2016, 164), the reader is forced to “approximate or guess” (ibid.) in order to locate the text. In some cases, the obfuscation of place may be intentional. In others—particularly in filmic texts where various different locations may be used—it is incidental. Challenges also arise when considering the tensions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing or identifying place (ibid., 165). This is a particular problem with narratives of Australian space, where “mythic zones such as the Center, the North, and the Never-Never remain vague, and ‘uncannily’ so when competing Indigenous cosmological concepts are added to the mapping equation” (ibid.).

In the present study I have selected only hinterland texts where the landscape is clearly identifiable, even if it is not always a “real” landscape but one constructed of mixed imaginary and quotidian elements. Quite often the clues to identifying the location of these landscapes came from outside the text, in reviews and interviews. In others, most noticeably Mullumbimby, place was deliberately signposted. Other challenges in cataloguing hinterland and Hinterland Gothic texts have been their relative scarcity and the sometimes elusive nature of the Gothic, as discussed below.

Context

In the early stages of research I was surprised by the relative dearth of literature, either creative or critical, written about Australia’s historically and culturally significant hinterland regions. As I catalogued a small body of hinterland-set novels I realised that many of their authors seemed to share my fascination with the Gothic qualities lurking beneath the hinterland’s sunny surface. However, while these texts certainly activated the Gothic through metaphor and plot elements, they were not

20 Chapter 1: Introduction

always predominantly, or even intentionally, Gothic. Gothic operated in them as a subterranean mode, rather than an overarching generic template. Where the Gothic materialised in these texts, it was often related to the hinterland landscape and the female body.

Gina Wisker argues for the importance of reading for the Gothic, even in texts where it is not an overt presence:

If the Gothic is ignored, if somehow we can’t read it in texts we might expect

to be realistic records or sometimes straightforward tales of everyday life,

then the texts are read as if depoliticised. They remain culturally silenced; we

overlook and cannot hear what spaces, places, constrictions, people and

events are telling us about the trauma and legacy of the colonial and imperial

past (2016, 124).

Where Gothic emerges, even if only in traces, it signifies something—some anxiety or taboo, something repressed. Elusive or overt, the Gothic in my own creative work and other hinterland-set texts seemed to mean something, and I wanted to understand just what was being said about, or gestured towards, in the gothicised hinterland landscape. However, when I turned to the body of literature on Australian Gothic as a means to understand this phenomenon, I found it had very little to say about a landscape that was fertile, hospitable, and homely instead of barren, hostile, and strange.

Whereas Australia’s hinterlands can often resemble English pastoral landscapes, Australian Gothic scholarship, as I argue in Chapter 2: Literature

Review, tends to focus on the Outback and bush as the genre’s dominant locations,

Chapter 1: Introduction 21

attending to what is different about the Australian landscape in comparison to the landscapes of Britain and Europe (see, for example, Turcotte 1998 and 2009; Gelder

2007 and 2012). Indeed, Australia has long been constructed as Britain’s Other, its landscapes characterised as vast, brown, flat, and dry in opposition to an England perceived as “narrow, green hilly and wet” (Arthur 1999, 73). For John Rickard such representations are part of an “enduring cultural myth that Europeans found the

Australian environment hostile, alien, oppressive, and that they had great difficulty in coming to terms with it aesthetically” (1996, 41). Literary and cultural studies scholars have widely recognised the way this landscape myth has been instrumentalised in the construction of a national, predominantly masculine, character who proves himself against an unforgiving Australian environment, which in its mythologised, essentialised form comes to represent a monstrous feminine; harsh, hostile, barren—a “bad mother” (Schaffer 1990, 63).

Australian Gothic scholarship continues to draw from and build on these early theories, rarely questioning their basis in national identity– and myth-making.

Yet Gothic is a genre that is more than usually reliant on setting, and the natural environment in particular, for its meanings and atmospheres (Hillard 2013, 111–

112). Australia contains a vast range of landscapes—beaches, mountains, rainforests, suburbs, cities, the weird rock formations of the Bungle Bungles, the Central

Highlands of Victoria, the snowfields of New South Wales, and the tropical, sub- tropical, and temperate east coast hinterlands. If landscape is central to the “change and adaptation” (Turcotte 1998, 11) of the Gothic, then each of these landscapes might be expected to produce a different kind of Australian Gothic. This thesis argues that a return to a broader conception of the Gothic is necessary to theorise

22 Chapter 1: Introduction

Hinterland Gothic, and that within Australian Gothic studies regional variations need to be taken into greater consideration.

Tasmanian Gothic stands out as the only established regional category of

Australian Gothic, differentiated from mainland literature by virtue of the state’s geographic isolation and resemblance to England (Davidson 1989). However, some scholars have begun the task of identifying other regional variations across literature, television, film, and theatre. These categories include desert Gothic (Haynes 1998); tropical Gothic (Craven 2008); and Northern Gothic (Carleton 2009, 2012, 2015 and

Stadler, Mitchell and Carleton 2016). Such studies take into account the specificities of region, of history, geography, climate, and landforms to contribute nuanced theories of the way the Gothic genre has mutated and been modified in Australian contexts, and the cultural uses to which it has been put.

This thesis contributes the category Hinterland Gothic to the emerging body of regional Australian Gothic theory. It argues that female-centred Hinterland Gothic texts disrupt the androcentric construction of a hostile Australian landscape as a locus of the monstrous feminine by setting their narratives in the alternative space of the hinterland. While maintaining the connection between the feminine and the natural world that is central to what I will call the Australian Landscape Myth,

Hinterland Gothic novels identify their female protagonists with a very different kind of landscape representing a very different version of femininity. Where the landscape in the masculine tradition is harsh, hostile, barren, and dry, Hinterland Gothic depicts a landscape that is gentle, lush, fertile, and well-watered. Against the “convicts, the bushrangers, the shearers, the gum trees and the wide open spaces” (White 1988, viii) of the masculine Australian tradition, Hinterland Gothic introduces artists, daughters, mothers, hippies, rainforests, lantana, and the closed spaces of winding

Chapter 1: Introduction 23

roads and family homes, juxtaposed against panoramic views out to sea. I argue that the hinterland landscape in these novels functions as a heterotopic Other space in which the marginalised experiences of women, especially, but also of Indigenous people, can be voiced and rescripted.

This is not, however, an unproblematic undertaking. While revaluing the category of women and nature, Hinterland Gothic also retains it. And while it troubles it ultimately does not break down binary constructions of “male vice and female virtue” (Meyers 2001, xii) that are embedded both in classic Female Gothic and in aspects of the woman-nature relation. Blame for past violence (gendered, colonial, and ecological) is cast on male figures while complicated vacillations between innocence and guilt play out between women and the environment, and often between mothers and daughters. Indigenous realities and histories are often uneasily addressed or remain silenced within texts by non-Indigenous writers.

Hinterland Gothic’s (often white) female protagonists simultaneously avoid direct acknowledgement of their complicity in male and colonial violence and undertake acts of atonement, which are explicitly figured as female penance for male sins, in the form of restoring the land back to a native, precolonial state.

The uncanny co-existence of innocence and guilt, Ken Gelder and Jane M.

Jacobs have argued, is endemic to postcolonial white Australia generally:

In relation to Aboriginal people, non-Aboriginal Australians can either be

innocent—in the sense of not being implicated in earlier processes of

colonisation, or guilty—in the sense that everyone […] even the most recent

immigrant, automatically inherits the (mis)fortunes of Australia’s colonial

24 Chapter 1: Introduction

past. In postcolonial Australia, however, it may well be that both of these

positions are inhabited at the same time (Gelder and Jacobs 1998, 24).

Non-Indigenous female protagonists in Hinterland Gothic inhabit this uncanny space of simultaneous innocence and guilt in regards not only to Indigenous people but also the environment and other women. I argue that their position as female subjects, oppressed under patriarchy but complicit in the destructive practices of colonialism acted out on Indigenous people, on the natural world, and on other women, complicates their already uncanny relationship to innocence and guilt.

Hinterland Gothic texts can profitably be considered ecofeminist in outlook.

They align the female, ecological, and Indigenous within the category of “nature”, positioned in a binary relationship with a masculine category aligned with culture, humanity, rationality, and whiteness (Plumwood 1993, 4). Australian ecofeminist

Val Plumwood writes that “racism, colonialism and sexism have drawn their conceptual strength from casting sexual, racial and ethnic difference as closer to the animal and the body construed as a sphere of inferiority” (ibid.). She argues that to break this dualism “involves both affirming and reconceptualising the underside, nature” (ibid., 5). Hinterland Gothic texts begin the process of affirming and reconceptualising nature in Australia, and by extension the categories of the feminine and the Indigenous, however the alliance between the categories remains uneasy, especially in regards to non-Indigenous female authors addressing the Indigenous.

Gothic metaphors drawn from the hinterland landscape—lantana, creeks, fences, roads—are used to represent ecological, female, and Indigenous experience; however, in texts by white female authors the female and ecological come to the fore and the Indigenous remains largely silent, although not unnoticed. Indigenous author

Chapter 1: Introduction 25

Melissa Lucashenko provides a significant alternative to this construction in her northern New South Wales Hinterland Gothic, Mullumbimby (2013). In this novel, the Indigenous is certainly aligned with the feminine and with a colonised and

“dismembered” (Lucashenko 2013, 134) landscape, however the land also possesses numinous agency and power, and issues of guilt and blame are much more openly addressed than in non-Indigenous-authored Hinterland Gothic novels. My own position as a white woman writing about a significant Indigenous landscape complicates my engagement with silenced Indigenous stories and histories in the hinterland, negotiating the fine distinction between inclusion and appropriation, as discussed in Chapter 7: Reflective Practice.

Research Questions

At Devil’s Elbow both drives the critical research and intervenes creatively in the burgeoning category of Hinterland Gothic. The exegesis investigates the literature of

Australia’s east coast hinterlands and their construction as cultural landscapes as a means of identifying both dominant depictions and lacuna in representations of the hinterland. By tracing this “dark writing” (Carter 2009) of place, the exegesis informs the development of the creative work, which activates the language of the

Gothic in order to articulate or gesture towards the hinterland’s silenced stories and histories. Through textual analysis and creative writing practice, I identify a regionally specific Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor (following Sedgwick 1980) that aligns the ecological, the female, and the Indigenous in order to articulate, or gesture towards, the silenced stories of the hinterland.

The research is guided by two central questions. First, I ask What does an analysis of Australia’s east coast hinterlands as Gothic heterotopias—cultural counter-sites—reveal about the marginalised or unspoken stories of place, the dark

26 Chapter 1: Introduction

writing of the hinterland? This question is predominantly addressed in Chapter 2:

Literature Review, Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the Blackall Range, QLD, and Chapter 7: Reflective Practice, as well as in the creative work. Second, I ask

How can a regionally specific Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor be used to create atmospheres of uncertainty and dread, while also ethically treating marginalised or unspoken stories of place? This question is at the centre of Chapter 5: A

Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor; Chapter 7: Reflective Practice, and the creative work, At Devil’s Elbow.

Significance

One of the key contributions to knowledge of this thesis is its identification of

Australia’s east coast hinterlands as significant cultural landscapes and sites of growing literary production. The thesis also expands the definition of Australian

Gothic by identifying the heretofore unrecognised strain of Hinterland Gothic. In doing so, the research also contributes to Gothic scholarship more broadly, which in an international context has, since the turn of the millennium, been increasingly interested in the specificity of location and national traditions (Spooner and McEvoy

2007, 51–53). The thesis introduces the critical concept of the hinterland as a type of place, liminal and heterotopic, that lends itself perhaps especially to Gothic productions, and which can theoretically be detached from its mooring on the east coast of Australia and used to apply to regions designated “hinterland” anywhere in the world. After all, in the broadest sense of the term, Gothic narratives have always taken place in hinterlands, displacing menace to locations “always over the border, always somewhere else” (Luckhurst 2014, 62), to “areas beyond reason, law and civilised authority” (Botting 2014, 4). The hinterland may in fact be a Gothic space par excellence. In addition to this, the creative work contributes to the growing body

Chapter 1: Introduction 27

of Hinterland Gothic literature, and is especially significant given the dearth of novels set in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. It also, along with the exegesis, develops

Sedgwick’s (1980) concept of the web of Gothic metaphor in a place-based context.

Thesis Outline

This Introduction has established the background, context, and scope of the research, as well as outlining the creative work and defining the concept of the hinterland.

Chapter 2: Literature Review contextualises the present research within the fields of Australian literary studies and Gothic studies, with a focus on the female, the Indigenous, and the natural environment. It argues that, given the limitations of existing studies of Australian Gothic, and their reliance on colonial literature as well as Outback and bush landscapes, a return to broader studies of the Gothic is necessary to fully explore the hinterland as a site of Gothic production. At the end of this chapter, I survey existing critical writing on Australian east coast hinterlands and identify the texts included in the category I term Hinterland Gothic.

Chapter 3: Research Design outlines the theories and methods used in this thesis. Gothic scholars have already addressed many of the key concepts relevant to this study, bringing together the Gothic and feminism in the categories Female

Gothic and Postfeminist Gothic; the Gothic and the postcolonial in studies of

Postcolonial Gothic including Irish, Scottish, Welsh, American, Caribbean, New

Zealand, and Australian national traditions; the Gothic and the ecocritical in the emerging field of EcoGothic; and the Gothic and space, relevant to all the aforementioned categories but developed particularly by Fred Botting (2004, 2012) in relation to Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia. These theories are

28 Chapter 1: Introduction

applied in textual analysis, spatial analysis, and reflective practice in the service of developing the creative work and answering the research questions.

In Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the Blackall Range, QLD I adapt Paul

Carter’s method of “ground truthing” (Carter 2010a) to explore the spatial history of the hinterland region where At Devil’s Elbow is set. Ground truthing makes use of textual analysis, historical research, and experiential engagement with the landscape to discover the traces of what Carter calls the “dark writing” of place—the excessive, even sublime “blind spots” (Carter 2009, 2) in conventional history, comprised of the

“[t]races of what is missing” (ibid.). As the Blackall Range is the setting, and inspiration, for At Devil’s Elbow this chapter forms an integral part of the thesis, drawing out insights into place that I later use to strengthen the creative work. In particular, the detailed investigation of the landscape features of the hinterland lays the groundwork to identify the Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor further explored in the next chapter.

In Chapter 5: A Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor I analyse four

Hinterland Gothic texts, Salt Rain by Sarah Armstrong, Mullumbimby by Melissa

Lukashenko, Deeper Water by Jessie Cole, and Nest by Inga Simpson, with occasional reference to Eleanor Dark’s Lantana Lane (1959), the only extended work of fiction set on the Blackall Range. Following Sedgwick (1980), this chapter identifies an interlinked set of Gothic metaphors, including creeks, weeds, trees, animals, earth, and the human-made, drawn from the hinterland landscape and present in these texts and in At Devil’s Elbow. It analyses how these Hinterland

Gothic metaphors are used to activate Gothic dread and suspense, and to articulate or draw attention to the dark writing of the hinterland—stories of ecological, female, or

Indigenous repression and violation.

Chapter 1: Introduction 29

In Chapter 6 an abridged version of the creative work, At Devil’s Elbow, is presented, along with a synopsis detailing the omitted chapters (these chapters can be found in Appendix D). This Gothic family drama is set on the Blackall Range in the

Sunshine Coast hinterland. It introduces a new landscape into the repertoire of

Australian Gothic literature, one characterised by fertility and lushness rather than the harsh, barren depictions of the Australian Landscape Myth. In the vein of classic

Female Gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), At

Devil’s Elbow centres on a daughter’s search for her missing mother, a search that takes the form of a quest through a Gothic landscape metaphorically linked to the female body. Regionally specific Gothic metaphors such as lantana, morning glory, barbed wire, creeks, and roads, relating to liminality and excess, activate Gothic atmospheres, drawing attention to what is unspoken or unspeakable, what is straining, nonetheless, to be heard—silenced stories, the dark writing of place.

In Chapter 7: Reflective Practice, I reflect on the research process, taking into consideration both the creative and critical aspects of the thesis. I consider the ethics of place-making through storytelling, of activating silenced and often traumatic stories and histories of place. This is a particularly fraught undertaking in an Australian context, where so much of history has been silenced and denied, and

Indigenous stories written out or written over—or protected and withheld by

Indigenous groups.

As well as Indigenous stories that inhere in the spiritually significant Blackall

Range, the research uncovered a history of femicidal violence in a series of abductions and presumed murders in the foothills of the range in the late 1990s.

These real histories of vanished women form part of the present-day character of the

Sunshine Coast hinterland, and inevitably inflect and inform the story of Callie’s

30 Chapter 1: Introduction

missing mother in At Devil’s Elbow. The trauma and legacies of these disappearances remain tangible for the women’s families and communities, and highlighted the need for a careful and ethical engagement with stories of place in At Devil’s Elbow.

Handling this sensitive subject matter was complicated by the Gothic’s tendencies to find pleasure in terror, to relish scenes of dread, death, and horror in ways that are potentially exploitative. In addition to these ethical considerations, I reflect on the writing process and the various stumbling blocks and successes that have resulted from the dialogue between creative and critical research.

Finally, In Chapter 8: Conclusion I articulate the findings of the research, as well as evaluating the efficacy of the approaches taken in the thesis and suggesting directions for future research. These include identifying potential strains of

Hinterland Gothic present in other Australian regions that fall outside the scope of this thesis as well as further possibilities for the application of hinterland as a conceptual term.

Chapter 1: Introduction 31

32 Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Literature Review

This literature review outlines the broad Australian Gothic literary and critical traditions to which At Devil’s Elbow and this thesis belong. It argues that Australian

Gothic literary scholarship has largely overlooked regional variations of the genre and the different forms of Australian Gothic that emerge in response to different landscapes and histories. Instead, scholarship has relied on essentialist myths that imagine mainland Australia as uniformly barren, dry, and hostile. A small body of work on regional Australian Gothic does exist, and this chapter positions Hinterland

Gothic within this growing field, with particular reference to how these existing studies have incorporated feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical theories into their investigations of Australian regions. The chapter ends by surveying historical, cultural, and creative perspectives on Australia’s east coast hinterlands and by outlining what I identify as an emerging category of Hinterland Gothic literature.

An Australian Gothic Literary Heritage

An Australian Gothic tradition in literature and other modes was first traced by

Canadian-Australian academic Gerry Turcotte (1993, 1998, 2009), and later extended by Ken Gelder (2007, 2012). These studies show that the Gothic has flourished in Australia since the colonial period. Convicts, soldiers, explorers, and settlers brought with them a familiarity with the Gothic genre, whose rising popularity in Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries coincided with Australia’s colonial period (Turcotte 1998, 1; Gelder 2007, 115). The

Gothic genre, by virtue of its related concerns, provided Europeans in Australia with a language through which to express the colonial experience of “isolation, entrapment, fear of pursuit and fear of the unknown” (Turcotte 1998, 1).

Chapter 2: Literature Review 33

Turcotte charts shifting European perspectives on the Australian landscape from pre-colonial times, when Terra Australis Incognita was “imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters” (1998, 1), through the convict era when it was “the dungeon of the world” (ibid.), to the colonial period when settlers confronted an unsettling, “out of kilter” (ibid.) foreign nature. The inversions, or

“perversion[s]” (ibid.), of a country where “trees shed their bark, swans were black rather than white, and the seasons were reversed” (ibid.) made the experience of migrating to Australia more than usually disconcerting. For Turcotte, writers’ use of the Gothic in Australia was twofold. Gothic provided a language “to speak, directly or indirectly, about the Australian landscape” (Turcotte 1998, 6); but the landscape itself also provided material with which to “articulate the fear and exhilaration of the colonial condition” (ibid., 3). In other words, a gothicised Australian landscape functioned both as a means to articulate the strangeness of an unfamiliar place and as a projection screen for broader anxieties resulting from exile, convictism, and other traumas. The Gothic’s preoccupations with being “uprooted, estranged, terrified, on alien territory, and pursued (if sometimes only in the imagination) by a daunting predator” (Turcotte 2009, 355) made it “the ideal Colonial mode” (ibid.).

Many of Australia’s earliest novels and stories were written in a Gothic mode. One of Australia’s most famous and enduring Gothic works, Marcus Clarke’s

For the Term of His Natural Life (1874), deploys Gothic tropes to immortalise the horrors of the Tasmanian convict system and “invest Australia with a living history”

(Turcotte 1998, 5). As Turcotte puts it, “Genre speaks of a legacy, of a heritage, of history” (ibid., 11). Through the Gothic mode, Clarke was able to both articulate specific Australian fears born of exile and the convict system and, somewhat paradoxically, establish a “comforting” (ibid.) literary connection with England.

34 Chapter 2: Literature Review

Turcotte and Gelder trace an Australian Gothic tradition through works including Barbara Baynton’s Bush Stories (1902), Hal Porter’s Short Stories, (1940),

Patrick White’s Voss (1957), Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961), and Joan

Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967). Australian New Wave cinema in the

1960s and 1970s also produced a spate of popular and distinctly Gothic films, including adaptations of Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) and Picnic at Hanging

Rock (Peter Weir, 1975), as well as original films such as The Cars that Ate Paris

(Peter Weir, 1974) and Mad Max (George Miller, 1979). In theatre, Louis Nowra’s plays Albert Names Edward (1975) and Inner Voices (1977) attested to widespread artistic interest in Gothic modalities. In the 1980s and 1990s, Gothic literary production continued in works such as Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well (1986) and Peter

Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994). Andrew McGahan’s postcolonial rural Gothic, The White Earth (2004), and Kate Grenville’s reimagining of colonial violence in The Secret River (2005) indicate the continuing vitality of the Gothic tradition in Australian literature, as do the contemporary Hinterland Gothic novels identified by this thesis.

Australian Gothic Scholarship

Contemporary Australian Gothic scholarship continues to rely on the foundational work of Turcotte and Gelder, both of whom also write widely on related fields including postcolonial Gothic, ghost stories, and horror. However, the body of work that directly addresses Australian Gothic is surprisingly small, consisting of only a handful of journal articles and book chapters. To date, there remains no book-length study that takes Australian Gothic as its only subject. Turcotte’s work on Australian

Gothic was collected in Peripheral Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Literature (2009), with an additional book chapter in Marie Mulvey-

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Roberts’ Handbook to Gothic Literature (1998). Gelder’s Australian Gothic oeuvre comprises two book chapters in edited collections on the Gothic (2007 and 2012), and the introduction to The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction (2007, co-edited with Rachael Weaver). Other publications such as his introduction to The

Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories (1994) and his book, Uncanny Australia:

Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (1998, co-authored with Jane M.

Jacobs), have also been instrumental to studies of Australian Gothic.

Across this body of work, Turcotte and Gelder have identified categories of colonial and postcolonial Gothic, as well as feminist, Indigenous, and migrant

Gothic, each of which makes use of the Gothic for distinct purposes. In keeping with recent trends in Gothic studies, which is increasingly concerned with media other than literature (Piatti-Farnell and Mercer 2014), Turcotte and Gelder have also extended the field into film, music, and subcultures. As this variety indicates,

Australian Gothic is not a single, uniform genre but has been used by writers and read by critics in a variety of ways. However, in terms of landscape Australian

Gothic has in fact been largely theorised as a homogeneous genre, with the exception of the separate category of Tasmanian Gothic.

In 1989, Jim Davidson argued that Tasmanian literary production had been predominantly Gothic, and that it ought to be considered as a separate category from mainland Australian literature in general, chiefly because Tasmanian literature responded to the island state’s “different” landscapes. “Tasmania,” Davidson wrote,

“has always seemed ‘different’ from the Mainland. It is an island of high latitudes, of mountains, lakes, mists, clouds and rain; of wastes of awesome scenery” (1989, 307).

Davidson’s tacit belief is that the mainland does not contain any such landscapes; it is implicitly generalised as flat (as opposed to mountainous), dry (as opposed to

36 Chapter 2: Literature Review

containing lakes and receiving rain), and mundane (as opposed to awesome). Most subsequent scholars accept Tasmanian Gothic as a specific regional type.

Problematically, however, they also accept Davidson’s view of generic mainland

Australian landscapes.

Landscape is at the heart of both Turcotte’s and Gelder’s theories of the function and formation of Australian Gothic. For Turcotte, Australia’s “specifically local variant of the Gothic mode […] turned to the specifications of the domestic landscape and voice to articulate the fear and exhilaration of the colonial condition”

(1998, 3). Likewise, for Gelder, Gothic writers responded to “the harsh, austere realities of settler life in the bush” (2007, 116). Throughout their bodies of work,

Turcotte and Gelder both acknowledge Gothic as a mode of perception projected onto the landscape as a means of expressing colonial anxieties of exile and the unknown, rather as something inherent in the landscape itself. Both recognise that colonial Australian literature participated in “the process of nation-building, of settlement and home-making in the New World” (Gelder 2012, 381), and that the

Gothic was deployed by nationalist writers to invest Australia with a sense of culture and history (Turcotte 2009, 356). Both also identify alternative European responses to the Australian landscape, including optimistic and “Edenic” (Gelder 2007, 116) perceptions. As they extend their readings to contemporary texts, both at least tacitly acknowledge shifts from rural settings to city and suburban locations (Turcotte 1998,

7; Gelder 2012, 389). However, neither Turcotte nor Gelder dwells on these other perceptions or settings to consider how the genre adapts and changes in response to them. Nor do they fully consider the ideological implications of nationalistic representations of Australian landscapes, which constructed the landscape as a

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feminised (Schaffer 1990) and racialised Other (Smith 2006, 171) in the service of establishing a (white, masculine) national identity.

Instead, Turcotte and Gelder both focus on those landscapes that “lend themselves all too readily” (Gelder 2007, 116) to the Gothic imagination.

Overwhelmingly, these are the hostile, alien landscapes of the Australian Landscape

Myth, the “enduring cultural myth” (Rickard 1996, 41) that deliberately constructs a

“unitary view of the Australian context” (Turner 1993, 9). In part, Turcotte’s and

Gelder’s focus on the falsified (Rickard 1996, 70) unitary environment of the

Australian Landscape Myth is a result of their disproportionate attention to colonial era texts, especially when discussing landscape. Across their bodies of work, both

Turcotte and Gelder draw heavily on colonial era texts, or postcolonial texts that

“return to the colonial scene” (Gelder 2012, 390), such as Grenville’s The Secret

River. In many cases, they draw on the same writers who participated in the construction of the Australian Landscape Myth, such as Henry Lawson, Marcus

Clarke, and Barbara Baynton.

The Australian landscape is, thus, read by Turcotte as hostile (1998, 1), alien

(2009, 355), arid, and sere (1998, 6). In Gelder’s readings of texts such as Charles

Harpur’s “The Creek of the Four Graves” (1845), Rosa Praed’s “The Bunyip”

(1891), and Guy Boothby’s “With Three Phantoms” (1897), the Australian landscape is represented as sweltering, dry, exhausting, maddening (Gelder 2012, 381), occulted (ibid., 382), ominous, and lethal (ibid., 383). Gelder particularly highlights the persistence of a “Weird Melancholy”, as it was famously expressed by Clarke, inhabiting the Australian landscape. In Clarke’s enduring words, “Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair” (Clarke in Gelder 2007, 2012).

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These colonial Australian Gothic landscapes are the paradigmatically barren, hot, and hostile spaces of the Australian Landscape Myth.

When Turcotte and Gelder read later works, including film, the nature of

Australian Gothic and the Australian Gothic landscape is already fixed, and they pay less attention to the ways the Gothic emerges from landscape and setting, unless it is to remark that “[m]ysterious experiences in the bush remain a stock theme” (Gelder

2007, 121). According to Turcotte, when “the colonies became too tame to be used as disorienting landscapes […] contemporary writers […] turn[ed] to the Old World in order to sufficiently disorientate and invert the security of their characters” (2009,

62). In this argument, Turcotte draws on Freud’s theory of the uncanny to argue that

“[t]he better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily he will get the impression of something uncanny in regards to objects and events in it” (ibid., 64).

Australian landscapes that appeared familiar or pleasant to European colonists’ eyes, or cultivated modern landscapes, are, therefore, considered unsuitable sources or sites for the Gothic.

However, this overlooks a key aspect of the uncanny: its dual nature. Freud argues that the uncanny emerges from that which is “unknown and unfamiliar”

(2003, 124), but that its particular quality of the frightening comes from a return of the repressed, that which “was once well known and had long been familiar” (ibid.).

Under certain conditions even “the familiar can become uncanny and frightening”

(ibid.) as “everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden” (Schelling in

Freud 2003, 132) disturbs the surface of the familiar, everyday world. It is in this form that the uncanny has been most relevant to studies of Female Gothic, in which apparently safe, domestic spaces are revealed as sites of entrapment and terror. This is also the form of the uncanny that proves pertinent to the study of Australia’s east

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coast hinterlands—apparently familiar, homely, domesticated landscapes through which, nonetheless, Gothic elements emerge in literature.

It should be noted that Turcotte and Gelder were primarily concerned not with landscape, but with tracing an Australian Gothic literary history from the colonial era to the present day. The continued reliance on a theory of Australian

Gothic based on generalised mainland landscapes speaks not so much to a failing of

Turcotte and Gelder’s work as it does to a broad gap in the scholarship that has come after. Australian Gothic scholars have not yet reconsidered this blanket approach to

Australian landscapes, or changing perceptions of that landscape over time.

For example, Alison Rudd follows Turcotte in listing signifiers of Australian

Gothic such as “a hostile environment” and “a harsh landscape” (2010, 105). Emily

Bullock, discussing Tasmanian Gothic in film, imagines mainland Australia as comprised of “dry plains and endless expanses of desert” (2011, 71). These studies, and Turcotte’s and Gelder’s before them, are certainly correct in their theorising of an Australian Gothic built on responses to a harsh and hostile landscape; however, I argue that this is only one narrow category of the genre. It is Australian Gothic as it emerges from the Australian Landscape Myth, from an imaginary, monolithic

Outback-bush space that, as Richard White has pointed out, was not usually based in direct experience, but “was essentially the city-dweller’s image of the bush”, which

“Australians were urged to respond to […] emotionally, as a test of their patriotism”

(1988, 85). A closer look at the Australian Landscape Myth reveals some of the possibilities for an alternative approach to Australian Gothic that takes into account the cultural construction of Australia’s landscapes.

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The Australian Landscape Myth

The tendency to view Australian space in terms of mythologised representations of

Outback and bush landscapes has been well documented across Australian cultural studies (see, for example Schaffer 1990; White 1992; Turner 1993; Drew 1994;

Rickard 1996; and Curthoys 1999). Scholars have traced the ways in which the

Australian national character has been constructed on and through an essentialised

Australian landscape characterised as either a productive paradise or a harsh and hostile enemy to be endured, if it cannot be overcome. Such representations arose chiefly through the bushman and pioneer legends of the colonial period, especially in the nationalistic literature of the 1890s by writers including Henry Lawson and A. B.

Paterson.

These legends mythologise European, especially male, struggle against a hostile Australian landscape as a performative act of taming and hence owning and belonging to the land, justifying colonial land theft (Curthoys 1999, 3; Smith 2006,

171). They play a significant role in constructing an Australian national identity, personified in the larrikin bushman and his values of egalitarianism, mateship, endurance, and irreverence towards authority. Rickard writes that as an instrument of national myth-making it was unsurprising that writers would “present the environment in its starkest form, the outback or never-never” (1996, 65). He reminds us, too, that this period “was a time of depression and drought, when the early

Australian promise had turned sour” (ibid., 64) and the land was perceived in its harshest aspect.

Ann Curthoys argues that bushman and pioneer narratives of suffering, failure, and defeat in a “dry and hostile land” (1999, 3) position “white Australians as victims, struggling heroically against adversity” (ibid.) as a means of denying other

Chapter 2: Literature Review 41

narratives and versions of history “which place them as aggressors, bringing adversity upon others” (ibid.). Convict tales, too, function as “victimological narratives” (ibid.) in which white Australians’ “earlier victimhood warrants [their] later aggression” (ibid., 4). In bushman and pioneer myths, the mythologised landscape is the “warrant” that, in casting white Australians as victims, negates, or at least obscures, their concurrent role as aggressors.

In terms of narrative, the pioneer legend is slightly more inclusive of women than the resolutely masculine bushman myth; however, in both the landscape is constructed as the feminine Other, “a place of desire against which Australians, at least white, male, European Australians, measure their identity” (Schaffer 1990, 1).

In the service of these myths, the landscape’s “infinite variety has been reduced to a rather singular vision—the Interior, the outback, the red centre, the dead heart, the desert, a wasteland” (ibid., 22). It is this mythic space that Schaffer refers to under the umbrella term “bush”. In the nationalist masculine tradition, “the relationship of man to the bush is established through the displacement of women” (ibid., xiv).

As characters, women are largely absented from bush narratives, or present only in their capacity as wives, sisters, or daughters of male characters. The feminine is most evident in these texts in representations of “the threat of the bush as a form of the monstrous feminine” (ibid., 62). The bush is a powerful, absorbing and assimilating force; “like the fantasy of the primal mother”, it can “suck up its inhabitants” (ibid., 52). Whereas Anne Summers (1975) has argued that femininity in

Australia was constructed in terms of either degenerate “damned whores” or puritan

“God’s police”, Schaffer contends that negative femininity in Australia is in fact coded as “the bad mother” (1990, 63), “the one who is harsh, obdurate, fickle,

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threatening; the one who fails to nurture her children; the one who cannot be trusted;

[…] the cruel mother […] has served as a metaphor for the bush” (ibid., 64).

“Feminine” and “masculine” are, of course, critically fraught terms. This thesis understands masculinity and femininity as socially constructed and performative (Butler 2010), as well as multiple and hierarchical (Connell and

Messerschmidt 2005). These gender categories are not “static roles or a fixed set of behaviors that men and women adopt” (Schippers 2007, 93), but rather are

“contextually and culturally specific sets of meanings for what women and men are and should be” (ibid., 92). The attributes seen as desirable or hegemonically masculine or feminine differ across race, class, and cultural contexts, but what remains common is that the gender categories within Western patriarchy “reify hierarchical gender difference and legitimate male dominance” (ibid., 98), and that

“masculinity is always defined through its difference from femininity” (ibid., 90).

In Schaffer’s argument, women and other marginalised groups, such as non-

Anglo migrants and Aboriginals, “live in a space of contradiction” (ibid.). They inhabit dual positions as both subjects, included in the category of white male universal subject, and also objects, “different and inferior” (ibid.) from the white male subject and thus cast out and identified with the landscape. For female writers, in particular, this relationship is fraught: “Australian women writers speak from within metaphors of landscape in which they are named as others” (ibid., 51). As authors, Australian female writers take up the masculine subject position against and outside the landscape, but as women they are positioned within and as synonymous with the landscape.

Schaffer locates continuing misogynistic attitudes towards women in

Australia in the enduring influence of the myth of the bush as monstrous mother.

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Only by dismantling the myth can the significations of women and landscape in

Australia be changed:

[I]n registering the ways in which the land has functioned as a metaphor for

woman within the Australian tradition we can begin to challenge notions that

the Australian landscape is an alien and threatening terrain. By displacing the

narratives of mastery we can reinscribe the harsh representations of the land

and woman’s place in relation to it (ibid., 27).

Schaffer offers some suggestions for how this change might occur, invoking, through playful écriture feminine, an imagined mirror space of excess, unspeakability, and liminality—all familiar staples of the Gothic. The mirror space is characterised by a blurring of boundaries and polyphony of voices. It is an alternative territory in which women are not “possessed”, in “exile” from themselves, (ibid.). It is not dry like the masculine landscape, but excessively wet, liminal: “The rain pours over our bodies. The land. The wet. Limitless expanse. The air swells with mist.

Streams flow with no fixed banks. Rivers merge with no division to the sea” (ibid.,

188). Schaffer is suggesting that women writers locate themselves in an alternative space, a heterotopic mirror space outside the essentialist masculine construction of the Australian Landscape Myth. Her suggestion recalls Australian ecofeminist Val

Plumwood’s assertion that in order to break down the nature/culture binary that positions the natural world, animals, women, and people of colour as inferior and subordinate to a (white, male, human) master category requires “both affirming and reconceptualising the underside, nature” (1993, 5).

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The hinterland, I contend, is one such alternative space where women writers have taken up the challenge to reconceptualise Australian nature and thus begin to reimagine the place of the feminine in Australian literature. Employing a Gothic language of excess, the unspeakable, and liminality, women writers continue to identify the feminine with the Australian landscape, but it is a very different kind of landscape—lush, fertile, hospitable, and nurturing—and thus a very different kind of femininity.

Regional Australian Gothic

Only recently have some scholars of Australian Gothic begun the project of breaking down the field’s reliance on essentialist, mythologised landscapes by extending the category to include regional variations. This is in keeping with the spatial turn in humanities more generally, and a specific turn in Gothic criticism that occurred at the beginning of the new millennium. This moment is marked by the publication of

Robert Mighall’s A Geography of Victorian London: Mapping History’s Nightmares

(1999), considered a seminal book in the contemporary study of Gothic spaces.

Mighall’s book catalysed a critical shift away from the psychoanalytic approaches that dominated Gothic studies throughout the 1980s and 1990s and towards alternative geographic and historicist concerns. In a 2000 article in David Punter’s

Companion to the Gothic (reprinted in the revised A New Companion to the Gothic in 2012), Mighall and co-author Chris Baldick excoriated Gothic scholars for overlooking the “manifest temporal, geographic, and ideological references” of

Gothic fictions in favour of constructing “increasingly implausible models of their supposed latent fears, desires, and ‘revolutionary’ impulses” (Baldick and Mighall

2012, 268).

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Scholarship since the turn of the millennium has taken up the challenge to make the Gothic’s historical and geographical positioning a central focus. Leading scholars stress the “need to focus on our contemporary moment, paying particular attention to cultural and geographical differences” (Piatti-Farnell 2014, i). Several recent collections include a focus on “locations where the production of the narrative and the national identity of the writer are bound up with the geographical setting [...] rather than the fantasised Mediterranean and Oriental locations of the earliest English

Gothic novels” (Spooner and McEvoy 2007, 52). Such scholarship is concerned with

“broad national traditions, but [also] the specificity of place: the particular fears associated with Tasmania or Tennessee” (ibid., 52–53), and highlights the ways in which the fears evinced in Gothic fictions are intimately bound up with place.

Contributions in this area include Justin D. Edwards’ Gothic Canada:

Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (2005); Catherine Spooner and Emma

McEvoy’s Routledge Companion to the Gothic (2007); Andrew Hock-soon Ng’s

Asian Gothic: Essays on Literature, Film and Anime (2008); Tabish Khair’s The

Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere (2009); Alison

Rudd’s Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and

New Zealand (2010); David Punter’s revised A New Companion to the Gothic

(2012); Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend’s The Gothic World (2013); and Anya

Heise-von der Lippe’s Dark Cartographies (2013). The leading journal in the field,

Gothic Studies, also regularly publishes articles relating to Gothic spaces and national traditions, including special issues on, for example, Italian and Scottish

Gothic, or the 2014 issue exploring the emergent critical category of EcoGothic. In the Australian context, the recently established journal, Aeternum: A Journal of

Contemporary Gothic Studies is concerned with “the importance and impact of

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cultural differences on the genre” and with “over-looked regional incarnations of the

Gothic” (Aeternum Journal 2017).

International Gothic scholarship is also increasingly interested in local variations within otherwise well-explored national and regional traditions. While categories such as American Southern Gothic, Irish Gothic, and Scottish Gothic have been well-canvassed (see, for example: Goddu 2000; Hogle 2002; Spooner and

McEvoy 2007; Punter 2012; Byron and Townshend 2013), scholars have begun to consider specific place types and localities, often drawing connections between traditions previously considered to be unrelated. For example, the edited collection

Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture: The Americas (2016) considers the

American tropics broadly speaking, a region that “comprises countries and nations grouped together under geographical or linguistic labels such as the Caribbean,

Anglo-American and Latin America, as well as North, Central and South America”

(Edwards and Vasconcelos 2016, 3). Examining national traditions of Gothic in southern countries including Mexico, Brazil, and Costa Rica, alongside the regional

Gothic of localities such as the U.S. South and the Caribbean, the collection, rather than concerning itself with isolated national or regional traditions of “Tropical

Gothic”, instead seeks instances of “recurrences and overlapping […] connections and disconnections” (ibid., 6) that demonstrate the common influences of colonialism in the tropics. As a result, this regional approach expands understandings of the Gothic and Postcolonial Gothic more broadly.

Similarly, the edited collection Gothic Topographies: Language, Nation

Building and ‘Race’ (2013) brings together examinations of Gothic works from the global North and South, including entries on Australian, South African, Russian,

Canadian, Danish, Finnish, and Italian Gothic, among others. In doing so, the editors

Chapter 2: Literature Review 47

aim to “postpone the idea of a genre and focus on Gothic sensibility which, in addition to employing classic horror topoi and motifs, articulates by way of fiction cultural and social concerns both local and global” (Savolainen and Mehtonen 2016,

2; emphasis in original). They consider canonical Gothic works alongside “their peripheral colleagues” (ibid.) and draw connections between “literatures that may be geographically remote from each other—the extremities of North and South—but share issues and conflicting desires inseparable from the rough natural conditions of daily existence” (ibid., 3).

The turn towards ecocritical and spatial studies in the Gothic has also resulted in a close regional focus in collections such as Sharon Rose Yang and Kathleen

Healy’s Gothic Landscapes: Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties

(2016). This is the first book-length examination of the significance of landscape in

Gothic fiction, although as the authors acknowledge landscape and setting have formed valuable cornerstones in earlier studies by David Punter, Fred Botting,

Valdine Clemens, and others (Yang and Healy 2016, 9).

Other studies, often inflected by ecocritical and postcolonial approaches, have examined certain types of landscape as Gothic spaces, both within specific regions or traditions and more generally, such as Lisa Kroger’s study of the Gothic forest

(2009); Rose Lovell-Smith’s (2013) exploration of the Gothic New Zealand beach in

Margaret Mahy’s 1986 novel The Tricksters; Derek Gladwin’s (2014) reading of

Irish Bog Gothic in the works of Bram Stoker; and Emily Alder’s (2016) reading of the Gothic ship and sea in Dracula. Beaches and coastal zones have also often been read as sublime or liminal zones (see, for example Andrews and Roberts 2012;

Tondorf 2016). Less attention has been paid, however, to the interstitial zone of the hinterland as it is understood by this thesis, positioned between edge and interior;

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although, at least one doctoral thesis has examined the excessive, Gothic qualities of subtropical regional Australia more generally (Chudy 2014). Taken together, these local and regional approaches to Gothic yield insights into the broader realm of the

Gothic, offering new ways of looking at established texts, or introducing new texts and landscapes for study.

Australian Gothic literary scholars have been slow to participate in this burgeoning field; thus far, visual art, film, and theatre scholars are leading the field of regional Gothic studies in Australia. While many of the regional Gothic studies surveyed below continue to focus on inland, Outback, and bush landscapes, they begin the process of breaking down the myth of a monolithic Australian landscape and instead start to theorise an Australian Gothic made up of distinct regional types.

Many of these readings also focus on modern texts and contemporary landscapes, moving away from the colonial scene. As a result, alongside increased attention to the specificity of regional landscapes, concerns with gender, race, ecology, and the postcolonial condition come to the fore. Out of these readings, new characteristics of and possibilities for the Australian Gothic arise.

Desert Gothic Roslynn Haynes’ Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and

Film (1998), which reads the Australian desert as a Gothic space, heavily influences

Gelder’s accounts of Australian landscapes (see Gelder 2007 and 2012), and thus can be said to underpin much of the dominant conception of Australian space in

Australian Gothic studies. However, Haynes does not attempt to make the desert stand for all of Australia, but instead examines the Australian desert as a distinct type of geographic, cultural, and literary region.

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Haynes charts literary representations of the desert from European explorers’ journals through to contemporary literature and film, tracing changing attitudes towards and cultural uses of the desert over time. She points out that the best known and “most highly mythologised heroes of Australian exploration, Sturt, Leichhardt,

Burke and Wills, are those who, in terms of conquering the land, could only be considered failures” (ibid., 51). Consequently, narratives used the desert to rescript tales of failures due to “incompetence and poor planning as the malevolent actions of a sinister, implicitly personified desert” (ibid., 59), and explorers are represented “as victims of a malignant land, counterparts of the imprisoned Gothic heroine” (ibid.,

52). A necessary requirement of the myth of a uniquely Australian, and uniquely desert Gothic, “hero as victim” (ibid., 83) narrative was the “construction of a landscape of terror” (ibid., 59), achieved through the vilification of the desert “as harsh, violent, treacherous and unrelenting (ibid., 83). Such a conclusion suggests another—that any landscape that did not contribute to this construction of the hero as victim myth must be excluded.

Haynes identifies two roles played by the desert in Australian cultural history: the first as “a mindscape of the horror within” (Haynes 1998, 184); the second as

“scene of renunciation and spiritual enlightenment” (ibid., 195), associated with

Biblical representations of the desert, such as Patrick White’s Voss. Haynes argues that the desert has become a uniquely Australian symbol capable of “liberat[ing]

Australian landscape and consciousness from its subservience to European dominance” (ibid., 6). In keeping with the broader traditions of Australian landscape representation outlined by Schaffer (1990), the colonial desert was gendered female, and subject to white male “conquest and possession” (Haynes 1998, 51). And just as

Schaffer reads the trope of the “bad mother” in representations of Australian

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landscapes, so too does Haynes argue that the desert landscape could not be characterised according to usual Western binaries as either fertile, virginal territory or undomesticated wilderness. Instead, an alternative female stereotype was invoked,

“[t]he infertile, drought-ridden land was characterised as an old hag, barren and past her time” (Haynes 1998, 52).

In later narratives, however, these representations shift. The desert landscape is still figured as harsh, isolating, devouring trespassers (ibid., 191), but “even at its most hostile, the desert landscape is benign compared with the sadism perpetrated by

[male characters]” (ibid., 195). This is a tendency Haynes sees in Thea Astley,

Catherine Martin, and Katherine Susannah Prichard, “for whom man, not the land, is enemy” (ibid., 195). Male characters are rendered evil by their greed for the wealth pillaged from the land through farming or mining, their disrespect for Aboriginal ownership of and relationships to the land, and their defensive proprietorship of the land they have claimed against perceived threats from government agencies, environmental groups, and Native Title claims (ibid., 206-207). A similar authorial and female perspective that casts men as villains in narratives of ecological, racial, and gendered violence is evident in the Hinterland Gothic texts analysed in Chapter

5: A Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor, a finding that informs the development of male and female relationships in At Devil’s Elbow.

Bush Gothic Kathleen Steele, writing on the bush landscapes of Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies

(1902) and Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), recognises the fallacy of

“an accepted Australian vision of the landscape as empty, unwelcoming bush or desert” (Steele 2010, 34), but questions what an examination of “insistently negative representations” (ibid.) of a generic “bush-space” (ibid., 41) can reveal. She links this

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tendency towards totalising representations of the Australian landscape, which establish a kind of “dehistoricised space” (ibid., 38) with the doctrine of terra nullius, which characterises pre-colonial Australia as a blank canvas, empty space, and denies the existence of an Indigenous history.

She suggests, quoting A. A. Phillips, that Baynton’s emphasis on timelessness in her fiction creates a corresponding vastness of space, and “a ‘certain kind of Australian bush’ that, while practically devoid of population, remains charged with a hostile presence” (ibid., 40). Within this generalised bush-space,

European settlement is uncertain, transient, and threatened (ibid., 40). This, Steele argues, suggests Baynton’s “rejection of European attempts to force a history of their own upon a country already replete with unacknowledged history and presence”

(ibid., 41). It is this unacknowledged history that results in the atmosphere of guilt and uncertainty that pervades Baynton’s imaginary bush-space.

Whereas Haynes, above, reads human, especially masculine, agency in the desert as a separate threat from that posed by the landscape, Steele reads Baynton’s wandering swagman in “The Chosen Vessel” (1896) as “a darker manifestation of the landscape” (ibid.). The climactic scene in which the swagman murders the unnamed shearer’s wife takes place outdoors, and “mirrors the […] belief that an unacknowledged presence in the landscape lies in wait to do Europeans harm” (ibid.,

42). This presence, however, is not linked to native animals or Aboriginal people, which as Steele notes either go unmentioned or give Baynton’s protagonists no cause for fear. Rather, Gothic terror results from “a sublimation of the clandestine and unspoken aspects of the Australian relationship with the Aborigines into representations of the landscape” (ibid.). It is the denial of the Other, displaced onto the landscape, that threatens, not the vengeful agency of a personified Other.

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Likewise, the sinister atmosphere in Picnic at Hanging Rock emanates from

“the silence of the Hanging Rock” (ibid, 44). Europeans feel a sense of spiritual emptiness and “oppressive accusation […] pressing upon them, whenever they confront the reality of the Australian landscape” (ibid.). Steele points out that the landscape of the novel shows the marks of permanent change wrought by Europeans.

The narrative highlights the deliberate “Englishness of the physical surrounds” (ibid.,

35; emphasis in original) of Appleyard College, which contrasts against and holds at bay Australian nature. It is this contrast between the European and the native, and the flimsiness of the first by comparison, that gives rise to uneasiness. The sense of rational stability represented by buildings, gardens, and clocks is insidiously undermined by traces of an “unacknowledged Indigenous presence and history […] subtly intimated within a land the European settlers insist has always been empty”

(ibid., 45).

Lindsay uses the narrative of the missing girls as “an alternative meditation on Aboriginal absence” (ibid., 47). The land itself is not figured as an aggressor, and no scenes of violence against the girls take place. They simply vanish, “are subsumed into the land” (ibid.). The Indigenous, here, is subsumed by the feminine, and both, in turn, are swallowed up by the landscape. A similar process of displacement and sublimation of the Indigenous onto and within the feminine is evident in many of the

Hinterland Gothic novels identified in this thesis, as discussed in Chapter 5. In these novels, as in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the natural environment is used as an alternative vehicle through which to speak of shared female and Indigenous subjugation under white male patriarchal and colonial dominion, but it is usually the female aspect of this shared experience that comes to the fore. Indeed, Picnic at

Hanging Rock can be considered a Hinterland Gothic novel, as the Macedon Ranges

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in which Hanging Rock is located are part of Melbourne’s municipal hinterland5. As such, Steele’s finding are particularly relevant to the present study.

Steele notes some potentially problematic aspects of Lindsay’s technique.

One is that in displacing the silenced Indigenous and instead “according sentient powers to the landscape” (2010, 47), Lindsay in fact “aids and abets a refusal to acknowledge Aboriginal absence” (ibid.); simply gesturing towards what is silenced and marginalised may not be enough. The other is that the European-Australian girls’ mergence with the landscape “may represent […] an unconscious attempt to create an ‘ancestor spirit’” (ibid.) for white Australians, through “sacrifice” (ibid., 49). The tension between, on the one hand, silencing and, on the other, appropriation of marginalised stories and histories is a key issue explored by this thesis, and is addressed further in Chapter 7: Reflective Practice.

Tropical Gothic Allison Craven (2008) reads the 1998 film Radiance, based on a 1993 Louis Nowra play and set in North Queensland, as an example of what she calls Tropical Gothic.

She argues that, prior to the landmark Mabo ruling (1992), in which the legal doctrine of terra nullius was overturned, Queensland was usually constructed in film as an Edenic place, a “holiday paradise” (Craven 2008, para. 21) of promise and leisure. In this post-Mabo movie, also the first feature film made by an Indigenous woman, the “disturbing history” (ibid., para. 2) of the region is instead brought to the fore, and Queensland “becomes an anti-Eden, an un-Paradise figured by abundant, gothic canefields” (ibid.). The film’s “towering cane plantations” function both as a

5 A detailed consideration of Victorian or Melbourne Hinterland Gothic falls outside the scope of this thesis because the region’s cultural, geographical, historical, and climactic character differs substantially from the Sunshine Coast hinterland that is at the centre of this study, and of At Devil’s Elbow. However, an analysis of Picnic at Hanging Rock as an example of Victorian or Southern Hinterland Gothic represents an exciting area for future investigation.

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strong indicator of place, and “a potent metaphor for the overwhelming power of the plantation economy and colonial culture that has determined the [female Indigenous characters’] lives in association with the region’s disturbing racial history” (ibid.).

Issues of race and gender, and colonial and economic dispossession come together against the backdrop of the gothicised tropical North.

Gothic concerns with patriarchal violence, family secrets, incest, colonial dispossession, and complicity structure the narrative. The family home, “a ramshackle old Queenslander” (ibid., para. 10), is framed as “a site of violence, discrimination and oppression” (ibid., para. 5). When it burns down at the end of the film, therefore, it is “a demythologising act, against home and also against mythic,

Edenic Queensland” (ibid.). Such an ending is also emblematic of Female Gothic; or, as Craven puts it, the burning of the house is “pure gothic melodrama, with echoes of

Bertha Rochester all around” (ibid., para. 12). Craven reads the destruction of the house, too, as “a statement about terra nullius, if it is considered that the first settlement by Europeans equated absence of permanent architecture with absence of culture” (ibid., para. 13).

By gothicising the regional icons of the cane field and the Queenslander,

Radiance establishes a new form of Australian Tropical Gothic that broadens the field of Australian Gothic and invites new readings of the function of the Gothic in a contemporary Australian context. In addition, Craven anticipates the emergent field of EcoGothic in highlighting the cane field as a source of Gothic horror, a reading that could be extended to take into account the destruction caused to the native flora and fauna in the creation of cane fields, refineries, and other mechanisms of the industry, as well as the cane’s uncanny dual nature as, on the one hand, an “out of place” (to use Gelder and Jacob’s terminology), endlessly spreading symbol of

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domination, and, on the other, as a crop that is “in place”, in that it is cultivated and cut, subject to humanity’s will.

In my analysis of Gothic landscape metaphors in Hinterland Gothic texts in

Chapter 5, I integrate ecocriticism with the more common frameworks of feminist and postcolonial readings. My reading recognises the inseparability in much

Hinterland Gothic fiction of landscape, gender, and race and seeks to uncover the ways they are connected within and elaborated through a complex network of Gothic metaphor.

Northern Gothic Attending to a similar geographic region as Craven, Australia’s North, Stephen

Carleton (2009, 2012, 2015 and Stadler, Mitchell and Carleton 2016) identifies “a

‘boom’ in theatrical engagement with Gothic tropes and forms” (Carleton 2012, 51).

Carleton’s North is located somewhere north of Brisbane and includes coastal North

Queensland as well as the deserts of Central Queensland and the Northern Territory, overlapping not only with Craven’s Tropical North and Haynes’ Gothic desert, but also with some of the spaces of Hinterland Gothic. These overlapping boundaries indicate future areas for exploration, and also possibilities for further regional variations within Hinterland Gothic. A range of similarities and differences might be found between the temperate southern Hinterland Gothic of Picnic at Hanging Rock and the Tropical, Northern, Hinterland Gothic of a writer like Thea Astley, who, as

Susan Sheridan puts it, understands the North Queensland coast as including “sea coast, mountain range and [the] ‘claypan’ or rainshadow country” (2009, 116) of the flat, dry hinterland.

Carleton’s Gothic North is both a geographic space and an imaginary one; a

“Deep” North in which “Deepness” refers to “a conscious mythologising of a remote

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and isolated Northern cultural landscape” (ibid.). Carleton seeks to discover “what this Northern theatrical Gothic turn might be saying about the North as a discrete cultural region” (ibid.). He isolates “Northern female Gothic” (ibid., 58) and

Postcolonial Gothic strains.

Just as Radiance gothicises the Queenslander and cane fields, in Carleton’s reading of the plays of Mary Anne Butler, the iconic highway roadhouse functions

“as the Northern Gothic spatial reinvention of the European castle or manor”

(Carleton 2012, 60), and the red dirt of the North covers the shallow grave of a murdered woman. In classic Female Gothic tradition, “[t]he female body becomes a site of the drama […], interchangeable with the Northern landscape in some ways”

(ibid.). Carleton argues that in these plays,

the harshness, isolation and lawlessness of the Northern frontier are being

activated to articulate visions of sexual violence; the North is operating here

as a metonymic space in which some of the nation’s core instances of

‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ about gender and violence are being played out (ibid.,

62).

Likewise, in the regional Postcolonial Gothic strain, the North functions as a threatening “multiracial northern frontier between not only black and white

Australia, but between Australia and Asia” (ibid., 64). Carleton suggests that as a result of its historically later colonisation, distance from the metropolitan centres of the nation’s south east, and its “relatively small population on the one hand, but its comparatively large Aboriginal population on the other” (ibid., 65), the North is figured as “the place in which the nation’s ghosts are most alive at present” (ibid.). It

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is “viewed as a place where ‘the past’—the time when European encounter with a non-Westernised or ‘traditional’ Aboriginality—is still playing out as ‘the present’, at least in the minds of non-Aboriginal metropolitan Australians” (ibid., 65).

Carleton’s suggestion brings to mind Ross Gibson’s assertion that “[t]he

Queensland frontier is not radically dissociated from ordinary experience, not relegated safely to some ‘ancient’ past. In Queensland, colonial times and contemporary times are coeval” (2002, 53). Gibson uses this imbrication of colonial and contemporary times to theorise his concept of the “badland”, a discursively formed, imaginative location (ibid., 14–15) that functions as a repository for cultural fears of historical violence: “A badland can be understood as a natural space deployed in a cultural form to persuade citizens that unruliness can be simultaneously acknowledged and ignored” (ibid., 15). Gibson reads the landscape of

Central Queensland around a particular length of highway known as the “Horror

Stretch” as “an immense, historical crime-scene [where] old passions and violent secrets are lying around in a million clues and traces. Whatever colonialism was and is, it has made this place unsettled and unsettling” (ibid., 1–2). In Gibson’s badland, as in Carleton’s North, “history lives as a presence in the landscape” (ibid., 50), and

Gothic threat comes from the perceived proximity of past and present. Australia’s

North, then, becomes a stage on which cultural fears and guilt surrounding race and gender can be simultaneously cast out and explored. Interestingly, the stretch of the

Bruce Highway charted in Gibson’s study cuts through the Capricorn Coast hinterland, meaning that Gibson’s paradigmatic badland space is also a hinterland space. Indeed, there are many similarities between Gibson’s badland and my conception of the hinterland as heterotopia.

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Hinterlands, I contend, like the badland and the Gothic North, evince an uneasy proximity of past and present. Settled by Europeans only towards the end of the nineteenth century, hinterland regions simultaneously celebrate and deny a past that they present as contiguous or even concurrent with the present. The colonial era is enshrined in the built environment; in the conspicuous survival of small farm lifestyles and economies, evidenced by farmer’s markets, co-ops, and roadside produce stalls; and in the emphasis on community and small town status and values.

However, the violence and dispossession that attended on these European settlements is denied in the elision of Aboriginal history and the importation of faux-historical building styles, as discussed further in Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the

Blackall Range, QLD. The repression of past violence is played out in the natural environment too, where the domestication of the landscape gives the appearance of long and prosperous European settlement. However, whereas Carleton takes pains to isolate two distinct strains within Northern Gothic, one to do with gender and the other to do with race, in Hinterland Gothic and in At Devil’s Elbow, I see these two concerns as intimately bound up, and with them the ecological.

Tasmanian Gothic Jim Davidson claimed Marcus Clarke as the inaugurator of the Tasmanian Gothic tradition, and Tasmanian Gothic production continues across a range of media, including the novels of Richard Flanagan, Chloe Hooper, and Rohan Wilson; the plays of Louis Nowra; and films such as The Tale of Ruby Rose (Roger

Scholes,1987) and The Hunter (Daniel Nettheim, 2011). Whereas studies of mainland Australian Gothic have focused on what is different about Australian landscapes compared to English and European ones, Tasmanian Gothic has been theorised according to its similarities to English landscapes. Tasmanians, according

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to Davidson, tend to “think of their island, the size of Scotland, as another England”

(1989, 307). In the colonial era, English cultural practices and materials transported easily to this familiar, “picturesque” (ibid., 310) landscape, from traditional songs to

Old World crops like hops and apples, and “deciduous trees [which] look totally at one with the landscape” (ibid., 307). The Gothic genre, likewise, did not need to make large adaptations to account for Tasmanian conditions.

Like the traditional Gothic settings of Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, the

Tasmanian landscape is wild and excessive, with features such as “the wonderfully overwrought coastline of Tasman Peninsula, with its clefts and pavements and blowholes located exactly where a gothic novelist would want them” (ibid.).

Tasmanian landscapes appear to be made for the Gothic. Where Gothic changes and adapts in Tasmania, it is not in response to an unexpected (because unlike European) nature but rather to local historical and cultural specificities—the legacies of convictism, colonialism, the almost complete genocide of Aboriginal people, and mainland perceptions of Tasmania as culturally (as well as geographically) separate and isolated from the mainland, backwards and degenerate.

The Tasmanian landscape is seen as a “gothic repository” (Davidson 1989,

310), containing the ghostly traces of the island state’s “slaughtered Aborigines, the downtrodden convicts, and hunted species liked the Tasmanian Emu and the gothically named Tasmanian Tiger” (ibid.). In this way, both postcolonial and ecological considerations have long been central to Tasmanian Gothic literature and criticism. Recent scholarship takes these ecological concerns a step further by engaging ecocritical lenses.

To a greater extent than any other area of Australian Gothic studies, scholars of Tasmanian Gothic have anticipated and engaged with the emergent category of

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EcoGothic. Emily Bullock (2011) highlights a recent spate of Tasmanian films and documentaries that find Gothic material in “the state’s ongoing history of violence and abuse towards the environment as well as the state’s green activists” (Bullock

2011, 78). Likewise, Jane Stadler (2012) identifies the Gothic and environmentalism as the two dominant modes in Tasmanian landscape cinema, which she sees as operating in conflicting yet related ways. As Stadler explains, “Where the Gothic typically represents the landscape as a malevolent, awesome threat to humans, the environmentalist perspective perceives it to be threatened by us, yet these apparently disjunctive modes are frequently entangled” (2012, para. 1). In the films Stadler analyses, Gothic terror is linked to the extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger, climate change, mining, and logging, as well as to the more familiar Gothic loci of isolation, wilderness, convictism, and the colonial past.

The emergence of an ecological sensibility in Tasmanian Gothic indicates, for

Stadler, a complex shift that encompasses and yet exceeds a change from the landscape as “Gothic villain to ecological victim” (ibid., para. 44), a complexity which is evident in Hinterland Gothic literature as well, in which stories of ecological violence are foregrounded and function metaphorically to convey stories of other kinds of violence—colonial, gendered, and racial—but in which the roles of aggressor and victim cannot always be easily separated.

Towards a Hinterland Gothic

Like Tasmanian landscapes, hinterland landscapes activate the Gothic not by virtue of their dissimilarity from the landscapes of England—as the main category of

Australian Gothic is perceived to do—but by virtue of their uncanny similarities. Just as Tasmania is perceived “as another England” (Davidson 1989, 307), so too have

Australia’s east coast hinterlands been described as “picturesque”, “idyllic”, even

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“un-Australian” (Palmer 1926d, 3). The Gothic arises in these regions not through experiences of pure alienation and terror in an unfamiliar and hostile landscape, but through a more subtle unsettling of the familiar and the unfamiliar as they coexist in uncanny proximity. Over two hundred years after colonisation, the Australian landscape can no longer be said to be unfamiliar to European eyes. Where the distinctively, natively Australian—especially plants and animals—jostle against imported species, or English-style cottage gardens and neatly fenced fields, it is difficult to say which is familiar and which unfamiliar, which in place and which out of place.

The uncanny erupts where boundaries blur; where distinctions between categories are unclear. Freud developed his theory of the uncanny in the 1919 essay

Das Unheimliche, drawing on the etymology of the German word for uncanny.

Unheimlich (uncanny, unhomely) is a contranym, synonymous with its own opposite, heimlich (homely). Crucially, unheimlich does not simply comprise two incompatible meanings, rather it “becomes increasingly ambivalent” (Freud 2003, 134) until, merging with its antonym, it reveals that the uncanny, the unfamiliar, “is in some way a species of the familiar” (ibid.), “so that what is called heimlich becomes unheimlich” (ibid., 132). The uncanny is, then, that which is both familiar and unfamiliar, in place and out of place (Gelder and Jacobs 1998, 24), at home and not at home (Punter 2000a, 83).

Gothic settings are typically conceived of as uniformly gloomy, frightening, unfamiliar, and lawless; however, the Gothic in fact relies on contrasting such spaces and effects with their opposite, quotidian counterparts. In the classic Gothic novels of

Ann Radcliffe:

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the tranquil, harmonious, light, and ordered space of the family home in a

picturesquely rural retreat is set against the dark, violent, and disturbing

world of the Gothic castle situated in a desolate and sublime landscape of

mountains and forests (Botting 2004, 245).

Radcliffe’s characters journey through idyllic valleys and pastoral lands

“bedecked with fields, vineyards and orchards” (Railo 1974, 12) to coastal villages, on their way to and from the louring castles and steep, forested mountain ranges that the Gothic genre is famous for. Although Radcliffe’s novels were usually set in

France, Italy, and Spain, her idyllic landscapes deliberately evoke an England idealised as a “pastoral paradise, as the original and authentic template of virtue and good taste, untouched” (Brabon 2013, 105). Likewise, while the castle in Horace

Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is a central setting, it is not the only one:

“Near to the castle there is a forest and behind this mountains which contain caves running down to the sea” (Railo 1974, 12). Much of the novel’s “pivotal action”

(Kröger 2013, 16) in fact takes place outside the castle, in the forest and by the caves.

These elements of classic Gothic landscapes—mountains, forest, sea—are the same that Ruth Blair has argued are linked together in the hinterlands of South East

Queensland and northern New South Wales, where the forested hinterland mountain ranges slope down towards the coast (Blair 2007, 177). These regions contain, too, the contrast that is central to the classic Gothic, juxtaposing the sublime scenery of mountains, rainforest, and cascading waterfalls against picturesque farmland, vineyards, and quaint villages. Examining the body of literature written about Mt

Tamborine in the Gold Coast hinterland, Blair notes that writers have used

Tamborine’s landscapes to explore “how settlement and forest can coexist” (2010,

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para. 5). On Tamborine, there is a “close relationship of forest and European garden, native and introduced plants” (ibid., para. 6) which emerges in literature alongside motifs of wilderness and domesticity.

South East Queensland’s hinterlands were, Blair points out, from very early on “seen as a potential place of retreat” (2007, 185) for Brisbane residents. Likewise,

Belinda McKay, surveying literary production in the same region, sees “the representation of the natural environment as a recreative or restorative spiritual force

[as] one of the dominant features of poetry about the coast and hinterland” (2001,

23). Nature in this guise is gentle, idyllic, remedial. However, at the same time, the landscape is often excessive, even terrifying. Blair quotes Arthur Groom, who visited the area in 1925 and described the rainforest as a “standing wall of jungle; hundreds of acres of giant trees, entwined and held with a tangling mass of vines and creepers, some of them as thick as a man’s body” (Groom in Blair 2007, 181). The Gothic emanates in this description in the form of excessive, personified nature that threatens through its physical and conceptual mass. The Tamborine rainforest appears as a version of the Gothic labyrinth or castle—monumental, overwhelming, perhaps annihilating.

Mabel Forrest also recognised a Gothic aesthetic in the Tamborine landscape when she named her house “White Witches” after the ghost gums surrounding it. In her poem “Mountain Rain” she describes rain sweeping up the forested mountain side from the coast as “grey witches” (Blair 2010, para. 6). For Blair, the tendency to import European mythology into this excessive landscape indicates the mountain’s unexplored “slumbering gothic qualities” (2007, 185).

Writer Vance Palmer perceived such Gothic qualities in the Blackall Range in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. Along with his wife, writer and literary critic Nettie

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Palmer, he lived in Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast in the 1920s. In 1926 Vance published a short series of articles about walking in the range, in which he described elements of the landscape as “medieval and Gothic” (1926b, 9), touched with the same sort of “magic” (ibid.) as Mabel Forrest’s Tamborine. Characterised by fertility, greenery, fruitfulness, idyll, and a sense that European settlement is already

“centuries” (ibid.) old, this landscape is, for Palmer, exemplary of the “kind of beauty […] we would call un-Australian, except that we know it is just one of the surprises that Australian landscape can give us” (Palmer 1926d, 3).

Critical engagement with Australia’s east coast hinterlands as discrete spaces has been limited. Blair and McKay provide the most thorough extant survey of literary production in South East Queensland hinterlands. Across a handful of articles and book chapters, they each chart a hinterland literary history across poetry, non- fiction, and novels (McKay 2001, 2005; Blair 2007, 2010). McKay also pays some attention to the concept of the hinterland as a specific literary site, the “relatively unexplored and mysterious” (McKay 2005, 59) “back country” (McKay 2001, 24) from which writers like Eleanor Dark take up a deliberate “cultural position” (ibid.).

For McKay, this positioning often has to do with contrast: the rural, small town perspective juxtaposed against urban life and views. She does, however, acknowledge that increasingly “old distinctions” (McKay 2005, 60) between city and bush, urban and rural, are blurring—perhaps especially in hinterland regions. Indeed, it is this blurring, this inverting or erasing of boundaries, that makes the hinterland such a rich imaginative region (ibid., 71).

The hinterland is a slippery, shifting region to chart, and Blair and McKay both survey slightly different hinterland regions. Blair focuses chiefly on Mt

Tamborine and the Lamington Plateau in the Gold Coast hinterland, although she

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draws connections with Sunshine Coast and northern New South Wales hinterlands.

McKay’s work, on the other hand, encompasses a much broader definition and application of hinterland, canvassing literature of Brisbane’s hinterland, in which she includes not only the Gold Coast hinterland and Sunshine Coast hinterland, but also the coast itself, offshore islands, and inland regions straddling or beyond the Great

Dividing Range. These are areas to which the label hinterland does not commonly adhere. Certainly, Stradbroke Island and the urban areas of the Gold Coast would not usually be called hinterlands in everyday discourse, even if they can be designated as

Brisbane’s hinterland in strictly economic or geographical parlance.

The east coast hinterlands considered by this thesis are discursively formed, distinct colloquial and administrative districts where applications of the term hinterland have accrued over time, shaping, as I argue, the characters of these regions. The natural barrier of the Great Dividing Range provides these hinterlands with a convenient western boundary, but the exact extent they run north and south, or indeed east towards the urban sprawl of the coast, remains only blurrily defined.

Brisbane and the outlying regions that can be designated its hinterlands intervene between the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast hinterland regions considered here, but the boundaries between these hinterlands are contiguous rather than sharply defined.

Indeed, even the Great Dividing Range is not as solid a border as it might appear, made up as it is of a network of mountains, plateaus, and highlands whose eastern reaches are not always clear. If areas in the range’s eastern slopes are designated hinterland, why not also areas on its crest, like Toowoomba, or the towns on its western slopes, the “rainshadow country” (Sheridan 2009, 116) that forms part of

Thea Astley’s conception of the Queensland coast? Where exactly does the Sunshine

Coast hinterland become the Brisbane hinterland? Is the arbitrary border of New

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South Wales sufficient to differentiate the Gold Coast hinterland from that of northern New South Wales?

Many of these inland and interstitial areas share similar qualities of landscape and history with the coast-bound hinterlands to the north and south of Brisbane that are the focus of this thesis. Where their literature also shares qualities with the

Hinterland Gothic texts examined here, it has sometimes seemed arbitrary to exclude these texts from consideration simply because they do not fall to one side of a fuzzily defined boundary. Something like Andrew McGahan’s award-winning Australian

Gothic novel The White Earth (2004), set in the northern reaches of the Darling

Downs near the Bunya Mountains, therefore can be included in the category

Hinterland Gothic if the boundary of the hinterland is allowed to fray outwards a little further. Likewise, as discussed in regards to the films of Ray Lawrence below, the boundaries of the hinterland can shrink inwards so that rural suburbs that strictly fall within urban regions can be positioned as hinterlands, lands behind and beyond the built-up spaces of everyday city life.

Both Blair and McKay remark on the relative dearth of creative literature set in South East Queensland hinterlands. Blair identifies a fairly strong literary tradition on Mt Tamborine, largely centred around non-fiction and Wright’s poetry, but including few novels. Janette Turner Hospital’s novel Charades (1988), discussed further below, is one of these few. Likewise, McKay points out that “[s]ince the

1980s, the Sunshine Coast and its hinterland have become something of a mecca for writers” (McKay 2001, 21), but “very few of those who live or holiday there actually use this location in their work” (ibid., 22). These hinterland landscapes have been available to writers since the late nineteenth century, when timber-getters had cleared enough land for settlers to move in. However, literary production seems not to have

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flourished there until fairly recently. Perhaps this is because such landscapes were not only unnecessary but also detrimental to a national literary tradition and character predicated on an Australian landscape that was harsh and unforgiving.

A Hinterland Gothic Literary Tradition

In the surveys of Blair and McKay, a few central figures come to the fore in whose works hinterland settings are a key feature: Rosa Praed, Eleanor Dark, and Judith

Wright. My own survey highlights the Gothic aspects in these writers’ works, as well as supplementing Blair and McKay’s catalogues with some newer, and some overlooked, works.

Rosa Praed’s Policy and Passion (1881), The Head Station (1885), and

Outlaw and Lawmaker (1893) are set in the Logan Valley in the Gold Coast hinterland. Praed (an author included in Gelder’s pantheon of Australian Gothic writers) represents the hinterland landscape in terms of the sublime and the picturesque. It “is the site for both rural enterprises such as farming and grazing, and for recreation and restoration through expedition to sublime and potentially dangerous natural environments” (McKay 2005, 59–60). Praed’s characters “are depicted as landed gentry in the English tradition” (ibid., 62); however, the

“underlying menace of this sublime landscape […] is never far from the surface”

(ibid., 65). Characters suffer snakebite, fall over steep precipices, and jump to their deaths over waterfalls in locations of “extreme wildness and desolation” (Praed in

McKay 2005, 63), all juxtaposed against picturesque pastoral lands and genteel activities such as picnicking.

Eleanor Dark’s Lantana Lane (1959) remains the only extended work of fiction set on the Blackall Range in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, and it is an anomaly in more ways than one. Critics describe it variously as a novel, a collection

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of short stories, and a series of essays (McKay 2001, 23). It is certainly not a Gothic novel, although it does include some Gothic elements, particularly in its depiction of lantana, a locus of the Gothic in At Devil’s Elbow and other Hinterland Gothic texts.

Lantana Lane is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.

Judith Wright’s poetry of Mt Tamborine is entwined with her concerns as an environmental activist. Her 1962 collection Birds focuses largely on the birds of

Tamborine and the impact on them of tourism and loss of environment (Blair 2007,

188). Blair points out that in her exploration of the relationship between human and environment, Wright occasionally employs anthropomorphism, seeking “through metaphor, a way to express the meaning of the non-human world” (ibid., 189–190).

In “Flame-tree in a Quarry”, (originally published in The Bulletin in 1947), Wright uses anthropomorphism to decry “human desecration of the landscape” (Blair 2007,

190). The poem is littered with images of violence and death used to articulate a story of ecological violence and degradation. The hill and the quarry dug into it are described in terms of “broken bone”, “a wrecked skull”, “scarlet breath”, blood, flesh, and wounds, the “living ghost of death” (Wright 1947a). A similar recourse to

Gothic language is evident in “The Cycads”, in which Wright expresses a sense of

Australia’s ancient pre-European history with reference to antiquity, broken bargains, curses, “the shrunken moon”, stone carvings, timelessness, and cold (Wright 1947b).

Blair speculates that “something more than the Romantic sublime is going on” (2007,

192) in this poem and suggests that Wright is using the language of the sublime to animate a sense of humility and environmental responsibility. I would argue that it is possible to read Wright’s hinterland poetry as examples of the EcoGothic, through which the natural world can be read as both menacing towards humans and menaced by human activity.

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Since Blair and McKay conducted their surveys, some new writing from

South East Queensland and northern New South Wales hinterland regions has emerged, including by authors identified in their articles as living in, but not yet writing about, the area. These include Kate Moreton’s The Secret Keeper (2012), which contains scenes set on Mt Tamborine, and Melissa Lucashenko’s

Mullumbimby (2013), set in the northern New South Wales hinterland behind Byron

Bay. Lucashenko binds together Indigenous, feminist, and ecological discourses in a narrative about place, motherhood, identity, and belonging. While not generically a

Gothic novel, Mullumbimby (2013) does employ Gothic modalities, as discussed further in Chapter 5.

The work of Janette Turner Hospital is only briefly mentioned in McKay

(2005, 60) and Blair (2010, para. 4) but proves a strong addition to the catalogue of

Hinterland Gothic. Turner Hospital’s work draws on her childhood memories of growing up in Brisbane and its surrounds—including the Gold Coast and Sunshine

Coast hinterlands. With its themes of female sexuality, aberrant maternity, ghostly fathers, doubling, and shades of incest, the 1988 novel Charades can be read as a

Female Gothic novel. Its settings include a lush, Gothic Mt Tamborine landscape as strongly linked with sensuality and fertility as it is with death and decay; Mt

Glorious, north-west of Brisbane, whose abundant rainforests trail down “in long slender lizards’ tongues and lick[…] at the edges of the city” (Turner Hospital 2015,

136); and the Glasshouse Mountains, represented through anthropomorphic metaphors as an erotic space

However, Turner Hospital is perhaps best read as a writer of the Brisbane hinterland broadly conceived, an area that includes but is not restricted to the Gold

Coast and Sunshine Coast hinterland regions. Mt Glorious in Charades and the

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Samford Valley and Cedar Creek, where a woman’s bones are discovered wedged between boulders in Turner Hospital’s novel The Last Magician (1992), are among those interstitial hinterland zones mentioned above. In addition to this, Turner

Hospital’s novels are rarely set entirely in one location, but move back and forth between a variety of places. In Charades, especially, the hinterland is usually seen in glimpses of memory from the narrator’s present-day perspective in Boston.

Peter Carey is another writer whose works defy strict classification as hinterland novels because of their diverse array of settings. McKay (2005, 70) notes that Carey, who lived for a time in a commune at Yandina the Sunshine Coast hinterland, set many of the stories in his collection War Crimes (1979) in the region.

I identify his novels Bliss (1981) and His Illegal Self (2008) as also partially set in or based on hinterland locations.

In 1985, filmmaker Ray Lawrence adapted Bliss for the screen, drawing to the surface its Gothic qualities. For Jonathan Rayner, the film’s generic hybridity, its blend of comedy and violence, marks it as part of an Australian Gothic film tradition to which Lawrence’s later films Lantana (2001) and Jindabyne (2006) also belong

(Rayner 2009, 7). I argue that these films also belong within my category of

Hinterland Gothic; although their locations in Sydney and southern New South

Wales put them outside the scope of this thesis. Due to some striking similarities to

At Devil’s Elbow, however, Lantana is discussed further in Chapter 7.

Northern New South Wales has, since the turn of the millennium in particular, seen a flourishing of hinterland literature with a distinctly Gothic cast.

Sarah Armstrong’s Salt Rain (2004), set in the northern New South Wales hinterland is the most distinctly Gothic of the Hinterland Gothic texts identified by this thesis. It deals with classic Gothic themes and motifs of incest, family secrets, mysterious

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disappearances, repetition, and doubling in a hinterland rendered both closed and liminal by constant rain and flood. This novel is also discussed further in Chapter 5.

Jesse Blackadder’s After the Party (2005) is predominantly set in Byron Bay in northern New South Wales, but includes extensive hinterland interludes in which the hills and valleys behind Byron Bay are represented as “the dark unconscious mind while Byron is the sunny iceberg tip of daily awareness. It is the fertile, female foil to Byron’s phallocentric lighthouse” (Blackadder 2005, 123). Blackadder’s hinterland is a heterotopic counter-site in which “Drop-outs, misfits, the mischievous, the quiet, the meditators, the imbibers, the extremists, the conservatives, the hippies, the city refugees, some original farmers, the reclusives, the alternatives” (ibid., 124) live side-by-side. It is, too, a space of Gothic excess and the supernatural where “The climate is too hot and too cold and too unfashionably wet. The creeks flood on a whim […]. The newspapers calmly report sightings of yowies” (ibid.), and a Gothic repository. The landscape “remembers death, remembers the crack of trees falling and the ripping of land being taken unjustly from previous owners who lived there for thousands of years and felt no need to destroy it” (ibid.).

Jessie Cole’s Darkness on the Edge of Town (2012) and Deeper Water

(2014), are both set in the northern New South Wales hinterland. Darkness on the

Edge of Town explores themes of maternal aberrance, grief, domestic violence, and missing persons. Deeper Water constructs the hinterland as a distinctly female space and uses it to explore female sexuality and social constructions of femininity, as discussed further in Chapter 5.

Queensland hinterlands have seen a far more modest production of literature.

Inga Simpson’s Nest (2014), also discussed in Chapter 5, merges aspects of the

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Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast hinterlands (Simpson 2014a) in a narrative that explores the effects on the Sunshine Coast community of the 2003 abduction and murder of schoolboy Daniel Morcombe. Although Simpson has stated that she intentionally attempted to avoid gothicising the landscape in Nest (Brown 2015), I argue that she nonetheless activates Gothic landscape metaphors to articulate latent stories of violence and guilt. Nest is examined in detail in Chapter 5, and in

Chapter 7 I reflect on how Simpson’s treatment of a real-life trauma in Nest guided my own engagement with regional stories of violence and death in At Devil’s Elbow.

Patrick Holland’s Mary Smokes Boys (2010) is another interstitial hinterland text that strictly belongs to the Brisbane hinterland. It is predominantly set in the area around Somerset Dam, near Esk, but it takes the name and certain aspects of its titular town and waterway from a creek in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. Holland’s novel deals with maternal loss and paternal violence and failure in a windswept and isolated landscape bounded to the north and west by the Great Dividing Range,

“wide and empty country in which the world was uninterested” (Holland 2010, 15).

Holland’s staging of the Gothic in the flat south-west of the Blackall Range, as well as aspects of Carey’s Yandina (to the north-east of the range) suggest a corresponding lowland Gothic set in the plains surrounding what can be conceived as the Gothic castle-like edifice of the Blackall Range, a potentially fruitful direction for future research.

An additional wellspring of hinterland literature may be emerging from

Victorian hinterland regions. The Gippsland hinterland is the setting for Peggy

Frew’s Hope Farm (2015), in which young Silver and her mother Ishtar move to a hinterland hippie commune, outside the norms and laws of the everyday world and presided over by the threatening presence of Ishtar’s lover Miller—who, like Jane

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Eyre’s Rochester, has a secret wife. And, like Jane Eyre, Hope Farm ends with its

Gothic structure in flames. Hope Farm can certainly be read as Female Gothic, as can the 2005 television movie Little Oberon (Gawler 2005), filmed in the mountainous, forested Marysville and Mt Macedon in the Melbourne hinterland.

Mother-daughter relationships are at the heart of the narrative, and the town of Little

Oberon reveals itself to be, beneath its picturesque surface, a place of secrets, danger, mysterious disappearances, and sexual intrigue. In classic Female Gothic tradition, the film’s climax involves a church residence burning down. The Gothic supernatural is also activated in the 2015 television mini-series Glitch (Ayres and Fox 2015), filmed near Castlemaine, Victoria, in which a small town’s dead residents mysteriously come back to life. As mentioned earlier, the Melbourne hinterland is also the setting for Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, one of Australia’s most enduring Gothic novels. Future investigations may identify, as well as Brisbane and

Melbourne Hinterland Gothic traditions, corresponding bodies of work related to

Perth, Cairns, Darwin, or Sydney hinterlands.

To varying extents, all the hinterland literature identified in the course of this research makes use of Gothic modalities, although not all of them can comfortably be called Gothic. In particular, Dark’s Lantana Lane draws out the Gothic qualities of lantana, as analysed in Chapter 5, without in any way conforming to the generic template of the Gothic. Nearly all of these Hinterland Gothic texts, however, evince a concern with mother-daughter relationships, identify the feminine and Indigenous with the landscape, and represent the hinterland as a mysterious place apart, a region beyond the everyday. In Chapter 5, I analyse a selection of these texts, arguing that they mobilise the Gothic through a regionally specific Hinterland Gothic web of

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metaphor, which they use to articulate or gesture towards marginalised stories of place.

Conclusion to the Literature Review

The studies included in this chapter’s survey of regional Australian Gothic begin the process of breaking down monolithic conceptions of Australian space. Both Steele’s

Gothic bush-space and Haynes’ Gothic desert remain generalised, mythic spaces, however they are not made to stand for the entirety of mainland Australia. Craven’s approach to North Queensland and Carleton’s to Northern Australia more broadly move further towards a conception of Australian Gothic as made up of a variety of distinct regional variations, as well as highlighting contemporary concerns with gender and race. New studies in Tasmanian Gothic foreground concurrent concerns with the ecological. My approach to Hinterland Gothic brings these three foci into alignment.

The small body of hinterland criticism and literature charted across Blair and

McKay’s studies and my own indicates a growing imaginative engagement with

Australia’s east coast hinterlands by writers and filmmakers. It also discovers a large gap to be filled in our understanding of Australian literature and Australian Gothic as it responds to discrete local regions. This thesis can only hope to address one small part of this gap, by examining Gothic traces in literature of the Sunshine Coast, Gold

Coast, and northern New South Wales hinterland regions. In the next chapter, I outline the theories and methods that inform the spatial and textual analysis of hinterland regions and hinterland literature undertaken in the following chapters.

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Chapter 3: Research Design

Introduction to Research Design

This thesis brings together a range of theoretical approaches within Gothic studies— spatial, postcolonial, ecocritical, and feminist—to construct a hybrid analytical lens through which to study selected Hinterland Gothic texts. It applies the same lens to a spatial analysis of the Blackall Range in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, where At

Devil’s Elbow is set, adapting Paul Carter’s method of “ground truthing” (2010a) as a means of tracing the spatial history of the region. Because spatial histories, as discussed below, are especially concerned with naming as an act that leaves symbolic traces, I consider the implications of the term “hinterland”, and what traces it might leave in the regions where it is applied. Through reflective practice, I examine the recursive process of creative practice and critical research, and the ways in which the research findings have emerged in and through the writing of At Devil’s Elbow, as well as challenges encountered throughout the research and writing process. I also examine my own position as practitioner-researcher, and the effects of my inevitably partial perspective on the research—an especially necessary step given that one of the key aims of the thesis is to cast light on the dark spaces of place, those stories and histories that dominant Australian culture is blind to.

Practice-Led Research

It was the sensed traces of just such silenced stories, what Paul Carter calls the “dark writing” (2009) of place, that catalysed the research. As Brad Haseman has expressed it, practice-led research often begins not with a clearly articulated question or problem, but may be inspired by “‘an enthusiasm of practice’—something which is exciting, something which may be unruly” (Haseman 2006, 100). The unruly

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elements that manifested themselves in early drafts of At Devil’s Elbow did so through the unexpected language of the Gothic. In my persistent and unintentional gothicising of the hinterland landscape I realised there were half-seen, half- understood traces of other stories, other views, underlying my perception of place.

The research began from my desire to shine a light on these dark traces, to understand the latent Gothic energies beneath the sunny surface of the hinterland.

Creative writing practice-led research aims both to extend knowledge about creative writing practice as a means of developing the creative work of the individual practitioner-researcher (Harper 2008, 170) and to create “knowledge about the contribution of creative writing to contemporary society” (Green 2006, 177). The current research develops understandings of how writers can activate regionally specific Gothic metaphoric repertoires to articulate or gesture towards the silenced stories of place. In a wider context, it expands the boundaries of the category of

Australian Gothic, debunking the myths of essentialised Australian landscapes on which much foundational scholarship has relied, and contributing the category of

Hinterland Gothic to what I identify as the growing catalogue of regional Australian

Gothic.

The research also creates new knowledge about and wider understandings of the neglected space of Australia’s east coast hinterlands as literary and cultural landscapes. Philip Drew has argued that only by dismantling the myth of Australia’s interior as the seat of the national consciousness and instead bringing our stories home to the edge of the continent, where most Australians live, will Australian culture move beyond its “immature” (Drew 1994, 156) vision of itself as “new-

Europe, […] new-England” (ibid.) and begin to construct its own authentic identity.

Schaffer similarly argues that in breaking down the myth of Australian landscape as

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hostile and threatening, we also begin to rethink the category of woman, with which representations of the landscape are intertwined (Schaffer 1990, 27). These are processes in which, I argue, At Devil’s Elbow and the broader category of Hinterland

Gothic participate.

These wider literary and cultural findings would not have been possible without the perspective and insights afforded by a practice-led methodology. Of critical importance in practice-led research is “the central role that making plays in the creation of knowledge” (Sullivan 2009, 8), and the writing of At Devil’s Elbow has guided the research process and resulting the creation of knowledge. As Graeme

Harper has pointed out, literary and other cultural studies are “post-event”, finding their subject matter only after the actions of creative practice, whereas “creative writing locates its discourse, its knowledge and its understanding in the act and actions of writing creatively” (Harper 2008, 161). Creative writing research identifies and analytically critiques the “event” as it happens. The present research has been able to identify the emerging tradition of Hinterland Gothic as a direct result of the acts and actions of writing creatively about the hinterland, rather than applying post- event analysis. In addition, my awareness as a creative writer of the deliberate construction of literary settings and effects has kept in the foreground the way in which landscapes are always culturally constructed and put to use for artistic and social reasons, a point which has been overlooked in much previous Australian

Gothic scholarship.

The research process has been cyclical and reciprocal, benefiting from both the creative and critical aspects. The process, perspective, and outcomes of creative writing have driven the project, and the critical research has, in turn, informed the ongoing development of the creative work, leading to a deeper understanding of

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Gothic generic conventions and the nature of the hinterland. The “unruly” element that emerged in early drafts of At Devil’s Elbow was a persistent and unintentional gothicising of the hinterland landscape. In seeking to understand the function of

Gothic settings and space, I found Fred Botting’s (2004, 2012) theory of Gothic space as heterotopic particularly useful.

Gothic Heterotopia

Botting draws on Foucault’s theory of heterotopias to argue that all the “main features of Gothic fiction […] are heterotopias: the wild landscapes, the ruined castles and abbeys, the dark, dank labyrinths, the marvellous, supernatural events, distant times and customs” (Botting 2012, 19). Conceiving of the hinterland of At

Devil’s Elbow as a Gothic heterotopia, a subversive “counter-site” (Foucault 1986,

246) in which voices and stories marginalised from mainstream Australian culture can find expression—namely, the feminine, the Indigenous, and the ecological— afforded me insight into the unruly Gothic energies circulating in At Devil’s Elbow.

The concept of the hinterland as heterotopia also points towards the significance of the hinterland as an Australian cultural space.

Both Foucault and Botting see heterotopias as crucial in the construction of culture and society, as well as, paradoxically, subverting the norms it helps to instate.

Societies constitute themselves by excluding “Otherness”, and heterotopias are “sites where subjects and behaviors that fit only partially within dominant norms can be both contained and excluded” (Botting 2004, 243). The “Otherness” represented by

6 I primarily rely on the most recent translation of Foucault’s 1967 lecture by Dehaene and De Cauter (2008); however, at times the original Miskowiec (1986) translation provides clearer or less awkward terminology. By their own admission, Dehaene and De Cauter have sometimes opted for fluency rather than logic, chosen “somewhat strange” (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008, 26) terms in the service of specificity, and even assumed errors in the original French, substituting alternative words at the risk of incorrect translation (ibid.). Nonetheless, as the most recent translators, Dehaene and De Cauter are able to take into account the choices of previous translators and offer annotations where they diverge.

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and contained within heterotopias “enables the differentiation, ordering and policing of the limits of their own space as well as the boundaries of society” (ibid.).

However, heterotopias also, subversively, “reveal or represent something about the society in which they reside through the way in which they incorporate and stage the very contradictions that this society produces but is unable to resolve” (Dehaene and

De Cauter translators’ note in Foucault 2008, 25). The heterotopia functions doubly, as a space of necessity and even comfort (since that which is Other is contained elsewhere) and a space of discomfort and destabilisation (since the choice of what to abject and exclude reveals a society to itself). In this way, the badland spaces described by Gibson (2002) are heterotopic, “prohibited space[s]” where a society’s

“savagery can be encysted even if it cannot be eliminated” (Gibson 2002, 15).

Indeed, Gibson’s concept of badlands and Foucault’s heterotopias have often been used in conjunction with one another (see, for example, Tompkins 2006), and badlands can perhaps be understood as a particular kind of heterotopia, one concerned with historical and especially colonial violence7.

Jane Stadler and Peta Mitchell have deployed the concept of the heterotopia in an Australian context as a means of reading the Never-Never in Baz Lurhmann's

Australia (2008) as a mythic space constructed from a palimpsest of real spaces and used to play out white Australian fantasies of belonging, reconciliation, and indigeneity. Heterotopia in this study functions as a way to conceive of the filmic space of the Never-Never “as presenting an inherent ‘otherness’, [while being] also, almost paradoxically, bound up with broader questions of nationality and belonging”

(Stadler and Mitchell 2010, 178–179). It in this way that Stadler and Mitchell see the

7 Gibson’s concept of badlands does not draw directly on the concept of heterotopia, although there are various similarities. Interestingly, Kevin Hetherington does elaborate on heterotopias through a different concept of the badland in The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (1997).

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Never-Never as participating in the simultaneous contestation and affirmation of

Australian attitudes to landscape and place. The heterotopia, like the Gothic, can be both conservative and subversive.

As discussed in Chapter 1: Introduction, Foucault uses the metaphor of the mirror as a space that mediates between the “unreal space” (Foucault 2008, 17) of the utopia and the “real place” (ibid.) of the heterotopia, providing “a sort of mixed, in- between experience” (ibid.). For Foucault, the mirror, “a placeless place” (Foucault

1986, 24) is certainly a utopia, “an unreal, virtual space” (ibid.) that shows oneself where one is not: “I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives me my own visibility, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent”

(Foucault 2008, 17). However because the mirror itself exists, is real, it is also a heterotopia.

Like the hinterland, the “land behind” that depends for its designation on a subject position located elsewhere, the mirror-as-heterotopia presents a reflection that, “in order to be perceived […] has to pass through this virtual point which is over there” (Foucault 2008, 17). Through these reflective properties, the heterotopia is able to show a society to itself, in perfected or inverted form (ibid.).

Foucault’s theory has been criticised as partial, paradoxical, “briefly sketched and somewhat confusing” (Johnson 2006, 75). Foucault’s development of the theory remains curiously unfinished, ending prematurely with an assertion of the ship as

“heterotopia par excellence” (Foucault 2008, 22) but neglecting to fully explore the role and function of the heterotopia in contemporary society (Dehaene and De Cauter translators’ note in Foucault 2008, 28). Nonetheless, Foucault’s theory of

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heterotopias remains a relevant, and useful, framework for the study of Australia’s east coast hinterland regions as sites that both reflect and subvert Australian culture.

The flexibility of the term makes it particularly useful in a creative context, both providing critical scaffolding and permitting creative freedom of movement. In addition, Botting’s theory of Gothic spaces as heterotopias provides a foundation for understanding how the subversive qualities of the heterotopia can be articulated through the language of the Gothic. The labyrinth, in many ways an analogue for

Foucault’s mirror, is Botting’s governing heterotopic form. The labyrinth space is:

doubly other: literally constituted of detours, repetitions, and duplications

which traverse the same space with an interminable criss-crossing of

differences and divergences, a space that is other to, constitutive of and

resistant to, the known limits of society and subjectivity (Botting 2004, 249).

The experience of moving through the hinterland is akin to that of traversing a labyrinth, of detouring, doubling back, moving beyond “the known limits”. In conducting a spatial history of the Blackall Range in Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the Blackall Range, QLD and textual analysis of Hinterland Gothic texts in

Chapter 5: A Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor, I position the hinterland as a heterotopic counter-site in which cultural attitudes towards, and the marginalised stories of, women, the environment, and Indigenous people are articulated through

Gothic metaphors drawn from the landscape itself. In reading these stories, or the spaces that indicate their silencing, I employ postcolonial, ecocritical, and feminist theories as they have been theorised within Gothic studies.

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Postcolonial Gothic

Gina Wisker claims that Postcolonial Gothic arises “wherever there has been an imperial and colonial past” (2013, 514). Hinterland—in its English usage at least— proves itself to be a particularly relevant postcolonial term, and space. Read as a

Gothic heterotopia, the hinterland lends itself particularly well to analyses of the postcolonial uncanny.

For many theorists, the postcolonial condition is itself uncanny. Gelder and

Jacobs write that citizens of postcolonial nations experience the uncanny in that they both remain within the structures of colonialism and are, at the same time, located beyond or “after” them (1998, 24). Descendants of colonisers find themselves in the paradoxical position of being simultaneously guilty and innocent—implicated as inheritors of colonial wealth and privilege, but innocent of crimes committed before their time. Descendants of the colonised frequently remain dispossessed, disadvantaged, and marginalised in a homeland that is no longer quite homely.

Gelder and Jacobs articulate this as a matter of being both “in place” and “out of place” at the same time (ibid.), an uncanny position related to Freud’s articulation of the unheimlich as a shifting and intertwined relationship between familiar and unfamiliar, homely and unhomely, or “that which is and is not ‘at home” (Edwards

2005, 5).

For descendants of European colonisers, postcolonial locations are “partly familiar and partly unfamiliar—partly resembling home (‘New Caledonia’, ‘New

England’, and so on) and yet also evoking something quite unrecognisable and strange” (Gelder 1998, 181). The landscapes of postcolonial nations are haunted, scarred by the actions of colonisation and imprinted with its memory. Natural landscapes and built environments “are concrete metaphors, living memories

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reminding and revitalizing secrets, reflecting them back to those who wittingly or unwittingly inherited from that oppressive past” (Wisker 2013, 512). The fiction of terra nullius that was central to colonial possession of lands in Australia, Canada, the

Americas, the Caribbean and elsewhere “is both reclaimed and redefined under postcolonial Gothic” (ibid.).

In Postcolonial Gothic, the trope of the return of the repressed functions to

“re-animate the traumas of [the] colonial past” (Gelder 1998, 181). Gothic tropes of haunting, liminality, metamorphosis, and monsters are deployed in a postcolonial context “to make visible and palpable the history and legacy of the repression, silencing, erasure, and remapping that was colonialism” (Wisker 2013, 512).

Descendants of colonised peoples, those who were once cast as the monsters of

Gothic text, appropriate and invert those tropes so that the coloniser is cast as the monstrous Other. Descendants of colonisers must confront their own implication in enduring systems of violence and marginalisation. The ghosts of those guilty of colluding in colonial regimes, as well as the murdered, enslaved, and oppressed victims of colonisation rise up, literally or metaphorically, to haunt those living in the present.

For Gina Wisker, the ghostly victims of colonialism include not only people but also animals (2013, 512). I combine such an understanding of Postcolonial

Gothic with the emergent field of EcoGothic to demonstrate how not only animals but also plants may be activated in Gothic texts as victims, and tools, of colonisation to create uncanny effects.

EcoGothic

EcoGothic criticism recognises that the natural world has long been a locus of fear in the Gothic, and “reconsider[s] the role that the environment, species, and nonhumans

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play in the construction of monstrosity and fear” (Del Principe 2014, 1). In an era of climate change and growing ecological concerns, “[t]he Gothic seems to be the form which is well placed to capture these anxieties” (Smith and Hughes 2013, 5).

EcoGothic criticism is well positioned to intersect with postcolonial approaches to

Gothic, recognising that “debates about the environment are also nationally inflected” (Smith and Hughes 2013, 4). It also acknowledges a debt to ecofeminist thought, which provides a theoretical base predicated on recognition of “interlocking androcentric and anthropocentric hierarchies” (Del Principe 2014, 1) in which women, animals, and nature are all oppressed and cast as Other. EcoGothic articulates this relationship, as well as giving voice to a “mounting ecophobia—fears stemming from humans’ precarious relationship with all that is non-human” (ibid.) In

EcoGothic literature, terror often results from human actions on the land, rather than emanating from a malicious environment:

[T]he desecration of the natural world is met with psychological trauma and

can usually be traced to an oppressive ruling power (a structure which mirrors

modern conceptions of a feminized nature attacked by a patriarchy—

technology, industry or even society itself). As the attack on nature

progresses in these novels, the environments become more frightening (Smith

and Hughes 2013, 5–6).

In At Devil’s Elbow and other Hinterland Gothic texts, nature appears in just such a guise, shifting between benign and malign, and terror often arises from landscapes that are threatened, rather than simply threatening. Nature is linked with oppressed female and Indigenous bodies, through liminal signifiers such as water, or

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the personification of landscape and trees. The recent collection Plant Horror

(Keetley and Tenga 2016) also extends EcoGothic to a more specific focus on the horror of excess and Otherness represented by vegetal matter, an approach that the current research combines with theories of the postcolonial uncanny to analyse how native and non-native plants are used as Gothic metaphors in Hinterland Gothic literature. The metaphoric connection of the ecological, Indigenous, and female in

Hinterland Gothic texts is explored further in Chapter 5.

Female/Postfeminist Gothic

In the Female Gothic critical tradition, a connection has long been recognised between the female, especially maternal, body and Gothic space. The Gothic castle has been seen to function as a “maternal space” (Holland and Sherman 1977, 288); like the maternal body, it is “both habitat and prison, and […] imaginatively linked to the realm of Nature” (Kahane 1985, 337). The Female Gothic plot dramatises the

Gothic heroine’s quest throughout a symbolically maternal structure or landscape for a missing, dead, or metaphorically absent mother:

[T]he heroine’s active exploration of the Gothic house in which she is trapped

is also an exploration of her relation to the maternal body that she shares,

with all its connotations of power over and vulnerability to forces within and

without (ibid., 338).

Through this Gothic quest the heroine confronts the often displaced figure of her mother—projected onto space, environment, or doubles—and “the problematics of femininity” (ibid., 336) that she represents, and which trap them both within the structures of patriarchy.

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As a literary genre, Female Gothic extends back to Ann Radcliffe’s eighteenth-century novels. As an analytical category, however, it is connected to second-wave feminist thought. Ellen Moers first articulated the concept of Female

Gothic in her gynocritical study Literary Women (1976) as “the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic” (Moers 1976, 90). Subsequent scholarship has critiqued Moers’ definition not only for vagueness, but for essentialism and universalism (Brabon and

Genz 2007, 5; Fitzgerald 2009, 16; Baldick and Mighall 2012, 285).

In an effort to redress these problems, yet maintain Female Gothic as a generic and analytic category in contemporary scholarship, the concept of

Postfeminist Gothic has been introduced. As a critical category, Postfeminist Gothic addresses changes in both popular and critical thought following the advent of poststructuralism and advances made by second-wave feminism. Taking into account poststructuralist destabilisation of gender and other categories of identity (Brabon and Genz 2007, 6; Wallace and Smith 2004, 1), proponents of Postfeminist Gothic reject Moers’ claim to exclusively female authorship of Female Gothic texts, however retain an interest in “those examples of the Gothic mode that encode women’s fears about entrapment within the home and the body” (Munford and

Waters 2014, 136). While all the Hinterland Gothic texts identified by this thesis as belonging to a Female Gothic tradition are written by women, the authors’ gender was not a requirement for their selection, but rather a pattern that emerged in the course of the research and directed my attention towards the Female Gothic as a category.

Postfeminism is itself a slippery and contentious critical term, however this thesis follows Sarah Whitney in understanding postfeminism to be “a cultural mood

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deriving from two dubious premises: that gender equity has been achieved and that feminism is now both obsolete and undesirable” (Whitney 2010, 351). Contemporary authors “revivif[y] the female Gothic genre in a postfeminist moment that is invested in minimizing claims of gendered inequity and violence” (ibid., 351). They burrow beneath the “bright, shiny surface of the postfeminist world” (ibid., 352), even appearing at times to condone or agree with its claims for the redundancy of feminism, only to unsettle postfeminist myths of freedom, choice, and equality by depicting women’s experiences of violence and oppression.

One benefit of Postfeminist Gothic criticism to the present research is its resolute focus on recent texts. Gothic studies has a tendency to be backward-looking in its analysis, focusing on the eighteenth-century texts of Radcliffe, or the Victorian era novels of the Brontë sisters. Emily Carr, writing on ecofeminist Gothic, points out that even Female Gothic scholarship focused on the contemporary moment tends to return over and over again to the same set of writers, such as Margaret Atwood,

Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, and Toni Morrison. Carr argues that this is antithetical to both ecofeminist and Gothic thought; instead of reading outside the literary canon to locate diverse voices, critics are solidifying another canon (Carr

2013, 162).

The present research extends Postfeminist Gothic analysis to a new set of non-canonical texts. It also connects the postfeminist with the spatial, postcolonial and ecocritical, all avenues that have only begun to be explored within the emergent category of Postfeminist Gothic.

Spatial History

I apply the theoretical lens elaborated above in conducting a spatial history of the

Blackall Range in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. Spatial history is a term coined by

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Carter in his 1987 book The Road to Botany Bay, which has come into international usage as “a broad umbrella term for scholarship that examines human experience of social and physical space” with a particular focus “on the exercise of power over territory” (Knowles 2008, 4). For Carter, spatial histories reveal and explore “the lacuna left by imperial history” (Carter 2010b, xxiii). They attend to “what modern maps leave out […] the movement history, the heritage of passages, and all their hazards, that went into its production” (Carter 2009, 27). It is this movement history, captured in the written materials of exploration, colonisation, and travel, that Carter reads to put the “dark writing” (Carter 2009) of spatial history back in.

Spatial histories are, thus, primarily concerned with language, with the ways places and societies are brought into being via discourse. They analyse “the letters home, the explorers’ journals, the unfinished maps—[the] written traces which, but for their spatial occasion, would not have come into being” (Carter 2010b, xxi). Such documents capture the “active nature of the explorer’s space and time” (ibid., 4), the material “engagement with the road and the horizon” (ibid., xxii) through which spatial history is made.

Of particular importance are names, because spatial histories begin “not in a particular year, nor in a particular place, but in the act of naming. For by the act of place-naming, space is transformed symbolically into place, that is, a space with a history” (ibid., xxiv; emphasis in original). To name something is to create difference between one kind of space and another. Even designating a land form as mountain or hill serves to bring “space into the realm of communication” (ibid., 50); to create “a succession of conceivable places that [can] be read” (ibid.). Analysing the place names bestowed, or imposed, by James Cook, Carter argues that Cook’s names make

“otherness […] readily accessible” (ibid., 31), and that for Cook, “knowing and

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naming were identical” (ibid., 8-9). To name a place was to make it knowable, to enter it into the register of conceivable places. Place names need not reflect the actual space they refer to; in naming, what matters is “that the name describe[s] a conceptual place: whether it describe[s] a physical object [is] unimportant” (ibid.,

51). Through naming, then, early European explorers and travellers in Australia

“invented places, rather than found them” (ibid.). These acts of invention were, also, acts of destruction and possession.

In applying European place names and ways of knowing to Australian sites, colonial explorers and cartographers “not only projected their Western values onto the landscape but also excluded and devalued the naming systems of the original inhabitants, in effect writing off native knowledge” (Alderman 2010, 2190). In

Carter’s theory, native knowledges are not just written off, they are written over.

Australian placenames are simultaneously sites of creation and sites of erasure; they overwrite other, older names and symbolise “the imperial project of permanent possession through dispossession” (Carter 2010b, xxiv). In reinscribing places with new names, colonial authorities invented and took possession of a discursively

“new” territory—a terra nullius.

Derek K. Alderman states that naming “represents a means of claiming or taking ownership of places, both materially and symbolically” (2010, 2190). People name places “to create a sense of order and familiarity, frequently choosing names that reflect and reinforce the importance of their point of view” (ibid.). Names are a critical component of “the development of a sense of place” (ibid.).

Of key interest to the thesis is the way in which the label “hinterland” attached to certain regions, in colloquial, tourism, and administrative discourses, cause them to take on certain characteristics in the cultural imagination. The term

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itself, with its connotations of imperial possession, marginalisation and Othering, low culture, liminality, and the unknown must have, in Carter’s and Alderman’s estimation, a role in the creation of the character of the place. In At Devil’s Elbow, and many other Hinterland Gothic texts examined here, this character emerges as resolutely Gothic, and the thesis explores the ways in which the Gothic inheres in the term hinterland, and thus attaches itself to hinterland places.

Ground Truthing

In Ground Truthing (2010), Carter conducts a spatial history of the Mallee region of

South Australia and Victoria as a means of capturing its character (Carter 2010a, 1).

His method, ground truthing, is based on a process involved in aerial imaging, often used by logging companies and the military, which involves fact-checking images taken from the air by actual exploration on the ground—investigating oddities, verifying appearances, and clarifying obscurities in the images (ibid., 7). Carter’s ground truthing involves a similar close examination of the ground, in both literal and figurative senses. Ground truthing combines physical exploration with literary excavation. Carter asks, “how do we understand anything when we do not know the nature of the ground we stand on?” (ibid., 11). Coming to know “the nature of the ground” relies on the maxim that “Places are made after their stories” (ibid., 3). To understand the ground, you must first understand its stories. The maxim, however, has a caveat: “places are made after their stories but the stories are broken or incomplete” (ibid., 134). It is in the broken and incomplete stories that the true nature of the ground can be found:

A creative region is not the sum of its interesting products—including the

stories that the regional tourism authorities retail as safely finished—it is the

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shadowy supplement of stories, including place names, that resist

explanation. These speak of unconscious impulses, contradictory histories

and dream landscapes in which the ‘as if’ of fiction comes closer to what

happened than any account that keeps to the ‘facts’ (ibid., 134).

Ground truthing, thus, involves uncovering these broken and incomplete stories. For Carter, this means “following in the footsteps of poets and artists” (ibid.,

9) and reading the landscapes that inspired their work, as well as finding the

Indigenous stories traced over and whited out by Europeans. Ground truthing entails looking beyond the mundane elements of a region to find its essence, located in stories and traces:

Beneath the rational surface of roads, nodal towns—and their corollary,

statistical information about the climate, the annual yields, the cyclical

fluctuations in the narrative of regional development—is an underlay of

unedited anecdote, a fine capillary system of interconnected words, places,

memories and sensations. These are a portal to the underworld of the Mallee,

to its dark writing where the region’s creative powers can be plotted … (ibid.,

3).

Ground truthing is as much an exercise in physical experience—literally following in the footsteps of writers and artists, charting the older pathways that underlie modern roads, immersing oneself in the place itself—as it is one of textual or even spatial analysis. This thesis undertakes a pursuit of the broken and incomplete stories of the Sunshine Coast hinterland, that shadowy supplement of

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dark writing that is not included in the authorised stories of dominant culture but which nonetheless makes up the character of the region, and which emerges, unexpectedly, through the language of the Gothic in At Devil’s Elbow, indelibly connected to the hinterland as space and landscape.

Reflective Practice

Through a combination of the theories and methods surveyed above, I have developed a concept of Australia’s east coast hinterlands as Gothic heterotopias in which metaphors drawn from the landscape are used to activate Gothic atmospheres of suspense and dread as a means of articulating or drawing attention to the silenced stories of place. This theory has informed the ongoing development of the creative work At Devil’s Elbow. A combination of creative and critical research also developed my understanding of the ethical dimensions of place-based storytelling.

If, as Paul Carter suggests, places are made after their stories, then writing a novel set in a real Australian place is, inevitably, an act of place-making. And place- making activities in an Australian context have an ethical imperative to both recognise the stories that have gone into making a place, and to handle them sensitively—without obliterating, without appropriating. Feminist geographer Gillian

Rose stresses the importance of “marking geographical knowledges as situated”

(1997, 305) through reflexive processes, and of recognising “that all knowledge is produced in specific circumstances and that those circumstances shape it in some way” (ibid.). Reflective practitioners, in both cultural geography and practice-led research, must recognise their own positions of privilege and partiality, and avoid making claims for the “universal applicability” (ibid., 307) of their findings.

Through reflective practice, qualitative researchers engage in “continuous examination and explanation of how they have influenced a research project”

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(Dowling 2008, 748). Throughout the research process I have reflected on the ethics of place-making in storytelling, taking into account the implications of my own position as a university-educated, white, heterosexual woman. I have also considered the ethics using the Gothic—which has a fraught history of rendering marginalised

Others monstrous and silent—as a means to articulate, or gesture towards, to silenced voices and stories of place.

As well as these ethical considerations, in Chapter 7: Reflective Practice I reflect on the writing process itself. The creative and critical parts of this research have formed a dynamic and recursive process (Gray and Malins 2004, 57) involving both retrospective and in-the-moment reflection. The creative work has encountered many stumbling blocks and problems, in particular to do with ethical considerations, narrative voice, structure, and point of view, which have necessitated constant recalibrations and new approaches, partially informed by creative experimentation and partially by generic understandings of the Gothic built through research and textual analysis.

In the process of crafting At Devil’s Elbow, I have produced dozens of my own broken and incomplete stories of place, as Carter would put it, contributing another layer to the fine capillary system of interconnected words underlying the authorised surface of the Sunshine Coast hinterland, a shadowy underworld even to the authorised version that appears in the finished novel. Although these drafts may not appear in the final version, their influence remains in later iterations and in the exegesis itself, where the ideas they explore, reject, reformulate, and rewrite have directed and responded to the course of the research.

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Conclusion to Research Design

The process of practice-led research is often described in terms of bricolage, a

“hybrid practice” (Stewart 2010, 128) that brings together a variety of methods and interpretative paradigms “which best suit the task at hand” (ibid.), even inventing or assembling “new tools as necessary” (ibid., 127). Through a bricolage of theories and methods outlined above, this thesis seeks answers to the research questions articulated in Chapter 1.

In the next chapter, I conduct a spatial history of the Blackall Range in

Queensland’s Sunshine Coast hinterland, the setting for At Devil’s Elbow. Analysing the hinterland as a Gothic heterotopia, I draw out some of the ways in which the hinterland has been and can be used as an alternative space in Australian culture, where marginalised voices and stories can be privileged and explored. This investigation also brings to light some of the regional features and landscape icons that are further analysed in Chapter 5 and considered in relation to At Devil’s Elbow in Chapter 7.

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Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the Blackall Range, QLD

Glasshouse Mountains

I approach the Blackall Range from the south, almost always. The old highway, a narrow, bumpy course of bitumen carved through eucalypt and pine forest, follows the train line from Caboolture to Beerburrum where it joins the smooth stretch of

Steve Irwin Way, renamed in 2006 for the late local zookeeper and conservationist

(Rands 2009). This is the Glasshouse Mountains region of the Sunshine Coast hinterland, a low, flat landscape scattered across with a dozen or so weirdly-shaped mountains, formed of volcanic plugs. The mountains’ collective name was given by

James Cook who, seeing them from the deck of HMS Endeavour in 1770, was reminded of the glass furnaces of his native Yorkshire (Cooke 2012, para. 1), but their older, individual names remain in use as well—Beerwah, Ngungun, Coonowrin,

Tibberoowuccum, Coochin, Tibrogargan. Though not large, as far as mountains go— they are often described as hills—the Glasshouse Mountains can be seen from kilometres away, distinctive landmarks of the region. Driving north from Brisbane, you see them squat along the horizon, scarcely seeming to get any closer as you approach, yet shifting subtly, one mass coming to overlap another, then, as the road turns, again standing apart.

Writers including David Malouf, Emily Hemans Bulcock, Emily Coungeau, and Nettie Palmer have remarked on the weird, looming presence of these peaks, and on their uncanny appearance of mobility, perceived from the sea as well as from land. Nettie Palmer saw the mountains as a kind of ancient, natural cipher, investing them with mystery and myth:

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They are as haunting as the Pyramids and Sphinx of Egypt, but vaster, and

not made by man. When seen from Caloundra they are more symmetrical

than from other angles, and they seem to write themselves along the skyline

in some significant sentence (Palmer 1926a, 19).

Twentieth-century explorer Thomas Welsby used the mountains for navigation and wrote of their shifting aspect:

The windings of Pumice Stone Passage place the mountains in every

changing position […]. Beerwah almost always comes foremost, now hiding

Coonowrim [sic] under its heavy silent shelter, again letting it stand by its

side as though in guardianship (Welsby quoted in Blair 2007, 179).

In their appearance of mobility, the mountains share some of the uncanny qualities of the hinterland. Although it is the viewer who moves, the perception is of the mountains shifting, just as the location of the hinterland shifts depending on the location of its centre. The hinterland is the land behind something else, designated in relation to an external subject position. Like the mountains, the hinterland recedes as the subject advances, remaining always beyond what is visible, what is known.

In his poem “Glasshouse Mountains”, David Malouf also describes the mountains’ deceptive sense of movement, seen from the Redcliffe Peninsular:

Seen always across

a bay called Deception

[…]

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On clear days

they stand far off, move close

under cover of rain.

At night safe in our beds

we dream of them: brows

of giants frown up

from the bay’s depths […].

So close, so close! […]

Like lodestones

they draw us.

[…]

O giants unkilled who walk

tonight the moonlit water

-lanes of my sleep.

[…]

(Malouf 1979).

As well as capturing the sense of elusiveness and the appearance of movement of these massive landforms, Malouf’s poem points to the mountains’ eerie, mythical qualities. They are “giants unkilled”, haunting children’s dreams, drawing them like “lodestones”. They appear close but remain unreachable, fragments of a boyhood dream. The mountains function almost like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—something that always shifts, that can never be attained, a

Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the Blackall Range, QLD 99

fantastic, imaginary space that is, nevertheless, rooted in concrete reality. In other words, the mountains occupy heterotopic space. Seen from afar, from the road or the sea, the Glasshouse Mountains appear fantastical, unreal, but unlike the “placeless place” (Foucault 1986, 24) of the utopia, they are “actually localizable” (Foucault

2008, 17).

As you drive along Steve Irwin Way you can glimpse, out the passenger-side windows, Tibrogargan, the most distinctive of the Glasshouse Mountains, squatting amid an ocean of pineapple plantations and strawberry fields. From this angle the mountain strikingly resembles a man (Figure 2), crouched and looking out across the land to the coast, one of the “unkilled giants” of Malouf’s poem. As the road wends around, Tibrogargan’s face comes into sharper relief, then, just past the moment when the mountain seems the most unmistakeably human—a titan turned to stone— you see that his face is in fact a ruin of pockmarks and caverns in weathered rock

(Figure 3).

Figure 2. Tibrogargan from Matthew Flinders rest area, Steve Irwin Way (2015).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, in local legend Tibrogargan was once a man. This legend is part of a handful about the mountains and other regional landmarks that

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circulate in colloquial discourse and are based on, or purport to be, Aboriginal myths.

The Glasshouse Mountains legend is perhaps the best known. It circulates in local discourse and I learned it from my father, who also grew up in the area. The legend figures the mountains as a family—Tibrogargan the father and Beerwah the mother—and the story centres on filial disobedience and patriarchal discipline. This legend was collected, along with others, in Alf Wood’s Tales of the Sunshine Coast

(1982)8, and adaptations are included on dozens of community websites9. However, some Aboriginal groups dispute the authenticity of such local legends and disapprove of their telling, as they prefer not to speak publicly about the spiritual significance of the mountains and other sacred sites (Gubbi Gubbi 2017a; Williams 2017).

Government and official tourism materials increasingly respect this silence and do not discuss the mountains beyond acknowledging that they are central to the region’s creation myths (Australian Government 2010, 32; Sunshine Coast Regional

Council 2009, 6; Queensland Government Department of National Parks, Sport and

Racing 2016). Nonetheless, stories about the mountains remain well known in the region. This made the decision of whether or not to include the Glasshouse

Mountains legend or other local myths in At Devil’s Elbow a difficult one, as discussed in further detail in Chapter 7: Reflective Practice. The mountains are visible from the Blackall Range, presenting the region’s most distinctive panorama.

Whether genuine or not, stories about them have become part of the local cultural

8 Wood was a schoolteacher from the Hunter Valley in New South Wales who retired to Buderim in the Sunshine Coast hinterland in 1972 (AustLit 2008). The Aboriginal legends in his collection are presented alongside local anecdotes and histories, and seem to be sourced from local hearsay. It is difficult to ascertain their veracity. 9 The Glasshouse Mountains legend is featured on websites for community groups (http://www.glasshousemountains.net.au/legend.htm; http://www.glasshouse- mountains.com/glasshouse-aboriginal-legend.html), real estate agencies (http://www.glasshousecountryestate.com.au/news/glass-house-mountains-aboriginal-legend), recreation (http://www.coolrunning.com.au/ultra/glasshouse/glassh3.shtml), wedding venues (http://www.tranquilpark.com.au/social-hub-hinterland/the-legend-of-the-glasshouse-mountains/), and motels (http://www.beerwahmotel.com.au/glasshouse-mountains.html).

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imagination, and for many non-Indigenous Australians their authenticity and whether or not they belong in the public domain are not in question. Looking at the mountains, one thinks of the legends.

Figure 3. Tibrogargan from Steve Irwin Way, past Nursery Road (2015).

Knowing the stories of a place, whether they are true or not, gives people a feeling of belonging. Such stories enable non-Indigenous Australians to identify sacred places, to invest the landscape with history and significance. Problems arise when those ways of belonging erase and overwrite others’ claims to place. The

Glasshouse Mountains thus come to occupy uncanny space in the non-Indigenous cultural imagination, in the sense of the postcolonial uncanny articulated by Gelder and Jacobs (1998). Non-Indigenous Australians both have a right to these old stories of place, in the sense that everyone has a right to belong to and tell stories about their home places; and have no right to these old stories of place, as descendants of the colonisers who sought to erase them through violence, dispossession, and denial.

European colonial-era stories of ghosts and spirits inhabiting the Glasshouse

Mountains and curses visited on unwary visitors both drew on reported Aboriginal beliefs and brought those beliefs into familiar, Gothic frames of understanding.

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Pioneer Andrew Petrie’s later blindness was attributed in local lore variously to his ascension of Beerwah and his taking of bunya samples, both prohibited acts in

Aboriginal custom (Petrie 1904, 252; Wood 1982, 14–15). Although European storytellers ascribe the belief in a curse to Aboriginal people, their retellings of such stories nonetheless function as a means to trace the tales of Europeans into local histories.

Tales such as these establish the Glasshouse Mountains as prohibited, heterotopic space in the non-Indigenous Australian cultural imagination, “privileged, sacred, or forbidden” (Foucault 2008, 18). Heterotopias, like Turner’s liminal space, can be used to contain individuals in states of crisis or transition. Like Gibson’s badlands, heterotopias can be used as sites where deviance is excluded and contained. In the case of the Glasshouse Mountains legends, the (presumed)

Indigenous sacred can be known, and instrumentalised for white belonging, but it is also safely contained and can be ignored. Indigenous prohibitions on climbing the mountains, for example, do not deter avid weekend warriors from ascending.

As Tibrogargan recedes into the distance, the strawberry and pineapple fields spill away to the horizon. Beyond Tibrogargan, Mt Ngungun rises on the left;

Australia Zoo slides past on the right. It is difficult not to recall that it was in a macadamia plantation somewhere near here that the skeletal remains of abducted schoolboy Daniel Morcombe were found in 2011, washed free from their hiding place by the floods that devastated the state. It is this case that Inga Simpson reinvokes her 2014 novel Nest, discussed in Chapter 2: Literature Review. In

2014, too, a “leafy suburban area” (Mackander 2014, para. 2) of residential

Glasshouse Mountains was the site of a grim murder-suicide, described by the police

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as a surprise, and “something out of the ordinary” for such a “nice neighbourhood”

(Acting Detective Inspector Darren Edwards quoted in Mackander 2014, para. 20).

The juxtaposition of the hinterland’s bright surface and dark underbelly is frequently recognised, often with a kind of Gothic glee, in news reports of violent crime. One website catalogues crimes in the area, stating on its homepage: “The perception is that the Sunshine Coast is home to a community of happy, friendly, normal people, living relaxed beach-side and hinterland lives. No one ever expected crimes like these to happen here” (StoryMapJS 2017). The sunny face of the hinterland, the very name Sunshine Coast, seems to suggest that dark deeds cannot occur here. But this region, like so many others in Australia, has a long history of violence, against people and against the land. This violence is evident perhaps not so much in visible scarring as it is in absence, in what is not seen.

Past Australia Zoo, a left-hand turn over the railway line brings you onto

Maleny Street, running through quaint Landsborough, a small town featuring false- front buildings and early twentieth-century Queenslander cottages. On the other side of town, the road begins to ascend the Blackall Range, named in 1874 for Sir Samuel

Blackall, Queensland’s second governor (SCRC 2016a). Like so many Australian sites, the landscape of the Blackall Range is lastingly marked by the names, actions, and material residue of colonisation.

The Blackall Range

Ninety years ago, writer Vance Palmer walked the same route I drive today. His short series of articles, “Tramping the Blackall Range”, was chronicled in The Daily

Mail in 1926. When I discovered his account, some time after beginning to write my own version of tramping the range, I was astonished at the similarities of his observations and course of travel to my own. But, of course, it is not so surprising

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that we travelled the same way. The twists and turns of the roads through the range give an illusion of freedom, of wilfully getting yourself lost and driving off the map.

But in reality, there are only a handful of ways up and down the range. Like me,

Palmer started at Landsborough, following the Landsborough-Maleny Road.

In 1926, when Palmer walks it, this road is new. It would have been gravel then; it wasn’t surfaced with bitumen until 1927 (SCRC 2015), but Palmer observes that “the work has been well done, and generations to come will reap the benefit of it” (Palmer 1926b, 9)—as I am today. Just as I am reminded of the traces of Palmer’s road, the road he walks reminds him of an older one “made by bullock-drivers”

(Palmer 1926b, 9). He can see, still, its traces scored into the land, “water-washed marks” (Palmer 1926b, 9). Perhaps I could see them too, if I knew how to look. Very likely, those old bullock tracks themselves overlaid older, Indigenous pathways. As

Carter puts it, Europeans moving through newly colonised Australia “intermittently sailed in the grooves of older Aboriginal ways. At other times (and largely) they progressed unaware of them” (2010a, 40). In his 1984 book Aboriginal Pathways in

Southeast Queensland and the Richmond River, J. G. Steele traced such Indigenous pathways through this region, showing that often later explorers’ and pioneers’ paths followed their traces. Older ways of moving through the landscape perpetually underscore and determine our own routes.

Above us, Bald Knob rises to the left, a hill forming a shape like a headland jutting out into a calm sea. In 2017, the transmission tower at its point, a maze of metal scaffolding, looks like a skeletal lighthouse (Figure 4). There is no tower in

Palmer’s view, but he nevertheless also gives the place a grim aspect, describing “the rounded skull of Bald Knob rear[ing] itself against the sky, treeless and bare”

(Palmer 1926b, 9). This is the first, but not the last, instance of Palmer’s gothicising

Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the Blackall Range, QLD 105

of the range. It is also, as in the case of Tibrogargan, another example of the impulse to see human shapes in the hinterland landscape; to link landforms with bodies and sometimes—as in the Tamborine poetry of Judith Wright discussed in Chapter 2— with physiological processes such as death and decay.

Figure 4. Bald Knob and transmission tower, from Mountain View Road (2015).

As the road climbs and turns spectacular views open out into the valleys that

Bald Knob overlooks. The hills rise and fall in swells like green waves. I am reminded of Foucault’s third principle of heterotopias, that they have “the power to juxtapose in a single real place several spaces, several emplacements that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault 2008, 19). The Blackall Range, although inland, maintains its connection with the sea. Standing on a balcony at Montville, Palmer draws these connections too:

At night, when the darkness comes over the sea, the balcony feels like the

deck of a ship. […] One imagines he hears the roll of the sea, and feels the

heave of a deck beneath his feet; yet the night air is heavy with the late bloom

of the surrounding oranges (1926c, 13).

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In the Blackall Range, ocean and land exist not just side by side but intertwined; the hinterland is permeated with a sense of the sea, always just over there, on the horizon. Other contrasts and entanglements abound, too. Cultivated, colonised pastures rub elbows with stands of wild, thick rainforest. In town, a succession of architectural styles cluster together, each suggesting a different time period, a different false face to Australia’s European history. As Palmer exclaims,

“the whole plateau at the top contains hardly more than 25,000 acres, yet what infinite variety that fertile piece of territory holds!” (1926b, 9).

Past Bald Knob, Maleny Mountains Wine estate appears on the left. The winery is constructed to look like a massive half-barrel of wine, sunk into the earth.

Beyond the tourist information centre in the carpark, the vines climb the sloping yard in serried strands that look not unlike the barbed wire fences separating vineyard from roadside (Figure 5). Vineyards, dairies, and small farms flourish on the range.

Its climate, though subtropical, is always a few degrees cooler than the coastal plains and its rainfall more regular.

Past the winery, the road forks. The left turn onto Mountain View Road leads to the Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve, which marks the pivot point for the three mountain ranges of the region—the Blackall, D’Aguilar, and Conondale ranges. The rainforest reserve includes part of the first allotment of land given to a settler in the

Parish of Maleny; 790 acres were allocated to timber-getter Isaac Burgess in 1878

(MCSR 2012a, para. 1). Over the years, the allotment was subdivided into small farms, and in 1941 three sisters, Elizabeth, Mabel, and Mary Thynne donated their one hundred acre inheritance to the local shire council, “with the aim of preserving the rainforest in perpetuity, and honoring [sic] their mother Mary Thynne (nee

Cairncross)” (ibid., para. 3).

Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the Blackall Range, QLD 107

Figure 5. View from Maleny Mountain Wines (2015).

This act speaks to a history of women’s participation in land ownership, colonisation, and preservation in the hinterland. Men’s names and choices of names may often mark roads, towns, parks, and the range itself, but women’s lives have left their traces here, too. One sign is located, incongruously, at the Maleny State Primary

School on Bunya Street. Here, two headstones butt up against the school fence; the graves they mark are beneath the school’s carpark, once tennis courts. The headstones identify Jane Dunlop (1827–1886) and Margaret Fletcher Hankinson

(died 1886), as well as “beloved uncle” Francis Dunlop (died 1941). Jane and

Margaret are identified on a plaque as “two pioneer ladies [who] were neighbours and close friends. They are buried side by side on the original Dunlop selection”, and

Jane Dunlop is further credited as “the first white womam [sic] to reside here”, having arrived on the range in 1876 (Queensland Family Trees 2017). In At Devil’s

Elbow the graves are described not just for the Gothic aspect of a cemetery on school grounds, but also because, for Debbie, these historical markers bring to mind the traces of other, silenced histories—the people who lived on the range before Jane

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Dunlop, before the trees were cleared for homesteads, tennis courts, and parking lots.

In Debbie’s absence, Callie recalls those stories, too (ADE Chapter Eighteen).

Palmer also highlights the participation of women in the colonisation and clearing of the ranges, reporting that “a society of Maleny women […] have given the men the lead in directing strangers to the beauty of the district. They have planned to put up sign-boards and rest-houses and to clear tracks to some of the waterfalls. Already the work has begun” (Palmer 1926b, 9). Nettie Palmer is pleased, too, to imagine the range and nearby coast becoming a holiday mecca, stating that the area’s “rare qualities ought to make it known to most of Queensland and to

Queensland’s visitors” (Palmer 1926a, 19), and her article, published in the Brisbane

Courier, and Vance’s series, published in the Daily Mail, contribute to the process of promotion, alteration, and commodification of the region for tourism purposes.

This is work that the Mary Cairncross Reserve participates in, even as it preserves. The rainforest reserve here is home to myriad species of native flora and fauna. The sounds of bell birds, whip birds, and cicadas are almost constant. Venture into the dark, narrow paths of the rainforest and you’ll see butterflies, hear the rustle of undergrowth, and perhaps spot a fleeing scrub turkey or a potoroo. Immense figs spread their buttressed roots right into the path and vines drape down from the treetops. Signs spaced along the path give the scientific and colloquial names of trees, as well as scientific and historical information. Boardwalks lift you above the leaf litter and benches offer respite from the walk. At the edges of the rainforest, invasive weeds like lantana, blackberry, and passionfruit vine encroach. In the depths of the reserve, however, you find almost exclusively native plants—ferns, black apple, bleeding heart, blue quandong, lilly pilly, native ginger. Red cedar, prized by

Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the Blackall Range, QLD 109

nineteenth-century timber-getters, remains here, and thickets of roseleaf raspberry reach out for the path.

Outside the close, humid depths of the rainforest, the newly constructed

Discovery Centre, finished in 2017, houses a café, gift shop, amenities, and research offices (SCRC 2016b). The lookout across the road offers a sudden, panoramic view south and east across the Glasshouse Mountains (Figure 6). From here, the mountains resemble surreal Gothic castles rising from the lowland haze—

“haunting”, as Nettie Palmer put it (1926a, 19). Her sister-in-law Emily Hemans

Bulcock (Vance Palmer’s sister, a schoolteacher at Razorback, now Montville) perceived them in a similar way, describing in her poetry the “weird Glasshouses”

(Bulcock 1924, 23–24: “Caloundra”), like “giant guardians” (Bulcock 1944, unpaginated: “Curramundi-Caloundra”).

Figure 6. Glasshouse Mountains from Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve (2015).

In the acrostic poem “The Glasshouse Mountains, Queensland”, Bribie Island poet Emily Coungeau also employs decidedly Gothic metaphors, describing the mountains as “watch towers of the plain”, “mighty Monoliths” that stand as emblems

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of impermanence and decay. They are “moribund”, “solemn”, “sphinx-like”,

“Standing in weird mysterious solitude”, “Lovely in death” (Coungeau 1920, 31).

Coungeau’s poem relates the mountains to an archaic, primeval past of creative forces, “Ere mortals’ drama on life’s stage begun” (ibid.), but she doesn’t acknowledge the first mortals to look upon them—the Aboriginal people who, by the

1920s, had been largely driven out of the region.

Vance Palmer, likewise, refers to the range as an “empty space” (1926b, 9), distinct from the “older countries” (ibid.) of Europe. Looking out over the rolling green paddocks of the range, Palmer reflects that the history of this country scarcely goes back “50 years” (ibid.), yet in that time so much of the land has been cleared, fenced, planted, and husbanded for raising animals that “It looks as if these paddocks had been occupied for centuries by the ancestors of the very Jersey cattle that are browsing in them now” (ibid.). However, when Palmer encounters his “first patch of real scrub” (ibid.), he betrays an uneasy awareness of the real antiquity of the range, describing it in distinctly Gothic terms. The passage is worth quoting at length:

Gazing into it in the full glare of afternoon seems like peering into the very

heart of darkness. From a narrow aisle in the centre comes a breath of cold,

permeated with [words obscured in original] of falling bean-pods and the

faint twittering of birds! A stone’s throw away from the road one might be in

the depths of a Brazilian forest, so complete is the separation from the world.

The shadows are so deep that they fall on the eyes like a curtain, and the

thick, glossy leaves overhead shut out the sky. All around are lawyer-vines,

forming traceries, and giant nettles rise menacingly from the wet earth, while

beautiful parasites hang from the straight trunks of the trees—staghorns,

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elkhorns, hare-lip fern, orchids of all sizes and descriptions. Some trees are

furred all the way up with fine ferns, soft as hair. It is like being in a beautiful

garden planned ages ago.

A little further along the road one can see just such another patch of

scrub from outside. It runs down the slope of a grassy hill, and up the further

ascent—a thick stripe of black upon the vivid green. “Black scrub,” the local

people call it, and there is something almost hostile in the adjective. Yet what

magic there is in the depth of tone it gives to the hillside and valley! It seems

to hold the elaborate darkness of an old engraving. There is a touch of the

medieval and Gothic about it, and the air around it is heavy with the folklore

and legends of an older world. It makes the fugitive farmhouse, perched in

the sunlight of a neighbouring rise, look thin, fragile, and insufficient. Even

the fresh, liquid note of the whipbird that comes from it, echoing up the

valley, has a depth that does not quite belong to the bright, cleared hillsides

(ibid.).

Palmer invokes a latent knowledge of the forest’s antiquity, a secret history that rises up in the language of the Gothic. The hinterland scrub reveals a “heart of darkness”, a region of veiled Gothic obscurity. This secret, closed space is only a

“stone’s throw away from the road” yet the sense of “separation from the world” is

“complete”. There is a sense of menace and hostility emanating from and directed towards this “Black scrub”; whether this results from the forest’s actual darkness, or the memories of the tribes who used to live there is left unclear. This scrub gives a sense too of the ineffable, of magic, of Gothic antiquity, that evokes a sense of “an older world”—the same kind of European magic that Blair (2007) perceives in the

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literature of Mt Tamborine. Palmer senses that something “does not quite belong”, and ascribes it to the rainforest and its creatures, out of place among “the bright, cleared hillsides”. However, by the same stroke he reveals that it is, in fact, the hillsides and the farmhouse that are out of place. The Gothic sensibility evoked by the rainforest renders the everyday, colonised world of farm and field “fugitive”, pointing to its illegitimacy. This Gothic contrast serves to highlight the dark and light aspects of forest and field and the ambiguous, intertwined relationship between them.

It is in that contrast, in the dark spaces that unsettle the light, that the absences that help create the region are most strongly felt.

Indigenous Population

The Sunshine Coast and its hinterland fall within the territory of the Gubbi Gubbi and Waka Waka language groups (Horton 1996), which include the Gubbi Gubbi,

Kabi Kabi, Jinibara, Dalungbara, and Western Waka Waka people (South East

Queensland Traditional Owners Land and Sea Management Alliance 2008, 62). In

2012, an area including the Glasshouse Mountains National Park and the Blackall,

D’Aguilar, and Conondale ranges was recognised under the Native Title Act as the traditional land of the Jinibara people, the first native title determination in South

East Queensland. The presiding judge acknowledged that the Blackall Range area

“had been subject to rapid European settlement in which local Indigenous people were initially retained as station workers and later moved out of the area to designated Aboriginal settlements” (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres

Strait Islander Studies 2014, 1).

Indigenous people from this area were forcibly moved to missions as far north as Yarrabah, near Cairns, and south-west to Deebing Creek, near Ipswich, as well as off-shore to Palm Island (MCSR 2012b, para. 3). Tribes living near stations

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and homesteads were sometimes deliberately poisoned by farmers and settlers who left out flour laced with arsenic, as at the Kilcoy station owned by Evan McKenzie in

1842, where sixty Giggabarah people died (Bottoms 2013, 21, 80), a crime now infamous in the region. Some station owners, according to an 1841 report, even paid their workers in poisoned flour when they no longer had need of them (ibid.).

Bottoms suggests that such poisonings were especially common in Queensland compared to southern states, possibly due to white settlers’ anxiety about their small numbers compared to the large number of Aboriginal tribes in the area (ibid.).

As well as settler violence, Indigenous groups were targeted by Native police.

Groups travelling to and from the bunya festivals in the Blackall Range and Bunya

Mountains were particularly at risk (Evans 2002, 52). In April and June of 1861, infamous Native Police Lieutenant Frederick Wheeler patrolled into the Sunshine

Coast hinterland, and “‘dispersed’ the ‘bunya bunya’ natives (presumably the Nalbo and Dallabarra of the Nambour-Maleny-Kenilworth region)” (Ray Kerkhove quoted in Evans 2002, 53). At Cressbrook, to the south west of the Blackall Range, Wheeler met “a grand force of Obi Obi (Maleny-Mapleton), Brisbane and Caboolture warriors” (ibid.), killing many and later “boast[ing] that he had driven most of the inhabitants either out to the Moreton Bay islands, down into New South Wales, across the Divide or into northern rainforests” (ibid.).

The legacy of violence and removals remains evident in present day numbers of Indigenous people resident in the area. Whereas in 2011, the Australian Bureau of

Statistics estimated that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people made up 3% of the total Australian population (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011), Indigenous residents make up under 1.5% of the population of the Sunshine Coast and

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hinterland, comprising approximately 4000 of a population of nearly 290, 000 people

(SCRC 2011).

Not only underrepresented in the population, Indigenous people and histories are also elided by local historical and tourism discourse. For example, despite the

Native Title ruling, one Montville tourism website still claims “It is not apparent that any Aboriginal tribes lived on the Blackall Range, but certainly members of the Kabi tribe gathered every two or three years on the banks of the Obi Obi Creek at Baroon

Pocket to feast on the fruit of the Bunya Pine” (Montville Guide 2017). This regional version of the terra nullius myth works to quietly efface questions of land ownership, presenting the range as simply an occasional meeting place, no one’s home until

Europeans moved in. The bunya festivals become a convenient symbol to, on the one hand, assert the spiritual and historical significance of the region and, on the other, to deny the importance of the range to Indigenous people by enforcing myths of transience and nomadism.

Bunya

Held on the Blackall Range and the Bunya Mountains further inland, where the bunya pine is endemic (Haebich 2003, 47), the bunya festivals were probably largest gatherings of Indigenous tribes in Australia (Kerkhove 2012, “Preface”). Although most accounts refer to the bunya festivals as triennial, held when the pines (Figure 7) produced a bountiful crop of nuts every three years, historian Raymond Evans states that smaller groups of around 700 or 800 also gathered in “intermediate years, when bunya harvests were not so spectacular” (Evans 2002, 53). When Tom Petrie, son of

Brisbane pioneer Andrew Petrie, attended a bunya festival around 1845, the gathering numbered between six and seven hundred (Petrie 1904, 16); however, major festivals saw up to six thousand people attending across the two locations and

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staying for weeks or months. Groups travelled from distances of up to five hundred kilometres to meet, share news and stories, resolve disputes, and feast on the bunya nuts (Evans 2002, 53). These nuts were an important source of nutrition, referred to by Indigenous people as mother’s milk (Bunya Mountains Elders Council and

Burnett Mary Regional Group 2010, 16). The festival itself “was known as

Boobarran Ngummin—‘our Mother’s breast’” (Bottoms 2013, 21) and had spiritual value. According to Jarowair man, Djerripiwalli, people attending would go home

“completely healed and full of spirituality from our Mother” (quoted in Bottoms

2013, 21).

Figure 7. Bunya pines off Curramore Road (2015).

The history and significance of the bunya pine and festivals are complex, for

Indigenous people certainly, but also in the way non-Indigenous Australians have perceived, reacted to, and appropriated them for economic and cultural purposes.

Despite the history of European resistance to and destruction of the bunya festivals, reference to the bunya is one of the only forms of acknowledgement made by many

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historical and community resources to Indigenous history in the area. Bunya iconography is common on the Blackall Range.

Evans suggests that the bunya plays a pivotal role in the story of resistance and conquest across southern Queensland:

The history of the bunya gatherings at both the Blackall Ranges and the

Bunya Mountains is not insulated from [the] profound chronology of conflict;

rather the histories of ‘festivity’ and mayhem are tightly imbricated, with the

bunya regions themselves forming central nodes of struggle (2002, 52).

The high cultural and spiritual importance of the bunya trees and festivals meant that

Indigenous defence of these regions against European encroachment was particularly fierce (Kerkhove in Evans 2002, 56). One element to do with bunya trees stands out as having particular significance. Constance Campbell Petrie’s Tom Petrie’s

Reminiscences of Early Queensland (1904) records that trees were owned by individuals and passed down through the generations:

Each blackfellow belonging to the district had two or three trees which he

considered his own property, and no one else was allowed to climb these

trees and gather the cones, though all the guests would be invited to share

equally in the eating of the nuts. The trees were handed down from father to

son, as it were, and every one, of course, knew who were the owners (Petrie

1904, 16).

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The Blackall Range Aboriginals’ ownership of individual bunya trees, the status of these trees as inherited property, unsettles the colonial fiction “of Aboriginal people as nomadic, as not bound to property, as ‘naturally’ dispossessed” (Gelder and Jacobs 1998, 57). Ownership of the bunya trees and the spiritual and cultural significance of the region points to something that the European colonising mentality does not want to admit: that Indigenous ownership of the land was not “tenuous and undeserved” (Curthoys 1999, 14) but definite and even subject to systems of inheritance recognisable to European law.

Colonial authorities at first respected the importance of the bunya to

Indigenous people, and their prohibitions against cutting down or damaging the trees in any way (Petrie 1904, 15; Evans 2002, 57; Haebich 2003, 49). In 1842, New

South Wales Governor Gipps declared the Blackall Range a reserve and forbade settler occupation or timber cutting, in hopes it might in future become a missionary site (Evans 2002, 54). However, when Queensland separated from New South Wales in 1859 the proclamation was rescinded, and the region opened to timber-getters early in the next decade (ibid., 55). Although initially seeking cedar, hoop pine, ash, and yellowwood, and even managing truces with Indigenous people to leave the bunya alone (ibid.), timber-getters soon saw the value in bunya wood. Bunya trees were logged from both the Blackall Range and Bunya Mountains, although the devastation was far worse in the Blackall Range, where access to the sea made transportation easier (ibid., 58).

By the end of the nineteenth-century there was a marked absence of the once plentiful bunya trees. Along with settler and Native Police violence, and the displacement of Aboriginal people to reserves, the decimation of the trees contributed to the “inexorable decline” (ibid., 53) of the festivals, and by the early

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1880s the Blackall Range festivals “had all but petered out” (ibid., 54). One hundred years later, in 1988, Baroon Pocket Dam was built at the festival site (Figure 8), and

“the traditional gathering place of the coastal and sub-coastal Aboriginal communities of South-East Queensland and Northern New South Wales, was subsumed beneath the waters” (ibid., 58).

Figure 8. Baroon Pocket before dam construction (Lake Baroon Catchment Care Group 2013).

In 1926, sixty years before its construction, plans for a dam here are already in circulation. Palmer notes that “it is said that with a moderate expenditure of money

[the creek] could be dammed to form a large reservoir” (1926c, 13). Walking across the now-vanished site, Palmer remarks that this “astonishing […] little belt of

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country” (ibid.) “might almost be another world” (ibid.) from Maleny, a “different country altogether” (ibid.). The forest is dense, the creek “is cold as if fed by melting snows” (ibid.; Figure 9). Palmer piles on descriptions that accentuate the range as a place apart, a place unlike other Australian regions, an otherworld. He makes no mention of its historical significance as a site for the bunya festivals. Forty years on from their end, perhaps the violence is still too close to the surface to be acknowledged.

Figure 9. Obi Obi Creek (2013).

Evans points out that historical European accounts of the bunya festivals tend towards the idyllic, reporting the festivals with an “aura of ‘romantic reminiscence’, conveniently unsullied by surrounding patterns of colonialism, racism and violence”

(Evans 2002, 47). Appearing at a time when the bunya festivals were already in decline, the accounts could afford to indulge in “European nostalgia and myth

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making”, constructing “wistful tales of the lost, ‘mystical’ bunya gatherings”; and although evincing sympathy towards Aboriginal people, they usually “concealed more about the actual process of deprivation and loss than they disclosed” (ibid., 60).

The same process of appropriation, repurposing, and silencing surrounds the symbol of the bunya in non-Indigenous discourse today.

Positioned in dominant discourse as both ancient and ephemeral, the bunya festivals and the space they occupy are heterotopic. Foucault links heterotopias to

“slices of time” (2008, 20). There are two types of “heterochronies” (Foucault 1986,

26), “the heterotopia of festivity” and the heterotopia of “the eternity of accumulating time” (Foucault 2008, 20). In a festival heterotopia such as a fairground, time exists

“in its most futile, most transitory, most precarious aspect” (ibid.). In contrast, in the heterotopia of “indefinitely accumulating time” (Foucault 1986, 26), such as the museum or library, “time never ceases to pile up” (Foucault 2008, 20). These are places where all time periods can coexist, and which yet remain themselves “outside of time, and inaccessible to its ravages” (ibid.).

The idea of the bunya festivals as it is presented in non-Indigenous discourse collapses over 65, 000 years of Aboriginal history (Clarkson et al. 2017) into the ephemeral site of the festival, which persists in idealised form outside time. This is a third form of heterochrony in which Foucault acknowledges that both the festival heterotopia and the heterotopia of accumulating time can “come together” (ibid.), and Foucault links it explicitly to tourism, using as his example Polynesian vacation villages where visitors can experience a few weeks of “primitive” (ibid.) lifestyles, so that the villages are both like museums and like festivals. In 2007, the bunya festivals were revived on the Blackall Range by Kabi Kabi woman Beverly Hand.

Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are welcome at the events, which include

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storytelling, ceremonial dancing, cooking, art, and games (Brown 2014). Through the festivals, Hand aims to show the community that the bunya has significance beyond that of a regional symbol or an icon used in company logos (Hand 2017).

In an article on the relationship between the Gothic and the “false consciousness” (Miles 2004, 197) of nationalism, Robert Miles writes of the tendency of settler nations to appropriate aspects of colonised cultures to further nationalist causes. Drawing on the theory of Ernest Gellner, Miles argues:

The general aim of nationalist ideology is to create a myth of unitary national

origin, whereby the present ‘congruent’ polity is understood to be the

manifestation of an ancient culture. Nothing must contradict this narrative,

including, or, indeed, especially, evidence of past diversity, heterogeneity,

and conflict (ibid.).

As part of this project of historical revisioning, nationalist forces erase and overwrite narratives of violence, and appropriate images of colonised cultures “as the material of its nationalist self-image” (ibid.). In this way, “First World countries [display] as their badge of national identity images of the native culture their creation largely obliterated (totem poles in Canada, boomerangs in Australia)” (ibid.). Non- indigenous deployment of the symbol of the bunya can be seen to operate within this mode of myth-making, drawing lines of continuity between the pre-colonial hinterland as a gathering place and the post-colonial hinterland as a vibrant community and a tourist destination, but eliding the violence and displacement that occurred in between.

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Maleny

Leaving the rainforest reserve behind, a right hand turn will bring you onto

McCarthy Road, where you’ll drive past Maleny Dairies on the left and the historical society on the right, and come onto Bunya Street. The high school and primary school attended by Callie and Zeke in At Devil’s Elbow are on this road, and nearer to town is the Maleny Hotel, with its Bistro Bunya. The hotel sits just above the juncture of Bunya Street and Maple Street, the main road through town, the street names performing a symbolic joining of the native and the European.

Where Bunya Street gives way to Maple Street, the town of Maleny begins in earnest. Local historians believe Maleny was named either after a surveyor named

Maloney, or for a Scottish town near Edinburgh named Malleny (SCRC 2016c).

Likewise, nearby Mapleton, originally named Luton Vale (possibly after a town in

Bedfordshire, England), was renamed in 1894 after the suggestion of a settler who had read about “a pretty little place on top of a hill named Mapleton in England” (W.

J. Smith quoted in SCRC 2016c). Today, the towns still have a sense of the English about them, in their quaint town buildings and cottage gardens, the rolling green fields at their outskirts and the maple trees planted along the streets.

When Palmer walked here in 1926, however, Maleny and its surrounds were not so picturesque. He regretted the “sheer devastation in the old policy of clearing all the timber from the tops of the ranges” (Palmer 1926b, 9). The timber-getters did their job too well, leaving the entire town denuded of trees, threatened by erosion, and with no respite from the sun or wind. Maleny was left glaringly bright and hot, and choked with red rust. Palmer laments that “A township standing on the site of ancient cedars, pine, and crow’s ash, has hardly a tree in its main streets” (Palmer

1926b, 9).

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Today, the roads and parks are fringed with shady trees. Although there are plenty of boutiques, bookshops, and galleries designed to attract visitors, Maleny is the least tourist-oriented of the range’s villages. It is, instead, the place residents and regular visitors come to eat breakfast at the cafés, shop at the co-op, visit the post office, or work in the community garden. In 2004 and 2005, Maleny made national headlines, becoming “a poster town for small communities fighting to exclude huge corporations” (Stafford 2005, para. 2) when its residents opposed the construction of a Woolworths grocery store in town, arguing that it would damage an important platypus breeding habitat in nearby Obi Obi Creek. The protest eventually failed, however it cemented Maleny’s reputation as a tight-knit, environmentally conscious community populated by “lentil-loving hippies” (ibid., para. 7).

The famous Woodford Folk Festival has its roots in Maleny, and environmental concerns are often at the fore in regards to this hinterland region. In

2009, the Queensland government released plans for “nature-based tourism”

(Jacques 2009, para. 2) in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, promoting the area’s walking trails, lookouts, and other environmentally-friendly activities. In 2014, federal MP Mal Brough declared the importance of keeping the “green space”

(Atkinson 2014, para. 4) of the Glasshouse Mountains region and the Blackall Range between the urban areas of Brisbane and Noosa, a policy that is routinely confirmed by new governments.

Like other Australian hinterlands—notably the northern New South Wales hinterland around Byron Bay—the Sunshine Coast hinterland is associated with alternative lifestyles; with hippies and permaculture communities, and unconventional political and economic views. In the heterotopia of the hinterland,

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these deviant elements can flourish, safely contained away from the central areas of coastal cities.

Witta

Maple Street wends through Maleny and out to Witta, a tiny suburb that it is possible to drive through without even noticing. When it was first settled in the 1880s by

German farmers, Witta was called Teutoberg (SCRC 2009, 68). Anti-German sentiment during World War II led to the town’s name being changed. During the war, Italian prisoners of wars were brought to work on farms in the area (Newton

2005), and in the forestry service alongside German internees (Powell 1998, 121), a piece of local history that seems little-known today.

My parents lived in Witta in their hippie days before I was born—my older sister was born in one of the weatherboard houses that cluster along the suburb’s narrow bitumen roads—and it is home to the James family of At Devil’s Elbow, too.

With its cottage gardens, tree-lined roads, and views out over rolling farmland, Witta appears to be a sleepy rural paradise. But it was near here that Michele Irsigler chose to dispose of her husband’s body in 2001. In 2012, a jury found that she had shot

Johnathon Watkins in self-defence after he’d held her hostage for three days. Irsigler and her boyfriend bundled the body into the boot of her car and drove to a friend’s property in Witta, where they burned the corpse on a bonfire and then bulldozed the ashes (Keim 2012). No traces of Johnathon Watkins’s remains were ever discovered, and although Irsigler was tried for his murder, Watkins is still included among the state’s missing persons, his photograph displayed on the national missing persons website (Commonwealth of Australia 2016). Watkins is not the only one to have met a bad end in these hills. In 2006, a murder-suicide at an agistment farm on the

Maleny-Kenilworth Road left three dead and two teenagers orphaned (Sydney

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Morning Herald 2014). A police spokesman expressed surprise at such a tragedy occurring in what “would appear to be a lovely area, [with] lovely homes” (Inspector

Mark Henderson quoted in Hinterland Grapevine 2006).

The Maleny-Kenilworth road, as it runs out of Witta and begins to descend the range, is the location of Devil’s Elbow Lane (Figure 10), where in At Devil’s

Elbow Debbie James’s body decomposes in a thicket of lantana. The placement of this road, its sheer edges, steep hillsides, tumbles of rock and tangles of lantana, was well as its sinister name, made it an ideal site for story.

Figure 10. Devil’s Elbow Lane, Maleny-Kenilworth Road (2015).

Conondale

At the bottom of the range, the Maleny-Kenilworth road cuts through suddenly different landscape. The trees that cloak the slopes of the mountainside thin out and fall away. A narrow fringe of forest remains along the roadside for a time, then that too peters out. In the gently sloping fields that stretch out to either side of the road,

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the grass is no longer the bright green that for Palmer “seems almost garish to

Southern eyes” (1926b, 9). Depending on the season it is bleached khaki, brown, or yellow, cropped short. Barbed wire fences mark property lines, but few livestock are visible in the roadside fields. Here and there, a house on stilts rises above the plain.

In the yards, car bodies rust away in great heaps.

Ahead rise the contours of the Conondale Range, rich with rainforest and creeks. It was from this region that two women and a teenaged girl disappeared in the late 1990s. British backpacker Celena Bridge disappeared in July 1998 from

Booloumba Creek Road, which turns off the Maleny-Kenilworth Road just past

Conondale. She was hiking from Crystal Waters Permaculture Farm at the foot of the

Blackall Range to Conondale National Park campgrounds when she vanished. One year later, in May 1999 a local woman, Sabrina Ann Glassop, also disappeared from her home on Booloumba Creek Road when she took her dog out for a walk. Her car was later located at the nearby Little Yabba Creek car park, but both she and her dog had disappeared (Hill 2007; Kyriacou 2014).

I heard about this woman’s disappearance on the radio during a family camping trip when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. Sitting in the back of our old yellow Kombi, following the narrow winding roads cut through the rainforest on our way to the campgrounds, my sister and I scanned the undergrowth for a glimpse of a limp white hand, a scrap of clothing snagged on a branch. We treated it not as a real event, but as something out of a thrilling camp-fire tale. We didn’t even know her name. Instead, Sabrina Ann Glassop’s disappearance merely added an edge of excitement to our holiday; made the rainforest of the campgrounds—already strange and spooky at night, full of the rustlings of possums and goannas—seem that much more dangerous.

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Years later, I learned that Sabrina was a teacher’s aide, and preferred to be called Ann. In 2014, her son said in a newspaper interview, “One of the things that upsets me so much is how she is now remembered as this person who went missing

[…]. She’s not just someone who went missing” (Kyriacou 2014, para. 34–5). In At

Devil’s Elbow, Callie feels something similar when she thinks of the photographs on missing persons posters, among which her own mother is now included, reduced to once face in a row of square photographs (ADE Chapter Fifteen).

In August 1999, just months after Sabrina Ann Glassop disappeared, teenager

Jessica Gaudie went missing after babysitting at a Nambour home. The estranged father of the children she had been watching, Derek Sam, claimed to have dropped her off at a Nambour intersection. He was later convicted of her murder and handed a life sentence, although he has never confessed or revealed the location of her body.

Sam has also been linked to the disappearances of Bridge and Glassop, but police were unable to bring their cases against him. Police believe that the bodies of Bridge,

Glassop, and Gaudie are buried somewhere in the forests of Conondale or

Kenilworth. The state-wide search for Daniel Morcombe from 2007 diverted police attention away from finding the missing women, but in 2012, following the successful conviction of Brett Peter Cowan for Morcombe’s murder, police reopened the older cases, conducting extensive searches of the area.

Local speculation about the disappearances remains rife. Mine shafts in the forests might hide the women’s bodies, but they are too dangerous to be searched and there are calls for them to be filled in (Hill 2007). Stories circulate about a shallow grave in the forest near Derek Sam’s workplace (Brown 2009); about Sam behaving

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strangely out near an old shack in the forest known locally as “Spike’s Hut10” (Hill

2007); and about men lying in wait for female drivers on Booloumba Creek Road and tricking them into stopping their cars (Roberts 1999). Nearly ten years after the third disappearance, locals still feared the kidnapper was at work when a local woman disappeared overnight after becoming lost on a horse ride (Fawkes 2008).

For some local children the “Yabba Grabber”, named for Little Yabba Creek where

Glassop’s car was found, became a bogeyman figure, linked with both the possibility of a serial killer and yowie folklore. At the time of writing, the women’s bodies have not been recovered, and the police investigation remains ongoing.

Debbie’s disappearance in At Devil’s Elbow draws obliquely—and at first unintentionally—from this history and the Yabba Grabber mythology. Staging a fictional disappearance in a place with a recent history of unsolved disappearances means treading carefully, respecting the fact that this is very much a living history that continues to impact the missing women’s families and community. This process is discussed further in Chapter 7.

Return

In the valley between the two mountains I turn, putting the Conondale Range and its secrets behind me, and look back up at the Blackall Range. From this perspective, it is easy to imagine it as a kind of natural Gothic castle. In its labyrinthine corridors— roads cut deeply into the mountainside—it is easy to become lost. Where lantana thickets cluster along the roadsides and tree canopies shut out the sky, the roads become tunnels. It is pointless to try to find a shortcut back up the range from the valley floor. The promising roads veering off in the right direction are deceptive;

10 In a massive bushfire in 2016, Spike’s Hut was reduced to charred tin panels and ash (Easton 2016).

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private properties close their gates across those narrow, winding ways. That area of the hinterland is inaccessible to the casual visitor.

This interplay of open and closed spaces is another mark of the heterotopia, which are simultaneously closed and penetrable (Foucault 2008, 21). Heterotopias may appear accessible, yet their apparently “pure and simple openings […] conceal curious exclusions” (ibid.). Any welcoming aspect is “only an illusion: one believes to have entered and, by the very fact of entering, one is excluded” (ibid.). The example Foucault draws on is a kind of guest room found in South American homesteads, where according to custom any traveller has a right to rest. However,

“The door for accessing did not lead into the central space where the family lived”

(ibid.); visitors did not have real access, only the illusion of it. The guest in these houses “was absolutely a passing visitor, he was not really an invited guest” (ibid.).

Likewise, the cafés, shops, and villages of the range appear open and inviting to tourists, but in any locality there will be secret places known only to those who live there. Hinterland roads lead into apparently secret and secluded byways, to lookouts designed with the tourist experience in mind. Hotels and bed and breakfasts invite the traveller to stay—if they can afford it. But everywhere there are fences and boundaries and signs warning the traveller against trespass. The multitude of winding roads on the map form a labyrinth of dead ends. Getting anywhere here requires doubling back, circling around, driving off the edges of the map and into dead ends.

From Conondale at the bottom of the range, there is only one way back; up past

Devil’s Elbow again.

I follow the Maleny-Kenilworth Road back up the range and through Maleny towards the cheerful tourist village of Montville, taking the Maleny-Landsborough

Road back towards that first fork. On my left, the turnoff to Gardner’s Falls opens

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suddenly, a narrow land between fields. At the end of the land is a stretch of Obi Obi

Creek that boasts a series of waterfalls and swimming holes where the water is always cold and clear. Past the falls, I take the left-hand turn onto the Maleny-

Montville Road. The popular wedding venue House of Laurels (my brother was married here) appears on the right. On the left is the art gallery—once called the Tree

Frog Gallery, now named Lift. Some of my mother’s artworks, mandala paintings, hang here, and it is somewhere very like this that Callie’s mother works—though this is a case of life imitating art, rather than the other way around. Debbie James’s pieces were displayed at the fictional Bunya Gallery long before my mother’s paintings were hung in Lift.

Montville

Just before Montville is Mill Hill Road, the oldest of the range’s residential streets.

The novelist Eleanor Dark’s house still stands here, and like the fictional Lantana

Lane, Mill Hill Road is a narrow, dead-end road. No highway deviation has been built through it, as Dark’s characters fear in Lantana Lane, and there is little in the way of lantana clustering around its edges; it is well-kept, genteel. However, the culture of small farming that Dark described in 1959 persists. Along the road are small fruit orchards belonging to the bungalows, and across the range roadside stalls sell cheap, locally grown limes, avocadoes, lychees, bananas, honey and macadamia nuts.

Dark’s house, number 41, is a cream-coloured Queenslander with dark brown trim and a round portal window at the front. It was built in 1926, the same year

Palmer walked the range (Gilmore 2009). Its extensive garden, once a macadamia orchard, now combines a variety of native and English garden plants. Boardwalks cut through dense rainforest, opening onto lawns shaded by Poinciana and frangipani

Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the Blackall Range, QLD 131

trees, and garden beds filled with hippeastrums and day lilies. The rear deck looks out over the valley and Baroon Pocket Dam, where Indigenous people once gathered for bunya feasts, but despite this, there is no Indigenous presence in Lantana Lane; it is not even hinted at.

Back on the main road, a five minute drive brings me into Montville. This is the most tourist-oriented of the range’s villages. The main street is lined with old- fashioned lamp posts and stone-paved sidewalks. Cafés, art galleries, lolly shops, antique stores, and boutiques climb in tiers up the sloping street, their goods spilling invitingly out of doorways. Arcades lined with shopfronts open into hidden courtyards. On the eastern side, the back windows of shops and café balconies look out over the stunning views to the coast. Parking is always at a premium.

Figure 11. Montville Clock Shop (2015).

Architectural styles clash in Montville. It is not so much a replica English or alpine village as it is a microcosm of Europe as a whole. Like the vanished site of the bunya festivals, Montville is a heterochrony in which “all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes [exist] outside of time” (Foucault 2008, 20). Entering town, immediately to the left, nestled among rainforest gardens, is the German Clock Shop

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(Figure 11) with its slate roof and gables, specialising in traditional German grandfather and cuckoo clocks from the Black Forest. Further on is Connemara

Cottage (Figure 12), built to resemble a seventeenth-century Irish croft, selling

Scottish, Irish, and Welsh heritage gifts, such as teaspoons, mouse pads, and coffee mugs printed with family crests. The stone-built Montrose building at the heart of the town, constructed to resemble a mill, features a water-wheel on its façade, though it is far from any streams (Figure 13).

Figure 12. Connemara Cottage, Montville (2015).

Off the main street is the old school building where Emily Hemans Bulcock used to teach, Razorback House, built in 1896 (Puregger 1979), and the old School of

Arts building, now village hall, built in 1903. This little cluster of buildings at the top of the hill comprises the few genuinely historical buildings in the town. The hall’s

World War One memorial is considered unusual as it lists not only the names of local men who served in the war, but those whose applications weren’t accepted

(University of Queensland 2014, para. 6). An avenue of six fig trees forms a living

Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the Blackall Range, QLD 133

memorial for the six local men who died in the war. Montville is, indeed, a town steeped in history, but it is a selective kind of history, and at times a misleading one.

Figure 13. Montrose water wheel, Montville (2015).

Despite the town’s quaint appearance, the sort of “falsified antiquity” (Hogle

2012, 498) on display in Montville renders it particularly amenable to Gothic production. Jerrold Hogle notes the Gothic genre has always been “grounded in fakery” (ibid., 496). It draws its inspiration from Gothic revival architecture, rather than from exclusively medieval sources, such as the “quite openly faked […] antiqued Gothicism” (ibid.) of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill mansion, which inspired him to write The Castle of Otranto (Botting 2012, 18). Fakery, forgery, counterfeiting, replication, and deceptive appearances are at the heart of the Gothic.

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Wills are faked, wax mummies mistaken for corpses, whispers for ghosts. Doubles proliferate. Further levels of fakery are created by unreliable narrators, as in Emily

Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and authorial subterfuge, such as Walpole’s claims that Otranto was a translation of an authentic sixteenth century Italian manuscript.

Hogle links Gothic “counterfeiting of the already counterfeit” (2012, 498) to processes of abjection through which individuals and societies cast out that which disrupts fixed and stable definitions of the self. Gothic’s “counterfeit archaism[s]”

(ibid., 499) become convenient emptied out repositories for the abjected material, and become themselves “the ultimate causes of terror and horror” (ibid.). Gothic “re- faking of fakery” (ibid., 500) animates both nostalgia for and revulsion towards the counterfeit original; it uncannily “feels the draw of what the past counterfeit seems to promise and yet rejects many of the cultural conditions or beliefs that once offered that promise” (ibid., 506).

Similarly conflicting tensions can be read in Montville’s architectural counterfeiting. In activating an entire range of possible pasts to represent a simulacrum of a unified, sanitised, idealised, highly falsified, generic European past,

Montville’s buildings collude in the elision of the region’s Indigenous history.

Megan Cassidy-Welch, in her essay for Stephanie Trigg’s Medievalism and the

Gothic in Australian Culture (2006), remarks on a similar situation in regards to a

Cistercian abbey established in Victoria’s Upper Yarra Valley, another hinterland region. The rustic, hilly landscape is home to wineries, vineyards, and quaint towns and was settled by white colonists in 1837 (Cassidy-Welch 2006, 190), although the abbey wasn’t established until 1954 (ibid.). Nonetheless, the abbey building affects a

“late Victorian” (ibid., 191) style which suggests a lengthy European settlement.

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Cassidy-Welch finds that European histories of the Tarrawarra area “fail to address the reality of nineteenth-century colonizing or ‘settlement’ practices” (ibid.,

200), which as well as violent invasion also included complicity in the practice of forcibly removing Indigenous children from their parents. In 1863, the region was home to Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, one of the places to which children of the

Stolen Generation were sent (ibid., 201). The present day abbey also fails to acknowledge Indigenous history of the area—it is simply “absent from the abbey’s representation of its relationship with the land it occupies” (ibid., 201). Instead, the monks engage with the medieval past of their order, and with a sanitised version of the colonial past in which “it is the land itself that provides the means by which ideologies are expressed” (ibid., 203). Cassidy-Welch remarks that “[t]he region’s indigenous inhabitants appear only as marginal, vague figures, who shared with the monastery some spiritual interest in the landscape, but whose subsequent disappearance from view goes unremarked” (ibid., 203). She wonders about the extent to which medievalism, in this instance, works “to obscure difficult histories”

(ibid., 204).

In Montville, it is not medievalism but rather a mismatch of histories, an architectural excess, that works to both obscure and highlight the Indigenous history of the area. The “mix of architectural styles” (Murphy et. al. 2011, 72) along the main street—German clock shop, Irish croft, Tudor pub—suggests a confusion of possible pasts. An Indigenous past is not among them, but it is evident, nonetheless, in the stands of rainforest that overhang the eaves of the German clock shop, in the great Moreton Bay figs (Figure 14) in the memorial avenue and the fields outside town, whose massive trunks bespeak centuries of growth. Their buttressed roots and the labyrinthine tracery of their branches are, like the “significant sentence” (Palmer

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1926a, 19) of the Glasshouse Mountains, a type of architecture or language that belongs to and is of the land, serving as a reminder of past inhabitants and ways of life. The artificial excess of Montville’s buildings both collude in the elision of

Australia’s Indigenous history, and serve to highlight what is not there, what is silenced.

Figure 14. Moreton Bay fig and bunya pine, Oehmichin Road (2015).

Already, when Vance Palmer visits in 1926, Montville demonstrates some of this artifice. It has “a touch of the fashionable pleasure resort” (Palmer 1926c, 13) that will come to characterise it more strongly over the coming years, although it resists a complete transformation into a tourist theme park:

These ranges are a veritable playground for people on holiday, and on the

slopes there are waterfalls, fern-gullies, and delightful camping grounds, but

the casual visitor must find them out for himself. No one wants the Blackalls

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to be disfigured by unsightly sign-boards; indeed part of their charm lies in

their being genuinely agricultural, and not merely a show-place for tourists

(ibid.).

Ironically, the “genuinely agricultural” charm Palmer admires is itself a construction, a replica of England. For Palmer, Montville “looks settled, prosperous, content […] sure if itself and its future” (ibid.). The appearance of long and stable settlement that he reads as authenticity—an absence of native scrub, “prim and orderly” (ibid.) orange orchards, neatly divided lots of land, an “air of affluence about the spreading houses” (ibid.), grass that “looks as if it had just been cut with a lawnmower” (ibid.)—are all artificial overlays, all constructions. In Gothic fashion, too, these landscapes mimic the “natural” countryside of England—itself shaped by millennia of human activity. Today, even that false sense of Montville’s authenticity is fading, so that the town, according to a recent survey, is at risk of becoming

“increasingly like a theme park, a place where locals go to work but one in which few actually reside” (Murphy et al. 2011, 191).

The theme park, of course, is one of Foucault’s examples of the heterochrony

(Foucault 2008, 20). However, Montville can be read as heterotopic in another sense as well, in its function as a model village, to all appearances “settled, prosperous, content” (Palmer 1926c, 13). Heterotopias fulfil a social function, creating “a space of illusion that exposes all real space […] as even more illusory” (Foucault 2008,

21), a space of compensation, a real space constructed to be “as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is disorderly” (ibid.). Foucault considers that

“certain colonies” (ibid.) might have functioned in this way. The Puritan colonies of

America, for example, “were absolutely perfect other places” (ibid.); likewise the

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Jesuit colonies of South America were “marvellous, absolutely regulated colonies in which human perfection was effectively accomplished” (ibid., 21–22). Perfectly planned and regulated, these colonies appear as model villages. Montville presents a quaint, orderly façade of perfectly successful colonisation. It is a mirror space that

“not only delivers a sense of discontinuity through inversion and distancing, but also allows for a perfected reflection, an idealization of elements of the past and the establishment of a continuity with the present (Botting 2012, 15–16). Within this utopian mirror, however, there is room for “heterogeneous and conflicting reflection[s]” (ibid., 18).

It is not only Montville’s built environment but the landscape itself that reflects a picture of a little Europe, perfectly colonised. And Australia’s ongoing preference for an essentialised version of the Australian landscape as harsh, hostile, dry sets the Blackall Range as a heterotopic place apart. Palmer, walking down off the range at the end of his travels, reflects on the surprising, “un-Australian” aspect of the hinterland landscape:

There are even one or two wild granite patches, of the kind admitted to be

picturesque, where the creek runs through a secret gorge. Another creek

widens out through flat pastures, forming holes that yield watercress. Over

the whole wide green landscape there lies a kind of idyllic beauty, the beauty

of a place that seems to have been long ploughed and sown, and inhabited.

This kind of beauty is perhaps what we would call un-Australian, except that

we know it is just one of the surprises that Australian landscape can give us

(Palmer 1926d, 3).

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The lushness and idyll of the hinterland, its beauty, should not be a surprise.

It is not, as Palmer acknowledges, truly un-Australian. It only seems that way because we perceive another Australia, a mythic, monolithic Australia comprised of red outback and menacing bush.

Today, the hinterland is more familiar to most Australians than it was in

Palmer’s day, when tourism in the area was just beginning. The Blackall Range is only a short drive from Brisbane, and a shorter one from Caloundra and

Maroochydore on the coast. It has never been as accessible to visitors as it is today.

Tourism advertising means that the hinterland’s green fields, panoramic views, deep rainforests, and “historic” villages are visible in everyday discourse. These “un-

Australian” landscapes are becoming familiar, are becoming a part of what Australia and the Australian landscape means. They are entering, even, into literature and beginning to accrue their own set of regional symbols—lantana, rainforest, creek, road—that in novels like Lantana Lane and Nest, and in At Devil’s Elbow, take on a

Gothic quality. As I follow Palmer down off the range, I carry some of these symbols away with me, ready to turn them into Gothic counterfeits of my own.

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Chapter 5: A Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor

Introduction to A Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor

Across the body of Hinterland Gothic texts identified in this thesis a number of seemingly disparate symbols recur, including lantana, rain, barbed wire, mud, trees, cane toads, dogs, creeks, birds, horses, and roads. In this analysis, I borrow Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick’s thesis of a Gothic “constellation” (1980, 2) or “web of metaphor” (ibid., 7) to show that these symbols are in fact conceptually linked, both within individual texts and across the emerging genre of Hinterland Gothic.

Sedgwick argues that while Gothic conventions are not all “about one thing” (ibid.,

5), they are nonetheless connected to one another via sets of congruent pairs that

“‘mean’ or ‘are about’ the same thing, that […] encompass the same content” (ibid.

6). These linking sequences of pairs form a “set of connected metaphors that underlie

Gothic conventions” (ibid., 7) binding apparently discrete conventions together through a network of resonances.

I argue that, in Hinterland Gothic texts, the hinterland functions as a heterotopic counter-site, a Gothic space in which alternative voices and stories disturb the ordered and apparently benign surface of everyday Australian life. Each of these texts activates a regionally specific web of Gothic metaphor that draws its symbols from the hinterland landscape and generates uncanny effects as a means of drawing attention to the dark writing of place—the hidden histories and stories of

Australia’s female, Indigenous, and ecological Others.

The Gothic’s “capacity for managing the unspeakable” (Beville 2014, 52) is one of its defining features. Gothic modes give “voice to the terror, taboo, and transgression of the contemporaneous collective unconscious, speaking of those

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issues that we are often too fearful to broach and too repressed to acknowledge”

(ibid., 64). Gothic can work “as a way of remembering” (ibid., 66) unspeakable, inaccessible, or repressed pasts and traumas—including national ones. But as Teresa

A. Goddu points out, “while the gothic reveals what haunts the nation’s narratives, it can also work to coalesce those narratives. […] The gothic can strengthen as well as critique an idealized national identity” (2000, 270). These tensions between revealing and concealing, unsettling and solidifying, articulating and silencing, are evident in the Hinterland Gothic texts examined here, as well as in At Devil’s Elbow, as discussed further in Chapter 7: Reflective Practice. In particular, Hinterland Gothic texts by non-Indigenous authors often use the web of metaphor to align (white) women’s experiences of gendered violence with colonial depredations on the natural environment, but deal uneasily with Indigenous histories and questions of white women’s complicity in racial violence, with the result that these stories sometimes remain sidelined and silenced. The analysis conducted in this chapter aims to determine some strategies through which the Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor can more effectively be harnessed to draw attention to the silenced and repressed in At

Devil’s Elbow.

As Sedgwick notes, the labyrinthine nature of the Gothic web of metaphor makes it difficult to analyse in an orderly fashion, and analysis is further complicated by the fact that Gothic metaphors work partly through repetition (1980, 4–5). I would add that this repetition functions to accrue meaning to symbols in layers across the text, so that the full impact of a Gothic metaphor may not be registered in isolation, but only through a series of recurrences. As a result, the examples used in this analysis do not always convey the full range of meaning associated with them. An additional complication is that Gothic metaphors are multivalent, their signification

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shifting across the course of the text, often between positive and negative poles. For the purposes of critical analysis, this makes Gothic metaphor frustrating. From a creative writing viewpoint, however, the recognition of Gothic metaphors’ layered effects is a valuable one and a rich area for creative experimentation.

For the purposes of analysis, I have chosen some of the more illustrative instances of Hinterland Gothic metaphor that I have identified, and sorted them into six categories; however, there is considerable overlap between them. The categories are water; plants; trees; animals; earth; and the human-made. I analyse how metaphors within these categories are deployed in the Gothic mode across five key hinterland texts set in South East Queensland and northern New South Wales: Salt

Rain by Sarah Armstrong, Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko, Deeper Water by

Jesse Cole, Nest by Inga Simpson, and Lantana Lane by Eleanor Dark. With the exception of Lantana Lane, which is included here for its relevance to Sunshine

Coast hinterland literature and its use of lantana as a central symbol, all these novels follow the broad contours of the Female Gothic plot, as outlined by Claire Kahane:

Within an imprisoning structure, a protagonist, typically a young woman

whose mother has died, is compelled to seek out the center of a mystery,

while vague and usually sexual threats to her person from some powerful

male figure hover on the periphery of her consciousness. Following clues that

pull her onward and inward—bloodstains, mysterious sounds—she penetrates

the obscure recesses of a vast labyrinthean space and discovers a secret room

sealed off by its association with death. In this dark, secret center of the

Gothic structure, the boundaries of life and death themselves seem confused.

Who died? Has there been a murder? Or merely a disappearance? (1985, 334)

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In each of the novels the hinterland is the “imprisoning structure”, associated, like the Female Gothic castle, with the female maternal or sexual body. Maternal absence (figured through mothers’ deaths, disappearance, or neglect of their children) is a common concern and plot device in each of the novels. Threat—sexual, patriarchal, and colonial—comes from male figures, often fathers or lovers (or a conflation of the two). The mothers of Hinterland Gothic are not, however, simply the repressed or victimised subjects of male violence. Rather, they are often unconventional, unruly, and aberrant—artists, hippies, farmers, sex workers. As postfeminist, postcolonial Female Gothics, Hinterland Gothic novels unsettle and dispel myths about female freedom, equality, and enfranchisement in contemporary

Australia by showing women who continue to struggle against the ongoing legacies and realities of patriarchy and colonialism.

In Salt Rain fourteen-year-old Allie Curran is brought home to the family farm in the northern New South Wales hinterland by her estranged aunt, Julia. Allie’s mother, Mae, a free spirit who sunbathes nude on the roof and sometimes trades sex for favours, has disappeared while swimming in Sydney Harbour. She is later confirmed to have committed suicide by drowning. Allie searches through the Gothic space of the hinterland for the truth about her mother’s past and her own parentage.

She confronts masculine threat in the form of a quasi-incestuous sexual relationship with her mother’s childhood sweetheart, Saul, and also in the lingering patriarchal presence of Mae’s deceased father, whose violence is wrought on the land he farmed as well as on Mae’s body—Allie was conceived through an act of incestuous rape.

Salt Rain uses metaphors of liminality and mergence, or loss of identity, often played

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out through the landscape, to insistently gesture towards the secret of Allie’s parentage.

In Mullumbimby, Indigenous woman Jo Breen is a cemetery groundskeeper who uses her divorce settlement to purchase acreage in the Byron Bay hinterland, to live on and raise horses with her fourteen-year-old daughter, Ellen. Jo is both the absent Gothic mother, her history of mental illness troubling her relationship with

Ellen, and a questing Gothic daughter bereft of maternal figures who would connect her to Indigenous knowledge, belonging, and place. Jo’s search for maternal guidance plays out on the hinterland landscape, and it is through connections with land that she finds the maternal within herself. Although the landscape is inhabited by the Indigenous sacred, a source of sublime terror, Jo perceives threat as coming from institutions and legacies of patriarchy and colonialism, whose violence is wrought on a landscape invaded by non-native plants and divided by fences and boundaries. Whereas in Salt Rain the uncanny arises from metaphors of merging, in

Mullumbimby is it chiefly the arbitrary division and possession of the land that creates terror.

As Katrin Althans has noted, “Aboriginal cultural beliefs should not be mistaken for the Gothic” (2013, 139); the Indigenous sacred and Gothic supernatural should not be conflated. However, Althans traces a pattern of critical engagement and creative resistance in the work of Aboriginal writers in which Gothic conventions are appropriated and “invested with a diametrically opposed meaning in order to reclaim a powerful Aboriginal identity” (2010, 185). Often these writers— such as Kim Scott and Sam Watson—incorporate “genuinely Aboriginal cultural beliefs into the appropriated mode of the Gothic” (ibid.) and use these alongside strategies of reversal and linguistic ambiguity (such as refusing to translate

Chapter 5: A Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor 145

Aboriginal words) in order to “establish a cultural matrix entirely foreign to

European readers” (ibid.)—and, it should be added, to many non-Aboriginal

Australians as well. Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby, I argue, similarly appropriates

Gothic forms and entwines them with Aboriginal cultural beliefs and experience in a way that renders the Byron Bay hinterland uncanny for non-Indigenous readers.

Lucashenko stops short of actually conflating the Indigenous sacred and the Gothic supernatural, however. Characters’ encounters with the sacred do generate sublime and apparently supernatural effects, but in the end these encounters are revealed to be not supernatural but quotidian. The very mundanity of the events, however— lyrebirds revealed to have learned and continue to sing Aboriginal ancestral chants, for example—while it dispels the Gothic (in a gesture reminiscent of the Female

Gothic’s “explained supernatural”, discussed further in Chapter 7, animates and attests to the ongoing presence of the Indigenous sacred.

In Deeper Water, Mema’s sheltered life is disrupted when she rescues a stranger, Hamish, who has been washed off the bridge near her home in a flood.

Deeper Water’s northern New South Wales hinterland is a markedly female space, inhabited by Mema; her mother, Naomi, an overweight, reclusive artist known to grant sexual favours to local men in return for gifts of produce and property maintenance; Mema’s sister, Sophie, and her two young children; and Mema’s childhood friend, Anja, a Marilyn Monroe-obsessed “bombshell” (Cole 2014, 27).

Men are absent: Mema’s half-brothers and their various fathers have left, and

Sophie’s husband is the latest in a long line of abandoning men. Threat comes from the local townsmen who, along with their dogs, stalk the roads and fences around the farm, waiting for the women, and Mema’s bitch pup (which is on heat), to “slip up”

(ibid., 224). Mema’s search through the hinterland landscape is for understanding

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and acceptance of her female body and sexuality within the confines of an aggressively patriarchal society. Fear and pleasure are entwined, and are located equally in the female body and the natural world.

In Nest, wildlife artist Jen returns to her childhood home in the Sunshine

Coast hinterland. Years before, her father Peter, a timber-getter and sawmill worker, disappeared within days of a local boy going missing. Neither disappearance was ever solved, and Jen and her mother were burdened by the possibility of Peter’s involvement in the boy’s disappearance. Jen seeks to atone for both her neglect of her late mother, who was troubled with mental illness, and for her father’s sins, environmental and otherwise, by restoring the land he cleared back to its native state.

When another local child goes missing, the past and present suddenly align. Nest references the real-life disappearance of schoolboy Daniel Morcombe from the

Sunshine Coast hinterland in 2003, as well the discovery of his remains in the

Glasshouse Mountains region following the 2011 Queensland floods. The hinterland of Nest quite literally holds old secrets that erupt into the present, disturbing the appearance of sunny tranquillity.

Lantana Lane, also set in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, is a collection of linked vignettes based on Eleanor Dark’s experience of life on the Blackall Range in the 1950s. Narrated via an elusive collective voice, the story follows the lives of a handful of small farmers living on a lantana-choked lane, apprehensive about the coming of modernity and the government’s plans to build a highway through their dead-end road. Lantana signifies aberrance and disobedience—qualities positioned not as terrifying, but as admirable. Dark’s lantana can, nonetheless, be read for its

Gothic properties.

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Each of these novels employs a combination of the Hinterland Gothic metaphors identified by this thesis. Many of the same metaphors have also been present in At Devil’s Elbow since its earliest draft, and the analysis focuses on those that are most relevant to the development of the creative work.

Water

Perhaps unsurprisingly, references to creeks, flooding, and rain come to the fore in the three novels set in the Northern Rivers hinterland region of New South Wales:

Salt Rain, Deeper Water, and Mullumbimby. This region is well known (and named) for its multitude of rivers—including the Tweed, Brunswick, Clarence, and

Richmond Rivers—and heavy rainfalls frequently lead to flooding. Flood emerges, too, in the Sunshine Coast hinterland of Nest, in direct reference to the massive floods that devastated Queensland in 2011. Water renders the hinterland a closed, claustrophobic space, wound round and threaded through with creeks that flood roads without warning—trapping and cutting off, but also blurring and blending; water a permeable and fluid boundary that alternates between signifying safety and threat.

In At Devil’s Elbow, water appears most noticeably in the form of the creek between the James and Friedrickson properties, where the families meet and cross over, their “two homes sewn together by the seam of the creek” (ADE Chapter Two).

The creek is a permeable boundary, and a place associated with fun, menace, and sexual desire. For the James and Friedrickson families it is a place of meeting and play, but is also, for Callie, the haunt of the bogeyman- or bunyip-like Trapper and the site where she witnesses Petra’s sexual encounter with Ewan (ADE Chapter

Thirty). In the Hinterland Gothic texts analysed here, water also has a double valence, associated with terror and threat as well as comfort and pleasure.

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In Deeper Water, the floodwaters that wash Hamish’s car off the bridge are described as “unpredictable”, “raging”, “wild” (Cole 2014, 2). He is trapped in the hinterland until the waters recede, his presence catalysing Mema’s sexual awakening.

Not only a threat, water throughout the novel is increasingly associated with female sexual pleasure. In one instance, Mema, masturbating, thinks of “the water hole, and all the pockets and crevices of the creek bank […] the swell of the flooding creeks, the way the water rose to fill […] those secret hollows” (Cole 2014, 246). Pleasure and fear coalesce in Mema’s imagination, both associated with the symbol of water.

Likewise her own female, sexual body is a site of both pleasure and fear through its metaphoric alignment not just with water but with the earthen banks and hollows of the creek itself.

Flooding creeks in Salt Rain cut characters off from one another at key points, and force others together, driving plot developments. The rising floodwaters are liminal, excessive, encroaching on the boundaries of the house. The teenaged protagonist, Allie, watches a “great sheet of water creeping up the paddocks”

(Armstrong 2004, 177) towards the farmhouse. Her friend, Petal, remarks that the water “flows really fast underneath the surface […] I waded out into the last flood and it nearly took me away” (ibid., 178). The water has a menacing agency; it traps, it creeps, it takes away. It is unpredictable, deceptive, and destructive, ripping up

Allie’s aunt Julia’s newly planted saplings. But Allie also imagines herself curled up in the “warm, salty sea of her mother” (Armstrong 2004, 210), kept safe “while outside the rain fell and the flood waters massed” (ibid.). Rain is the medium that connects Mae’s body to Allie’s body, and to the hinterland itself:

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[Allie] lifted her face to the rain. This very drop may once have slid down

Mae’s cheek, the clouds trapped inside the valley walls year after year, the

same drops of rain falling back into the valley. It was salty on her tongue, like

tears, like blood, and for a moment she could taste her mother. Then there

was nothing but the ceaseless rain, running down her body, soaking the soil,

filling the creeks (ibid., 41-42).

Through the liminal figure of water, the boundaries between Allie’s body,

Mae’s body, and the hinterland landscape itself are eroded, so that all three are connected. There is a temporal element to this cycle, as well; past and present are indelibly linked through the valley’s rainfall. Rain also signifies the cycle of grief and healing. At the end of the novel, swimming helps soothe Allie’s grief; it

“leak[s]” (ibid., 217) from her into the creeks and washes away.

In Mullumbimby, a heavy storm and flooding causes the death of protagonist

Jo’s horse, Comet (a colt also symbolically linked with Jo’s daughter, Ellen, as discussed below). She finds him, a “dark lump, lying wetly half-in, half-out of the swollen creek at the base of the hill” (Lucashenko 2013, 117), tangled in barbed wire fencing and drowned in “swirling dirty water” (ibid.). The creek is transformed from

“babbling brook” into “a hostile, murderous brown snake of fatal water, twisting and writhing its way through her innocent green farm” (ibid., 117–118). But rain sometimes assumes a benign aspect, as well. Lying in bed with her boyfriend,

Twoboy, Jo watches the rain “cascad[ing]” (ibid., 73) over gutters to form a “silver curtain between the lovers and the rest of the world” (ibid.).

In Nest, protagonist Jen longs for rain to relieve the dry heat, but is apprehensive about its excess. She remembers, as a child, being “stuck indoors with

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the mould while it rained and rained for a month” (Simpson 2014b, 160). The rain is unstoppable, though. There is “no escaping it” (ibid.), and when it comes it wreaks havoc. Gutters and water tanks overflow, the power goes out, and the “worst [floods] in a hundred years” (ibid., 253) wash away entire towns and “advance on the city”

(ibid.). Simpson invokes two state-wide traumas in her narrative; the 2011 floods that swept through Queensland causing massive destruction and loss of life, and the 2003 disappearance of Sunshine Coast schoolboy Daniel Morcombe. Just as Morcombe’s remains were disturbed by the flood, both complicating and assisting in their discovery (Kyriacou 2012; Calligeros 2014), so too do Simpson’s floodwaters finally reveal the two missing children, allowing their families and the community to begin to heal.

It is water’s dual aspect that seems to activate its threatening possibilities in the Gothic mode. As rain, creek, and flood water is a liminal medium, functioning alternately as solid boundary and permeable threshold, a space of merging. It is unpredictable and unstoppable, excessive, associated with the unseen, what lies hidden beneath the surface, and with transgressive, often sexual, pleasure. Hinterland

Gothic authors invest water with its own unpredictable and often menacing agency, especially by using active verbs to describe its movement—creeping, raging, twisting, writhing. The same techniques can invest water with properties of pleasure, healing, and comfort; it swells, cascades, cleanses away. Metaphorical alignments between water and blood or sexual fluids blurs the boundaries between human and non-human. Through a complex web of signification human bodies—often female, desiring, maternal—are linked with hinterland creeks and rain. The repressed or taboo is, thus, both present and absent; spoken about, or around, even if it remains, strictly, unspeakable.

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The Indigenous is notably absent from the signification of water in the

Hinterland Gothic texts examined here, with the exception of Mullumbimby in which

Comet’s drowning may be linked through the association with Ellen with Indigenous deaths. However, Australian creeks and waterways have been (just as much as roads, discussed below) sites and channels of colonial violence and expansion. Many

Australian creeks bear grim names—Murdering Creek near Peregian Springs on the

Sunshine Coast, for example—or are indelibly associated with colonial violence— such as Myall Creek in New South Wales, site of an 1838 massacre (Bottoms 2013,

15). Waterholes were also sites of fierce contestation between traditional owners and colonial landholders (ibid., 18). Bottoms relates a piece of oral history about Blencoe

Falls in Northern Queensland told to him by Ernie Grant of the Jirrbal/Girramay people:

In the 1980s, Ernie’s brother Earl, his wife and her mother Nora, were driving

from Mt Garnet to the coast via Kirrima and pulled up at Blencoe Falls. Nora

told how she survived a plunge into the gorge as a young girl because she fell

on top of the bodies of Aboriginals who had been whipped and driven over

the cliff by a party of white-men. Ernie was quite young when he noticed that

Nora had a bad limp but he did not know why. Buck Bail, an elderly resident

of Fringford where Ernie grew up, also told him that two Aboriginal women,

one of whom was pregnant, were pushed over the falls to their death. The

man who pushed them over was responsible for the pregnancy. Buck said it

was common knowledge in the district (ibid., 143–144).

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Australia’s waterways are associated with many such histories of violence, stained into the cultural consciousness. The naming of the fictional Trapper’s Creek in At

Devil’s Elbow, and its associated bogeyman-like figure, the Trapper, intentionally invokes such histories of colonial violence through the sinister-sounding yet ambiguous name, as discussed further in Chapter 7. Water, already a complex and multivalent symbol in Hinterland Gothic, has the potential to be pressed further to help articulate or gesture towards silenced Indigenous histories and stories as well.

Weeds

In At Devil’s Elbow, Debbie’s body is finally found tangled in a lantana thicket on a hillside below a busy road. She has decomposed there, snared in and hidden by, but also shielded within, the surrounding lantana. For Callie the lantana thicket is a locus of horror that extends beyond the specific site of Debbie’s death. Lantana also chokes the James’ yard and the banks of the creek and surrounds the worker’s huts on the Friedricksons’ farm, bringing its associations with death and decay into familiar, domestic space.

Lantana is an imported ornamental shrub that grows naturally in Mexico and

South and Central America. It is classified as “one of the worst weeds in Australia because of its invasiveness, potential for spread, and economic and environmental impacts” (Cooperative Research Centre for Australian Weed Management 2003, 1).

Lantana is particularly rife in Australia’s hinterland regions, where it flowers and fruits almost all year. Its berries are poisonous to livestock, and it competes with and overruns other plants, even releasing chemicals into surrounding soil to prevent other plants’ germination (ibid., 2). A hardy plant, lantana can resprout (or resurrect) even when apparently dead. It is almost impossible to eradicate. Like the Gothic, lantana thrives on boundaries, flourishing along fence lines and at the edges of creeks. A

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contemporary weed guide characterises it in quite Gothic terms: “Lantana invades disturbed sites, especially open sunny areas such as roadsides, cultivated pastures and fencelines. From there it can invade the edges of forests” (ibid., 2).

According to Dawn Keetley, who enumerates six theses on plant horror in her introduction to the recent EcoGothic collection Plant Horror (2016), plants can

“easily become monsters […] because they are the absolute ‘other’” (Keetley 2016,

7; emphasis in original). Plants are uncanny because they are both deeply familiar,

“commonplace and yet, at the same time, ‘alien’ in their being and in their relation to us” (ibid.). In a postcolonial context, I argue, introduced species like lantana activate the uncanny because they are “out of place” (Gelder and Jacobs 1998, 24), while simultaneously thriving and appearing “at home” (Punter 2000a, 83). They act as symbols and reminders of colonisation. As Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin point out, “in the settler colonies it was the results of environmental imperialism that were often most immediately clear” (2009, 7; emphasis in original) and the effects are ongoing. Plants and animals imported from Europe “prospered in lands where their control predators were absent. The genuinely natural ways of indigenous ecosystems were irretrievably undone as ‘wild’ lands were cleared for farming or opened up to pastoralism” (ibid., 7–8). In Australia, and especially in east coast hinterlands, lantana stands as an enduring and highly visible symbol of these processes and their ongoing legacies.

In Hinterland Gothic, lantana is, thus, symbolically invested with a range of meanings arising from its status as non-human plant, as unwanted and poisonous weed, as foreign invader, and as product of colonisation. More than any other weed lantana is rendered uncanny because, despite its usurper status, it has established a firm enough foothold to be a familiar, ubiquitous icon of place. As Jen puts it in Nest,

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“[m]ore than any other plant, lantana ha[s] adapted to the subtropical environment.

Far better than any of the human inhabitants” (Simpson 2014b, 65). In both Nest and

Mullumbimby lantana and other weeds are designated “bad” because they are not native; they are “out of place” (Gelder and Jacobs 1998, 24), not “at home” (Punter

2000a, 83). The female protagonists of both novels seek to clear lantana from their hinterland properties, although for different reasons.

For Jen, restoring the land back to its natural state is a way of “mak[ing] amends” (Simpson 2014b, 21) for her father’s cutting of native trees. Peter used to joke that he and lantana arrived in the hinterland the same way, the lantana via council dumping of rubbish on roadsides, himself hitch-hiking along the highway

(ibid., 65–66); and, like Jen’s timber-getter father, lantana is linked to destructive human agency—Jen notes that “[i]t was humans who had let it loose” (ibid., 66).

Lantana is linked, too, with Jen’s guilt over her mother. She volunteers with a friend,

Lil, at a land care organisation, removing lantana, and listens to Lil worry about whether she should put her elderly mother in care. This reminds Jen of her own

“guilt when her […] mother reached that caring stage” (ibid., 125), and Jen used work as an “excuse” (ibid.) not to look after her. Like Jen’s feelings about her mother, lantana is hardy and apt to return. She pulls it out by the roots, “but it soon pop[s] up again, swirling into thickets, and creeping closer and closer to the house”

(ibid., 65), like the floodwaters in Salt Rain. Keetley notes that plants can cause dread because their “growth always breaks what seeks to contain it, transgressing borders meant to confine and define” (2016, 13). If “the dizzying growth of wild vegetal life terrifies” (ibid., 14), and a “multiplying mass always terrifies” (ibid.), then lantana is a truly terrifying plant.

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While Jen can recognise some positive qualities about lantana—that it provides cover for wallabies, and that butterflies and birds feed on the flowers and berries (Simpson 2014b, 65)—for Jo, lantana has no redeeming features. Brushed against, it sandpapers (Lucashenko 2013, 95) and scratches (ibid., 255) the skin. For

Jo, tending the land is not a means of atonement as it is for Jen, but of connection and responsibility. Jo does it so “the land knows somebody loves it” (ibid., 47; emphasis in original). She aims to eradicate all non-native species from her land, vowing that “only indigenous trees and plants would grow on her farm. She would wipe out the camphors on her twenty acres before she died, along with the fireweed, the crofton weed and the lantana” (ibid., 204–205).

Jo’s mission is bound up with anger—at the colonisers who killed her ancestors and stole their land, disconnecting later generations from culture and place, and at herself. Jo sees herself as abject, a “fucked up blackfella” (ibid., 50) who can’t prove who her family is or where she belongs. This results in an “immense self- loathing that told her constantly that whatever she had was never enough. That she was bad, and if anyone dared to love her, it was simply evidence that they, too, were deeply and irrevocably flawed” (ibid., 88). Jo takes out her anger and self-loathing on the weeds that infest the cemetery where she works, the last resting place of “one hundred and fifty years of dead white Mullumbimby” (ibid., 2), savagely yanking, massacring, flaying, murdering, assassinating grass and weeds, and by doing so,

“killing the past” (ibid., 89).

In Nest, lantana’s creeping encroachment on boundaries, its tenacious swirling thickets that threaten to bring it inside a space where it does not belong is the source of its Gothic energy. In Mullumbimby, however, Jo’s wrathful attack on weeds does not give the same menacing effect, even with multiple anthropomorphic

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references to flaying, massacring, and murdering. Nature submits to Jo’s rage. She tames the weeds and leaves the cemetery looking “immaculate” (Lucashenko 2013,

89). This submission appears to defuse what might otherwise have been a Gothic effect. It is vegetal nature’s “untameability” (Keetley 2016, 1) that makes it horrifying, the suggestion of “the perennial and terrifying ability of vegetal life to swallow, engulf, overrun, and outlive humans” (ibid., 5). Because Jo’s weeds don’t resist human actions the way Jen’s lantana does, because they submit to Jo’s efforts to tame them, they fail to threaten. Instead, Jo is the menacing force.

In contrast, Eleanor Dark’s Lantana Lane is very far from being a Gothic novel, however lantana is described in distinctly Gothic terms. Dark’s lantana is not inert, but active and almost sentient, and linked to madness. The lantana thicket can be read as a microcosm of Gothic space, its dark underworld serving as a repository for the Lane’s secrets. Dark describes lantana in terms that evoke Frankenstein’s

Creature. Nature has “informed it with life, and then left it to its own devices. The result—as one might expect—is frightful” (2012, 97); an excessive and unruly plant that grows not according to any discernible pattern but instead “sprouts upwards, downward or sideways at will, guided only by an eager, blundering vitality, a fervent, planless exuberance” (ibid., 97). Lantana “zealously persists in the endless task of piling itself upon itself” (ibid., 99), in the manner of a Gothic labyrinth.

Like the Gothic, whose terror comes from “the sense of limits overrun […] the breach of boundaries” (Luckhurst 2014, 62), Dark’s lantana confuses and exceeds boundaries. Due to its chaotic growth it is impossible to classify the plant’s parts according to standard terms: “Does this shrub (or should we say creeper? …) consist of a great many stems and no branches, or a great many branches and no stem?”

(Dark 2012, 97). The only option, for Dark, is to abjure categorisation altogether:

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We shall employ them all indiscriminately—stem, stalk, bough, branch, limb,

twig and even peduncle. Only let us get out of this; only let us rediscover

sanity and sunlight; only let us look again at a tree, a thistle, a clover-leaf, a

cabbage—anything which comports itself with purpose and precision,

anything which knows its own shape, and sticks to it (ibid., 98–99).

The wild unclassifiability of lantana leads to a Gothic excess of language that results from trying to fill the void of the unspeakable. In this way, lantana is related to the unspeakable, the liminal, and the uncanny: to what is unruly and exceeds ordinary forms of language and classification. For Keetley, this is one of the key sources of vegetal horror; plants are “[n]ever completely accounted for by human’s efforts to categorize them” (2016, 8). This puts plants “perilously close to the very definition of the monstrous—which […] centers precisely on its refusal of known categories” (ibid.).

Gothic terror is “insistently about spatial discomfort, whether from entrapment in dungeons or buried in a premature grave, the disorientation of labyrinths, or the annihilating sublimity of the vast openness of mountain ranges or

Arctic wastes” (Luckhurst 2014, 62), and Dark characterises the space inside lantana, its “hidden underworld” (Dark 2012, 99), as just such a place of entrapment, disorientation, and annihilation:

One’s sensations, while crawling into the lantana’s nether layers must

markedly resemble those of a psychiatrist groping his way into the twilight of

the unconscious, Great Heavens, what a mess! This demented confusion of

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naked growth cannot but suggest the tortured complexities of obscure,

Freudian urges. Here is activity without discipline or direction, an aimless

rampancy of pullulation expressing itself in mad angles and frenzied

excursions, senseless entwinings and interlacings, wild sallies and irrational

recoils, brusque deviations, and long, random wanderings. The light is dim,

and faintly green. The still air smells of secrecy, and through it the dead

leaves softly fall and fall like yesterdays. Nowhere is any system discernible,

nor any hint that the monstrous vigour of this afflicted weed is governed by

law (ibid., 97–98).

The space within Dark’s lantana thicket is like the Freudian unconscious. It is

“demented”, “tortured”, “without discipline”, “a mess”. Like the Gothic world, located in “areas beyond reason, law and civilised authority” (Botting 2014, 4), the space within the lantana is not “governed by law”. It is as labyrinthine as the dungeon of a Gothic castle, characterised by “senseless entwinings and interlacings”, and “long, random wanderings”. A suggestion of the past, the uncanny return of the repressed that animates the Gothic, is captured in the leaves that “fall like yesterdays”, and the air “smells of secrecy”—like the closed, secret room at the heart of Gothic space. And, indeed, within the specific set of functions ascribed to lantana in Lantana Lane is the function of secrecy, of Gothic repository:

[Lantana] is without peer as a receptacle for otherwise non-disposable

rubbish. When you are at your wits’ end to get rid of something, it is the local

custom, hallowed by long usage, to Throw it Down in the Lantanna [sic] […].

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With a soft crash, and a sound of splitting twigs, discarded objects of

all kinds, shapes and sizes fall through the green leaves, and discreetly vanish

into the twilit world below (Dark 2012, 105).

If the Lane’s lantana is eradicated, “many strange and embarrassing sights will lie revealed” (ibid.). Like the deceptively domestic surfaces of the contemporary

Female or Postfeminist Gothic, which “tunnels below the bright, shiny surface”

(Whitney 2010, 352) of the everyday world, lantana conceals its secrets in a dark, interior labyrinth beneath an apparently “normal […] veneer of leaves” (Dark 2012,

99) and “silly little flowers” (ibid., 99). The Ray Lawrence film Lantana discussed in

Chapter 3: Literature Review and further in Chapter 7, makes effective use of the contrast between lantana’s bright canopy and labyrinthine interior. Such representations demonstrate that lantana is a Gothic weed par excellence.

Like Simpson’s resistant, ineradicable lantana, Dark’s lantana is figured as a sentient thing that fights back against a farmer’s efforts to kill it. It bounces back brush hooks, or gives way suddenly beneath trampling feet. Severing one limb can cause “another portion with which it appeared to have no possible connection, [to spring] out and [swipe] him smartly across the face” (Dark 2012, 99). Fallen branches “trip him up”, until “the damned stuff is all about him. Stalks spike his ankles with jagged ends. Boughs reach down and snatch his hat from his head. Stems leap backward from his blows. Twigs thrust forward at his eyes” (ibid., 100).

Dark’s lantana animates a Gothic fear of “vegetation [that] refuses to be mere backdrop” (Keetley 2016, 11; emphasis in original). Lantana’s refusal to submit, its insistent forcing of itself on the farmer’s awareness, on his body, activates a fear that, as well as encroaching on the boundaries of “abandoned gardens, houses, and roads”

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(ibid., 15), weeds might also encroach on the bounds of the human body. While the overall effect in Dark is humorous, she is intentionally calling forth lantana’s Gothic properties. Unlike the weeds that submit to Jo’s work in Mullumbimby, Dark’s lantana has the potential to be the stuff of Gothic terror because it does not, will not, submit, to human intentions.

Trees

Dark points out the human tendency to classify vegetation as either plants or weeds;

“Goodies [or] Baddies” (ibid., 96). “Good” plants provide either beauty or food, whereas “bad” weeds are deemed “useless” (ibid.) for human requirements. This attitude is also evident towards trees in Hinterland Gothic novels, which are, more distinctly than in the case of weeds, further divided along the lines of “native” and

“introduced”. Foreign trees such as camphor laurels are denigrated as pests while native eucalypts, lilly pillies, cedars, and bunya pines are valued. Native trees are also repeatedly anthropomorphised, often recognisably representing specifically female or Indigenous bodies. Trees in Hinterland Gothic novels are almost inevitably linked with violence and guilt, overtly attributed to the regions’ historical timber- getting industries. Male characters, especially protagonists’ fathers as in Nest and

Salt Rain, are the perpetrators of crimes against the environment, and frequently also crimes against women.

Female characters are not, however, correspondingly innocent or passive victims. The women of Hinterland Gothic, and particularly mothers, are guilty of complicity in male sin. In fact, innocence and guilt are often intertwined in complex and uncanny fashion. Jen’s timber-getter father in Nest is innocent of child abduction, but guilty of environmental depredation and of abandoning his wife and daughter. Jen’s mother, in turn, is guilty of having an affair, of lying about Jen’s

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paternity, and of being a “bad mother”. Mae’s timber-getter-turned-farmer father in

Salt Rain is guilty of incestuous rape, but the women of her family—her sister Julia, their mother, their grandmother—are complicit in their failure to intervene.

In both cases, the story that remains silent, but not necessarily unnoticed, beneath these meanings is the colonial guilt associated with land theft and slaughter.

Native trees—both absent and standing—function as indelible reminders of the people who once occupied the same lands. White female writers of Hinterland

Gothic tend to unite white women, native trees, and Indigenous people as victims of white colonial male violence. White women’s complicity in male violence against other women and against the environment is recognised, but their participation in colonial violence is only uneasily acknowledged, by proxy. In Salt Rain and Nest, female atonement for male sin is enacted by replanting native trees and restoring the land back to its native state. In Mullumbimby, Jo’s position as an Indigenous woman renders her relationship to trees, and the tree metaphor, quite different.

In Nest, Jen returns to the hinterland “to look after the land [her father] had cleared. To make amends” (Simpson 2014b, 21). When a ghost gum comes down in a storm, Jen thinks of it variously as a “body”, a “grey ghost”, “like a skeleton”, and

“Like the remains of a great elephant. And here she was cutting off its limbs and carving it up” (ibid., 116). The anthropomorphism generates an uncanny, Gothic effect. However, Simpson, who lived in Landers Shoot in the foothills of the Blackall

Range while she wrote Nest, has stated that she deliberately did not want “to paint the bush in a Gothic way, despite the disappearance [of Daniel Morcombe]. I wanted it to be a benign place where the main character is very comfortable” (Simpson quoted in Brown 2015). Elsewhere, she has described a sense of artistic imperative in landscape representation:

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To move beyond gothic representations, the fearful othering of our

landscapes as hostile places against which we must pit ourselves and fail. To

counter the exoticising of nature that keeps it out there, a two hour drive

away. To resist the temptation, even with the knowledge of the harm we’ve

done, to pity nature, to feel sorry for her and lock her up (Simpson 2010).

In Nest, Simpson avoids exoticising or pitying nature, but her nature is still presented as besieged, even victimised, and she only partially manages to evade the

Gothic.

Simpson also employs anthropomorphism to identify the region’s native trees with its Indigenous people, but rather than generating Gothic effects she evokes a romantic, elegiac tone. Jen imagines what the hinterland landscape might once have looked like:

From above, it was easier to imagine it all as it had once been. Before the best

of it had been picked out and the rest mown down. The great trees, gone. The

first people, gone.

The cedars, all but childless for several generations now, were a race

persisting only in the forgotten damp, dark gullies. Forest kings who would

soon pass into legend—too majestic for this world (Simpson 2014b, 57–8).

Simpson’s conflation of native trees and Indigenous people feels forced, rather than evocative. The use of grandiose, abstract language, “great tree”, “forest

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kings”, “legend”, “majestic”, lacks the visceral immediacy of the ghost gum “like the remains of a great elephant”.

The same sense of a forced effect comes across in another scene, in which Jen didactically recites local history to her drawing pupil, Henry. “A captive audience,”

Jen thinks when Henry asks about the bunya branch she has selected for the day’s drawing class, “the perfect opportunity for a micro-lesson” (ibid., 119). She proceeds to tell Henry (and the reader) about the bunya’s scientific classification and historical significance, rendering it a mundane, rather than evocative, symbol. Likewise, where the natural world is described in formal, even scientific terms: “the riparian zone along the creek” (ibid., 223); the “[d]ry sclerophyll” (ibid., 149) rainforest; “native mice—Antechinus flavipes” (ibid., 148) there is little sense of the Gothic.

Occasionally, though, Simpson’s attention to biological detail opens cracks through which the Gothic intrudes. Of bloodwood trees Simpson writes: “Their timber wasn’t any good for building, riddled with veins of blood-like resin that oozed out when their trunks or limbs were cut or damaged. It was a shame all trees didn’t bleed: there might be a few more left standing” (ibid., 20). When cut, the resin gives off “a smell almost like flesh” (ibid., 133). The image of the bleeding, savaged tree, associated with human flesh, is uncanny and horrific because it signifies a blurring of boundaries between the human and the non-human, activating “the horror of plants both in their absolute strangeness and in their uncanny likeness” (Keetley 2016, 5) to humans. The alignment between tree and human is made more terrifying by the depiction of a tree violently injured and dismembered, not just because it suggests the same wounds inflicted on a human body, but because it suggests that plant bodies, like human bodies, are capable of suffering, making violators and murderers out of all humans.

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In Salt Rain, as well, links between trees and human physiognomy—and the suggestion that trees feel pain—give rise to uncanny effects. A character describes a gum tree that has fallen during a storm: “it groaned, this ... sound came from inside it. Julia says they feel pain, that all plants hurt when we kill them. It was like a huge body, a massive fucking corpse” (Armstrong 204, 167). Julia likens another fallen tree to her own body, and watches as the ambivalent, sometimes threatening Saul—

Mae’s ex-boyfriend, and underage Allie’s new lover—chainsaws into it: “As Saul sliced the trunk into segments, the thick brown bark fell away in curves, exposing the tender inner skin of the tree, its wood folded like Julia’s own belly that she ran her hands over in bed at night” (ibid., 185). Saul throws the severed branches “into the lantana thicket” (ibid.) at the side of the road, out of sight. In both these instances, it is the particular suggestion of wood as flesh—both universally human and specifically female—vulnerable to injury, pain, and death that unsettles.

The significance of the metaphoric link between female bodies and trees becomes evident in Julia’s project of planting native trees—red cedar, quandong, lilly pilly, tamarind (ibid., 22)—around the dilapidated family farmhouse. She allows the house to fall to ruin while “letting the forest take its own back. Letting natural order re-establish itself” (ibid., 18) in a “token effort to make up for what the family did to the valley” (ibid., 139). Like Jen, Julia is atoning for the sins of her forefathers.

And like Jen’s hitchhiking, timber-getter father, Julia’s father “came to the valley

[as] a hobo” (ibid., 202), taking work at Julia’s grandfather’s sawmill and later marrying the boss’s daughter11. The violence Julia’s father enacts on the land is linked to the violence he wreaks on the body of Julia’s sister, Mae. Julia witnessed the incestuous rape through which Allie was conceived, but did not prevent it.

11 Narratives of usurpation are common to the Female Gothic, in which rightful female property is stolen by men through forced marriage, murder, or other underhanded methods (Wallace 2013, 232).

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Staying on the farm and planting the trees is as much atonement for that guilt as for ecological guilt; as Julia puts it, “I failed her, and staying was my way to pay” (ibid.,

214). Although Julia atones for her guilt by planting specifically native trees and restoring the land back to its pre-colonial state, the Indigenous remains unspoken in this text; problematically, it is perhaps denied. History in the valley seems to go back only as far as the “original homestead” (ibid., 116), its location marked by an eighty- year old mango tree.

A different metaphoric resonance of trees and perspective on colonial history is evident in Mullumbimby. Although the binary of native-good and introduced-bad remains, it is ultimately unsettled. Jo greets an avenue of lilly pilly trees in town,

“Jingawahalu baugal jali jali” (Lucashenko 2013, 11), literally “Greetings, good trees” (ibid., 283-4), noting that just because their fruit is not in season is “No call to ignore someone […]. Respect is a fulltime job” (ibid., 11). In the early parts of the book, however, Jo’s respect is reserved for native plants only; she treats introduced plants with the same mixture of anger and scorn she directs towards her white pastoralist neighbours, of whom she thinks she can sometimes understand “the old

Goories refusing to walk behind the dugais when they travelled together in the forests. Just in case the temptation to sink an axe into their ignorant European skulls became altogether too overwhelming” (ibid., 24).

Jo wants to eradicate not just the lantana and other weeds on her property, but the camphor laurels that she likens to a “green cancer that choke[s] out the native trees” (ibid., 204) and which contribute little to the ecosystem. Jo highlights the connection between camphor laurels, which “would take over the entire valley, given half a chance” (ibid.) and processes of colonisation: “Large, attractive, fast-growing trees that didn’t drop branches, they had seemed the ideal schoolyard tree to some

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long-forgotten bureaucrat who had installed them in playgrounds across New South

Wales” (ibid.). The novel traces Jo’s process of coming to terms with the ongoing entanglements of colonialism, and by the end the camphor laurel has shifted its signification. It is no longer useless and reviled, and Jo observes that a native blue heron has built a nest in a camphor laurel near her house (ibid., 280).

In Deeper Water, camphor laurels are also explicitly associated with colonisation. Mema notes that “Someone brought them in from China years ago and now they’d run wild like rabbits, occupying all the hills the first settlers had cleared.

I guess that’s what happens—colonisation” (Cole 2014, 63). Mema’s attitude is very different to Jo’s early perceptions of camphors as a cancer. The trees are “great for climbing” (ibid.), and they are beautiful: “Big, with widespread branches, dark, waxy leaves. In spring all their new growth came out luminous light green, just around the edges, so from the distance it looked like they were glowing. Whole hillsides alight.”

(ibid.).

Like lantana, camphor laurels thrive on boundaries:

All along the fence lines the camphors flourished, large and graceful with

their luminous leaves, grown from seeds in the droppings of birds scattered

while they rested on the fences. Randomly placed by nature, the camphors

always seemed perfectly positioned. Boundaries still standing when all the

fences were gone (ibid., 124).

For Mema, there are no distinctions between plants and weeds; nature is nature with no divisions. Although camphors are “noxious weeds” (ibid., 207) to

Hamish, Mema loves them, “The way their roots seem to hold the ground […] like

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they’re holding everything together” (ibid., 321). A local company wants to chip the trees for “green” energy—Hamish points out that even environmentalists won’t try to save camphors (ibid., 292)—and Mema is motivated to fight for them, a commitment that spurs her into adulthood.

As in Salt Rain, the Indigenous is very nearly erased from Mema’s hinterland. Even camphor laurel trees’ origin in China does not open space for a reflection on race and racial history in the region. A ruined shack “on Old Gordon’s land” is “[p]robably” the area’s “original farmhouse” (ibid., 63). Mema states that it has “[b]een there as long as anyone remembered” (ibid., 64). History in Deeper

Water’s hinterland only goes back so far—to the earliest ruins of colonisation, but not beyond. Indigenous history remains silenced and excluded. But Mema’s uncertain “probably” in reference to the farmhouse’s origin reveals an ambivalence about the region’s history through which the Gothic, given a chance, might open cracks. This chance is not taken up, however. Rather, femaleness and female sexuality function as the silenced Other beneath Deeper Water’s Gothic web of metaphor.

Trees in Deeper Water often function as sites of female sexuality. As children, Mema and Anja pleasured themselves against a submerged log in the creek

(ibid., 194), and one of the first times Mema has sex she finds pleasure when pressed up against a camphor laurel:

There was a root between my legs, thick and knobbly, and I thought of the

mossy log and all the pleasure it gave.

His fingers paused on my skin. “You like that, don’t ya?”

I didn’t want to speak.

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“The feel of that tree?”

I liked it as much as I liked him. I liked all of it together (ibid., 281).

Across the Hinterland Gothic texts analysed here, trees, even “bad” trees like camphor laurels, are not activated as sources of threat, even when they fall across roads or through roofs. Instead trees—both native and imported—appear as victims to rapacious men—timber-getters, abusers, and rapists. Trees’ status as victims, as abject, links them metaphorically to female and Indigenous bodies, often—although not always—with uncanny effects.

In Nest, Simpson effectively forestalls the Gothic when she associates native trees and native people by deliberately and explicitly using the metaphor for what Jen would call a “micro-lesson”. In contrast, a Gothic effect is achieved both in Nest and in the other examples from Hinterland Gothic examined here where the meaning or moral remains latent, and the physicality of the human body is invoked within the image of the tree—its flesh, its blood, its limbs, and above all the implication of trees’ corresponding ability to feel pain. What this suggests—or rather, confirms—is that the Gothic is most effective in evoking its sensations of uncanny unsettlement when it plays on and around, rather than directly addressing or revealing, the unspoken and repressed. In Ann Radcliffe’s classic Gothic novels it was precisely uncertainty and obscurity that animated terror (Knowles 2007, 144), because

“obscurity, or indistinctness, […] leaves the imagination to act upon the few hints that truth reveals to it. [...] Obscurity leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate” (Radcliffe 1826, 150–151). The reader is left to make connections, to imagine fully what is not quite spoken or seen, and it is through this dialogue that the

Gothic manages to both reveal and conceal, to articulate the unspeakable. It is all the

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more effective because the reader fills those gaps with her own imaginative content—the desires, guilt, or repressed knowledges that the Gothic text alludes to, and perhaps implicates herself in the process. Likewise, in the context of Paul

Carter’s theory, dark writing “conjure[s] up what is missing without destroying it by reducing it to the light writing of classificatory reason. From this it emerges that […] dark writing […] must remain on the edge of sight” (2009, 12–13).

Animals

The binary relationship between good-native and bad-introduced species that is already complicated in regard to weeds and trees is disrupted further respecting animals. Keetley (2016, 7) argues that humans recognise a kinship and affinity with animals that they deny with plants, and certainly in Hinterland Gothic novels animals aren’t as easily identified with a negative Other as plants are.

In Mullumbimby, native birds such as the blue heron, lyrebird, and fairy- wrens are not only positively valued but also instrumental to the plot, functioning almost as characters in their own right. However, horses are also valued and characterised, as well as having a metaphoric function. Jo’s two horses, Athena and

Comet, a mare and her colt, are symbolically linked with Jo and her daughter Ellen.

Comet’s death by drowning in the creek foreshadows danger towards Ellen, and causes Jo nearly inconsolable grief. Despite their non-native status, horses are valued in Mullumbimby.

Likewise, in Deeper Water Mema objects to the killing of cane toads, even as

Hamish insists that “You can’t argue for a cane toad’s life […] They eat everything, and then the things that eat them die from their poison. They are wiping out whole species” (Cole 2014, 86). Mema can’t blame the toads, because “[i]t’s not like they introduced themselves” (ibid.). When she was small, she collected tadpoles and there

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was no way to “tell the difference” (ibid., 87) between which would turn into toads, and which into frogs. Her mother explains that you can’t tell someone which things are “okay to love” (ibid. 91), and that in Australia, “We’re all just weeds here” (ibid.,

92). Non-native animals and pests in Deeper Water are uncannily innocent-and- guilty, like the contemporary non-Indigenous Australian subject in Gelder and

Jacob’s reading, both “implicated in earlier processes of colonisation” (1998, 24) and not.

Dogs take on an additional signification in Deeper Water—male dogs at least. When Mema’s old (female) dog dies, Hamish gives her a bitch pup, Blossom, which goes on heat, acting “like a signal to the town at large” (Cole 2014, 213).

Blossom’s heat and Mema’s sexual awakening coincide, so that at the same time as

“the town’s mongrels [start] hanging at [the] fence line” (ibid., 214), local men cruise the roads around Mema’s farm, glancing between Mema and Blossom as they suggest Blossom mate with their dogs (ibid.). A neighbour’s request that Mema lock

Blossom up, because “[t]he bitch is on heat” and “spreading her scent all over the place” (ibid., 216), is echoed in the encounters Mema, her mother, and Anja have when they venture into town. The townsmen call them sluts (ibid., 138), slags, town bikes, whores (ibid., 313), and at one point Mema is nearly raped.

Likewise, in Salt Rain, the men who represent sexual threat often own dogs—

Mae’s father, and her ex-boyfriend Saul, who becomes Allie’s lover even though

Allie is barely fifteen. Specific dogs are not necessarily symbols of threat, but dog packs or men associated with dogs and doglike behaviour are. Travelling through the forest at night to Saul’s place, Allie listens “for the feral dogs that Julia said ran in packs in the hills. She imagined them silently tracking her through the bush, muzzles lifted to catch her scent” (Armstrong 2004, 45–46). The next line begins with a direct

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reference to Saul, referred to simply by the masculine pronoun “he”, linking both

Saul and all men to the sinister threat represented by the dogs. Later, when Allie learns the secret of her parentage, she imagines the “faceless grandfather who had gripped her mother and rutted like a dog” (ibid., 209).

The use of animal metaphors in Hinterland Gothic texts is complex. Where a sinister or Gothic effect arises it is rarely from the animals themselves, but from the people (sexually predatory men, victimised or menaced women) they are linked to.

As with the categories discussed above, there is room within the animal metaphor to point towards marginalised Indigenous voices and histories. Cane toads, rabbits, foxes, sheep, cattle and other non-native animals have impacted on and become associated with hinterland environments no less than imported plants like lantana.

Dairy cows, for instance, are a common sight in many hinterland regions. Animals were also, no less than possession of land and water sources, frequently at the heart of conflict between Indigenous people and colonisers. Native animals as well as settler livestock were assumed to “naturally” (Huggan and Tiffin 2009, 9) belong to settlers, leading to conflict with traditional owners debarred from hunting on their own lands. While not wishing to reductively deploy good-bad, native-foreign binaries, I argue that they can be used to great effect in the Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor and that within the animal metaphor in particular there is scope for further development.

Earth

Metaphors of earth, mud, soil, and land activate terrors of mergence, death, and decay in Hinterland Gothic novels. The flood waters in Nest uncover the bodies of the two missing, murdered children, buried in the earth: “Long held beneath root and soil, gestating in decomposing plant matter, the hinterland deliver[s] up its lost

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children” (Simpson 2014b, 253), a terrible reminder that all life “will always become vegetal matter, matter for vegetation” (Keetley 2016, 3; emphasis in original).

In Salt Rain, the hinterland soil is “[r]usty red like dried blood, spilling onto the luminous grass” (Armstrong 2004, 18). At Mae’s funeral, Julia, who has been planting trees, has “red dirt under [her] fingernails” (ibid., 52), signifying her implication in Mae’s death. Allie watches “[r]ed earth exploding on the white

[coffin]. […] A rustling came from the mound of dirt beside the grave. It wanted to return to the earth, to layer itself heavy on the coffin” (ibid., 55). Earth is animated here, transformed from inert matter into matter with a will to subsume, to consume.

Allie subscribes to Mae’s belief that “Bodies go back to dust but we leave traces here and there, atoms of ourselves. We float in the air everywhere we have ever been. Every word spoken, every breath exhaled. Every drop of sweat” (ibid.,

41). At the funeral, the thought of Mae’s “trail of atoms […] leaking from the coffin, spreading” (ibid., 52) makes Allie feel viscerally ill. Grief and the horror of death intermingle in the metaphor of earth. In merging with the landscape, Mae is lost to

Allie: “Rain and mud. That’s all there was in the end. Ashes to dust to dirt to mud.

Mae was everywhere. She was the red mud being washed down into the swollen creek, her mother slipping through her fingers again” (ibid., 157).

As in Salt Rain, in Mullumbimby, the earth Jo buries Comet in is anthropomorphised as the “colour of blood, almost, and the colour of war, too”

(Lucashenko 2013, 129). Jo cuts through pine roots to dig the grave, thinking that eventually “these roots will regrow, but this time through Comet’s bones. They’ll wind in and out of his ribcage, until it softens into soil itself” (ibid., 129). The image of winding roots, of the binding and blurring of flesh and soil is sublime, signifying the truth that “we all, whether buried in the ground or scattered on the earth, become

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sustenance for plants. Ashes to ashes. Flesh to food” (Keetley 2016, 1). As it does for

Allie, for Jo the image of mergence evokes grief and horror, but Jo also experiences wonder at the transience of life and the natural processes of decay and regeneration.

Human-earth mergence again evokes the sublime when Jo makes the terrifying, yet euphoric, realisation that the lines on the palms of Ellen’s hand are a perfect replica of the hinterland landscape:

The world shrank […] to […] the intricate whorls of the map […]. The

contour lines, roads and watercourses of the country shown by the map were

marked in exact replica by Ellen’s red palm print. Starting just below her

daughter’s fingers, the artery of the Brunswick River wound its ancient way

through the valley. The major roads snaked over the land […] the bitumen

roads, built on bullock trails, that were built on the paths that the Bundjalung

had made […]. Ellen’s been carrying the entire valley around with her for

thirteen years, unknowing, Jo thought wildly. I gave birth to the valley

(Lucashenko 2013, 246; emphasis in original).

Images of water, tangling, and the female or maternal body are pulled into alignment in this passage, along with the inextricable entanglements of postcolonial

Australia. The coexistence of the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous, the sacred and the mundane, are referenced in the modern roads layered upon Indigenous tracks, the enduring tracery of watercourses, all inscribed on the hands of Jo’s mixed-heritage daughter, all springing from Jo’s maternal body.

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Jo discovers the maternal within herself, and the path to healing her troubled relationships with her daughter and her heritage, through a similar experience of mergence when she stands up for Ellen against a threatening male figure:

Jo now felt the fleshy boundaries of her skin weirdly dissolving. She became

tremendously heavy and solid […] she was as massive as a mountain, as

heavy and immovable as Chincogan or Bottlebrush. Standing in her kitchen

with her hands on her daughter’s quaking shoulders, she had somehow grown

large enough to contain every Bundjalung woman who had ever stood near

the place she stood. With her palms on Ellen’s shoulders, she was a thousand

black women, then thousand black women, a mighty army of Goorie women

who had been holding their jahjams safely on this same spot for tens of

thousands of years. Jo came to understand that she was no more alone than

the stones in the creek were alone, or the blades of grass in the paddocks

(ibid., 250).

Images of maternity as well as female sexuality also inhere in earth in Deeper

Water. Mema’s mother, Naomi, makes “huge earthen pots […] curved and dark and heavy” (Cole 2014, 32); “majestic things” (ibid., 52) that are “almost bigger than her arms could span” (ibid., 52). Like Naomi’s own body the unfired pots are “large and curved and white” (ibid., 52). Mema describes how “Watching her at the wheel was like glimpsing the world at creation, like she held the whole universe in her arms”

(ibid., 52). The pots are symbolically resonant of the womb and of female flesh.

Mema “wonder[s] about the similarities between clay and flesh” (ibid., 184) when she shows Hamish how to throw pots, “seeking that small nub around which

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everything turned, measuring it with the waxy pad of my thumb” (ibid., 99).

Throwing pots with Hamish feels “like we [are] merging into one” (ibid., 102), a symbolically sexual experience that leaves Mema feeling “calmed and peaceful

(ibid., 100).

Earth, then, assumes a range of metaphoric associations with sex, death, maternity, power, and grief in Hinterland Gothic novels. Only in Lucashenko’s

Mullumbimby, however, does the earth metaphor connect with the Indigenous. While both Ellen’s and Jo’s experiences of mergence with the land can be attributed to a specifically Indigenous spirituality which, as Althans (2013, 139) has pointed out, should not be conflated with the Gothic, Lucashenko’s recognition of the ghostly presence of Indigenous pathways underlying contemporary roads suggests one way for non-Indigenous writers to use the earth metaphor to more effectively gesture towards marginalised Indigenous histories and stories of place.

(Hu)man-made

Although the natural landscape can animate terror in Hinterland Gothic novels, and appear in a menacing guise—in raging flood waters or the horror of mergence with plant life or the earth, for example—it is largely the human-made through which terror erupts, the ways in which the land has been victimised by humankind’s (and mankind’s, in particular) actions.

In Deeper Water Hamish’s arrival in the hinterland is marked by clamour and violence, signifying a rude penetration into female space, that recalls the first meeting of Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, when Rochester arrives with a “rude noise”

(Brontë 2006, 132) of clattering hooves and barking dog, shattering Jane’s tranquil contemplation of the evening. Mema is waiting for her cow, Bessie, to give birth when Hamish attempts to drive over the flooded bridge. Mema hears “the splintering

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of timber” (Cole 2014, 2) and the previously contemplative language surrounding her observation of Bessie’s labour changes to reflect action and violent intrusion—the river rages and Mema has to scream over its roar. Boulders in the creek crash together in tumult, and there is the sound of smashing and cracking as Hamish breaks the window, trying to get out. The car itself is “incongruous”, “all steel and glass” in the creek (ibid., 2–3). The mechanical is identified with the masculine, and both with noise, violence, and intrusion.

In Mullumbimby, Comet is snared and drowned by a “hideous, unwanted barbed wire fence that doesn’t belong here […] tricking him and trapping him and murdering him, yes, murdering” (Lucashenko 2013, 117). The fence belongs to Jo’s white pastoralist neighbour, metaphorically aligning Comet’s horse body and an imagined, collective Aboriginal body tricked and trapped and murdered by unwanted, out of place, colonising white forces.

Comet’s death brings on a near mental breakdown for Jo, and spurs her realisation that fences mark every plot of land as belonging to white people who have taken “it upon themselves to lace the country tight, using bitumen and wire and timber to bind their gift of a continent to themselves” (ibid., 133). Jo sees the land as not only “named and claimed by the whitefellas” (ibid., 134) but divided into pieces,

“dismembered each from the other, the orphaned parts of a now-dissolved whole

[and] found on the maps all numbered the way that the graves at the Mullum cemetery were numbered” (ibid., 134). Jo conceives a horror of binding, strangling,

“ruler-straight lines and fences” (ibid.) that signify white people’s possession of

Aboriginal land, to the extent that she worries she is herself “losing the plot” (ibid.), playing on the double meaning of the word.

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Likewise, in Nest, it was the timber industry that despoiled the land, and the human-made is aligned with the monstrous. The “scream of a chainsaw” (Simpson

2014b, 132) “rip[s] apart” (ibid.) the morning stillness and Jen’s peace of mind as council workers start cutting trees to widen the road near Jen’s house, threatening to bring the outside world to her door. Jen is not exempt from this violence either; she hits a kookaburra while driving and feels herself and her car are both killers (ibid.,

123). The missing children were both abducted, or presumed abducted, from roads, just as in the real-life Daniel Morcombe case. And, just as the Kiel Mountain Road overpass where Daniel was last seen in 2003 has since become a site of public remembrance and mourning, including a memorial stone (Atkinson 2012), so too does the road of the most recent child abduction in Nest become a community memorial, “turned into a shrine: plastic wreaths, flowers in jars, candles and notes”

(Simpson 2014b, 96). Roadside memorials are a frequent sight in hinterland regions, with their winding, treacherous roads that attract tourist drivers and, especially, motorcyclists. Donna Lee Brien has written of such memorialising as Gothic practice. Roadside memorials “make the roadway unfamiliar by inscribing onto it the memory of corporeal trauma and, in the process, re-creating their locations as vivid sites of pain and suffering” (Brien 2014, para. 8).

Such memorials, then, mark the sorts of places Gibson would call badlands, sites “associated with violence and murder” (Gibson 2002, 14); and, indeed, the badland at the heart of Gibson’s study is a stretch of road known for a series of violent deaths—both road accidents and murders. Gibson has a “hunch that some

Australian roads channel the violence that has produced the nation” (Gibson 2010,

6). Roads, as “the main infrastructure of nation-building […] must cut through sinister territory” (ibid.). Ken Gelder has also written about the Gothic properties of

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roads in the Australian imagination, using the 1979 film Mad Max as an example.

Citing director George Miller he points out that in Australia, car culture replaces

American gun culture as a suburban, “socially-acceptable form of violence” (Miller in Gelder 2007, 122). For Gelder, the “Gothicness” of Mad Max is symbolised by the

“menacing black car on the highway” (Gelder 2007, 122). The horror of the highway is directly related to its straightness and visibility, a sense of exposure. For Rebecca

Johinke, the road in Mad Max is “a potentially fatal arena for [the] performance of masculinity” (Johinke 2009, 118), with cars symbolic of power and masculinity and their drivers the embodiments of patriarchy.

It is a combination of these properties that animates the Gothic aspect of roads, and other (hu)man-made materials in Hinterland Gothic texts, their association with patriarchal and colonial domination and violence. Hinterland roads are not characterised by straight lines like the roads of Mad Max. They are as labyrinthine and twisting as the corridors of a Gothic castle, hewn into mountainsides, tunnelling beneath the overarching boughs of trees. Lantana heaped along the banks obscures vision, until it suddenly falls away and views out to sea are revealed. The interplay of vision and obscurity on these roads, their history as the channels for colonial violence, make them ideal Gothic sites. In At Devil’s Elbow, the road is the site of

Debbie’s death, and her killer is a drunk driver—recognisably a symbol of a particular type of Australian masculinity and violence. Fences are no less symbols of boundary and ownership in At Devil’s Elbow than they are in Mullumbimby, and often are sites in which a variety of Hinterland Gothic metaphors come together— tangling lantana and camphor laurels situated along fence lines, road sides, and creeks; dairy cows penned into fields. It is from this accrual, this excess of meanings, that the Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor draws its power.

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Conclusion to A Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor

The Hinterland Gothic texts examined here establish a complex web of regionally specific Gothic metaphors, full of contradictions and shifting significations. Gothic effects are generated through metaphors’ signification of liminality, excess, and the uncanny. Ineradicable, out of place, flourishing lantana; the permeable boundaries of creeks; trees that bleed; earth that erodes boundaries between human flesh and soil; animals represented as kin and akin to humans; (hu)man-made roads and fences that signify colonial and masculine violence, and female vulnerability and complicity all symbolise the transgression of boundaries. The repetition and combination of these metaphors, their own overlapping boundaries, contributes to the activation of dread.

Sedgwick (1981) identifies the surface—not only images of surfaces but also the surface conventions of the genre—as a key locus of Gothic meanings and effects.

She argues that an analysis of those conventions and of “thematic attention to surfaces” (ibid., 255) in Gothic fiction can reveal more about the genre’s depths than, for example, traditional psychoanalytic approaches. My own analysis has revealed that writers of Hinterland Gothic use the hinterland landscape—the visible surface— to reveal through metaphor what is silenced and invisible, the stories of historical and ongoing violence against women and Indigenous people that lie below the sunny surface. Culturally acknowledged and historically documented stories and legacies of ecological violence and depredation are able to stand as the “acceptable” face of

Hinterland Gothic. Drawing attention to these stories, writers of Hinterland Gothic are able also to draw attention to other stories of violence. In some instances, the marginalised may remain unvoiced, as is certainly the case with the Indigenous in

Salt Rain and Deeper Water, but it does not necessarily go unnoticed. The Hinterland

Gothic web of metaphor links together the female, the ecological, and the Indigenous

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in a complex and inextricable set of interrelations, so that when one is to the fore, the others echo beneath.

Meaning accrues to these symbols in layers, through a series of repetitions in which each symbol is connected to another (or a variety of others) in differing ways.

The metaphors call to each other across the texts, each new instance of repetition bringing to mind previous ones in a series of symbolic echoes. The governing trope of the Gothic has been said to be the labyrinth or the palimpsest (Sedgwick 1980;

Botting 2004, 2012; Hogle 2004), and it is in this fashion that Hinterland Gothic metaphor works. The metaphors shift throughout the text as well, acquiring a double valence so that they can be either positive or negative or, uncannily, both at the same time. Idiosyncratic perceptions of, for instance, cane toads or lantana, lead to different significations for different writers, particularly for Indigenous and non-

Indigenous writers.

This analysis has identified a range of strategies for using the Hinterland

Gothic web of metaphor to generate uncanny effects and gesture towards the dark writing of place. These include: using “acceptable” or known histories of ecological violence to stand in for unacknowledged or repressed stories of violence against women and Indigenous people; using anthropomorphism and attributing agency through the use of active verbs to the non-human environment, including animals and plants; using place names and associations to indicate unspoken pasts; using binaries such as native/non-native to link otherwise dissimilar elements together, but allowing for slippage between categories; relying on a gradual accrual of meaning across the network of metaphor; and leaving room for the reader to interpret obscurity and uncertainty rather than employing didactic direct references.

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The complexity of the Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor, while presenting difficulties for a critic, is of value to the creative writer. Rich with potential meaning, flexible, amenable to idiosyncratic adjustments, capable of gesturing towards latent layers of meaning while activating Gothic atmospheres of anxiety and dread, and above all strongly evoking a sense of place through its use of regionally specific symbols, the Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor is a potentially powerful creative tool. In the next chapter, an abridged version of the creative work At Devil’s Elbow is presented (see Appendix D for the omitted sections), then in Chapter 7 I analyse and reflect on my use of the Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor in At Devil’s Elbow, and the ways in which it generates sense of place, atmospheres of dread, and gestures towards marginalised ecological, female, and Indigenous voices.

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Chapter 6: At Devil’s Elbow (abridged)

Chapters One through Seventeen are presented here, followed by a synopsis detailing relevant events from chapters Eighteen through Thirty-One (the omitted chapters can be found in Appendix D). Following the synopsis, chapters Thirty-Two to Forty are presented.

CREATIVE WORK EMBARGOED

Chapter 6: At Devil’s Elbow (abridged) 183

Chapter 7: Reflective Practice

Introduction to Reflective Practice

A number of creative challenges arose during the process of writing At Devil’s Elbow and were addressed through a combination of creative experimentation, critical analysis, and insight derived from engagements with theory. The process involved investigating stories of place in the Sunshine Coast hinterland—not only those that are acknowledged by dominant Australian culture but also the region’s silenced and hidden stories, its dark writing—and deciding if and how to tell them; identifying At

Devil’s Elbow as a Female Gothic text that takes place in a context both postfeminist and postcolonial; identifying and developing the Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor; and making creative decisions about narrative structure, point of view, and voice.

At Devil’s Elbow began not as an intentionally Gothic novel, but from a sense of the hinterland landscape distilled into a single, clear image: a dead tree standing in a high, windswept field. The field was empty and rolling, very green, the bare branches of the tree dark against a blue sky. The air was crisp and cold, autumnal.

The setting was the Blackall Range, an area I’d been visiting with my family since I was a child. The story of At Devil’s Elbow grew out of this landscape, out of the feeling of it and my desire to represent this sense of place. Very quickly, however, my descriptions of the landscape, the feeling of the hinterland, assumed a Gothic cast. Lantana in particular, a familiar sight in the Blackall Range, adopted a sinister aspect from the very first paragraph, which in the earliest drafts read:

My mother’s bones lay tangled in lantana, halfway down a hillside, for

eighteen months before they were found. We thought she’d run away;

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abandoned us. Hoped that, sometimes. Because the alternative, what the

police feared, well most of the time that seemed worse (ADE 2011 draft).

From the beginning, then, the natural landscape, the missing mother, death, and uncertainty were key elements of At Devil’s Elbow and the sense of place I sought to capture. Other features of the hinterland landscape, both the natural and the human-made, also emerged in distinctly Gothic language. Morning glory “strangled

[…] fence posts and reached insidious tendrils towards the road” (ibid.); earth was

“penetrated by the thin clawing fingers of roots” (ibid.); roadsides “bristled with wooden posts threaded with endless lengths of barbed wire” (ibid.) and sheer drops opened suddenly along the steep roads. My hinterland landscape was a place of excess, entanglement, and a sense of encroaching danger.

To some extent, it was perhaps inevitable that, given the subject matter, the tone of the novel would be a Gothic one. After all, the Gothic thrives on uncertainty and terror—precisely the states experienced by Callie and her family when Debbie goes missing. Psychologists refer to this state as “ambiguous loss” (Boss 2004).

Ambiguous loss is “uncanny” (Boss 2010, 1) because families and friends of missing people must inhabit paradoxical positions of belief—the missing person is both alive and dead, both present and absent, both part of the family and no longer part of the family. Grieving processes are forestalled because there is no closure. Callie’s experience of ambiguous loss is reflected in her relationship with the world around her, rendering the hinterland landscape uncanny.

The gothicising of the hinterland landscape could, then, be considered a result of plot and character choices. In Gothic fiction in particular “landscape and mindscape operate in tune with each other, as […] descriptions […] are focalised

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through the heroine’s perspective and reflect her mood” (Heise-von der Lippe 2013, viii). However, the story of Debbie’s disappearance and Callie’s search for answers had also grown out of the landscape, been inspired by it. There was something about the hinterland itself, I thought, about its landscape, its history, the poetic resonance of its name. Hinterland. It was a word with secrets. It hinted at something, something not quite seen or known, at some other land, somewhere behind and beyond.

Poised on the edge of the Great Dividing Range, a natural barrier between the everyday environs of the coast and the nation’s mythologised red, dead, heart, the hinterland can be readily seen as a liminal, even Gothic space. Reading the space of the hinterland as a Gothic heterotopia opened up the possibility that the hinterland functions in the Australian cultural imagination and in literature as a kind of Gothic repository or counter-site, in which marginalised voices and narratives can be explored. In thinking about At Devil’s Elbow in this way I started to pay attention to the reasons behind, the tensions beneath, its Gothic energies. What were the half- heard, half-remembered stories and histories that were struggling to the surface in my text? Carter’s theory of dark (2009) writing provided a conceptual tool through which to identify and consider how to engage with these unruly elements of place.

The Dark Writing of the Sunshine Coast Hinterland

Personal experience and knowledge of the Sunshine Coast hinterland as well as historical research indicated two primary aspects of the region’s dark writing—the stories and histories of Indigenous people in the area, and a more recent history of women’s disappearances. As At Devil’s Elbow developed I realised that many of its unruly Gothic energies could be attributed to these marginalised aspects of place, and that through developing my own Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor I might be able to gesture towards—without necessarily fully articulating or appropriating—these

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stories of place. As Carter puts it, dark writing “conjure[s] up what is missing without destroying it by reducing it to the light writing of classificatory reason”

(2009, 12–13). Dark writing exists “on the edge of sight” (ibid.).

Indigenous Stories of Place As the site of the bunya festivals the Sunshine Coast hinterland is a particularly significant cultural region for many Indigenous groups, and yet its most significantly silenced voices and histories are Indigenous ones. Both the research and creative writing processes have been complicated by a dearth of publically accessible first- hand accounts or scholarship about the region by Indigenous people. Colonial history in the region and the bunya festivals themselves are fairly well represented in historical accounts and contemporary scholarship; however, these are predominantly authored by non-Indigenous writers and researchers. Stories and histories of the

Sunshine Coast hinterland authored by Indigenous people or groups are difficult to access or verify, and the terrain between acknowledging and including Indigenous stories and histories, and respecting cultural ownership and injunctions to silence is a murky one.

Ignorance, bias, censorship, and widespread cultural denial on the part of white Australia have contributed to the corruption or erasure of many Indigenous histories, nationwide. In addition, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out, in accounts by ethnographers, anthropologists, and historians “Aborigines have often been represented as objects—as the ‘known’. Rarely are they represented as subjects, as ‘knowers’” (Moreton-Robinson 2004, 75). White academics instead position themselves in the privileged position of “knowers” drawing on Aboriginal experience to produce knowledge, but failing to recognise that their very ways of knowing are racialized, and their own “whiteness [is] being exercised

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epistemologically” (ibid.) Writing on Australian colonial adventure narratives,

Martin Crotty shows how even sympathetic and well-intentioned white writers participated in the “appropriation of certain aspects of constructed Aboriginality to ease non-Indigenous anxieties about place, belonging and racial fitness rather than a genuine desire to embrace Aboriginality” (Crotty 2008, 144).

These were particular areas of concern for me, as a non-Indigenous person writing about a landscape historically, culturally, and spiritually significant for

Indigenous people. In addition I was aware that, as Anna Haebich points out, the absence of Indigenous voices in certain areas can signal not a loss or lack of traditional knowledge, but rather a “guarding of knowledge from those who indiscriminately took what little was shown to them in the past” (Haebich 2003, 54).

This is certainly the case with some legends of the Sunshine Coast hinterland which although widely known by non-Indigenous locals remain the property and heritage of

Indigenous people.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972) remains one of the only Indigenous-authored collections of Aboriginal legends about the South East

Queensland region, but as the title suggests it is centred on the stories of Stradbroke

Island. Among residents of the Sunshine Coast hinterland, Aboriginal legends of the

Glasshouse Mountains (see Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the Blackall Range,

QLD) are widely known, and versions are included on countless tourism websites.

However, many of these versions appear to be adapted from non-Indigenous writer

Alf Wood’s 1982 collection Tales of the Sunshine Coast, which includes retellings of

Aboriginal myths alongside general local anecdotes. To my knowledge, a public or print version of the Glasshouse Mountains legends authored and authorised by

Indigenous peoples is not available, and indeed the Gubbi Gubbi people, the

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traditional owners of the Glasshouse Mountains region, state that tales of the area should not be discussed by non-Indigenous people (Gubbi Gubbi 2017a, para. 1).

Beverly Hand, who drove the revival of the bunya festival in Maleny, has shared some traditional stories of the region on ABC radio (Shorthouse 2011); however, details of these are disputed by the Gubbi Gubbi people, who state that the

“telling of stories that do not reflect Traditional beliefs and understandings […] denies the Culture and Heritage of the Gubbi Gubbi” (Gubbi Gubbi 2017b, para. 1).

Tensions exist around ownership and authenticity of stories of the region, and it is not the purpose of this thesis to intervene in these ongoing debates. However, the

Glasshouse Mountains legends in particular form part of my own knowledge of the region and sense of place, as they do for many non-Indigenous residents of the area, many of whom may not be aware of such debates. My protagonist Callie would certainly know the legends. The question of whether, or how, to include the story in

At Devil’s Elbow was, thus, a difficult one.

At one point, I considered having Callie tell Jess the story, reasoning that as

Jess was a visitor in the region it would be unusual for him not to comment on the striking and unusual landmarks of the Glasshouse Mountains, and that Callie would likely not be aware of debates surrounding ownership and veracity of the legends. In addition, some of the themes of the story resonated with mine and telling it would provide a good opportunity to bring some of these ideas to the fore, while exploring the region’s Indigenous history and culture. I did not want to elide or ignore this aspect of the range’s history and present engagements with place, but equally I did not want to participate in cultural appropriation of a story I knew some local

Aboriginal groups preferred not be told.

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In the end I decided Callie should allude to the story, and some of its themes, without telling it, and that she needed to be aware of some of the issues surrounding cultural appropriation. Rather than speaking the story to Jess, Callie reflects on it:

There was an Aboriginal legend about the mountains, in which they were a

family. It wasn’t a happy story. One of the children acted badly towards his

mother and the father, Tibrogargan, turned his back on him forever. If there

was a lesson in the legend I wasn’t sure I understood it, except maybe that

families were more fragile than you expected. But, then, maybe the tale

wasn’t true at all, like so many stories I’d been told growing up, and had

believed in implicitly. We’d learned in school how explorers and historians

had recorded stories like these and gotten them wrong, or taken them without

permission. Stole them. Changed them. Until, after a while, even the people

they belonged to couldn’t always tell what was true and what wasn’t (ADE

Chapter Twenty-Three).

By taking this approach I hoped to both include a sense of Indigenous history and culture in the region and yet respect the fact that many Indigenous stories of place weren’t mine to tell. Rather than telling Indigenous stories without authorisation, I attempted to acknowledge them instead. Rather than seeking to fill the silences, to fully illuminate the region’s dark writing, I attempted to draw attention to the acts of silencing Indigenous history that persist in this place instead.

I also sought in other ways to draw attention to the way Indigenous history is recognised and utilised in the Blackall Range today. Without wishing to be didactic or unnatural, I wanted to highlight and problematise some of these elements of the

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range’s contemporary culture. The commodification of the symbol of the bunya is highlighted in the name of the fictional Bunya Gallery where Debbie works, and the café where bunya baked goods are literally consumed by tourists (ADE Chapter

Twenty-Three). Debbie and her friends also appropriate the term “corroboree” (ADE

Chapter Four) to describe their drumming circles at the creek—and yet Debbie is the source of much of Callie’s awareness of the region’s Indigenous history. The

Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor, as discussed further below, also provided a means to obliquely address histories of violence against and dispossession of

Indigenous people in the area through symbolically aligning the Indigenous, the female, and the natural world.

Women’s Stories of Place Likewise, women’s experiences of the hinterland were not always easy to address.

When Callie remarks on the colonial women’s graves outside Maleny State Primary

School (ADE Chapter Eighteen) she is able to acknowledge an ongoing history of women’s habitation on the range and their participation in its development—as well as processes of colonisation. However, when I grew the story of Debbie’s disappearance out of the hinterland landscape, I did not consciously recognise that I was drawing on real life circumstances. It was not until several months into the research and writing process that I remembered, suddenly, the camping trip we’d taken to Booloumba when I was fourteen, the story of the missing woman on the radio, my sister and I searching the undergrowth as if we might see her, injured or dead. I realised I must have unintentionally resurrected this memory in At Devil’s

Elbow.

As I looked into the stories of the 1990s disappearances, I increasingly came to understand the potency and impact they still have on the community today.

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Friends and relatives of the women still live in the area, and Sabrina Ann Glassop was a teacher’s aide, particularly well-known in the community. Although a man was jailed for the murder of Jessica Gaudie, her body was never found and he has never confessed to the crime. Although police believe the three disappearances to be linked, they were unable to get convictions for Celina Bridge and Sabrina Ann

Glassop, and their murders are still unsolved. When Daniel Morcombe disappeared in 2003, police and media attention shifted from the women’s cases and only recently has the investigation been reopened (Harazim 2014), although media attention remains scarce. However, for the Sunshine Coast hinterland community the women’s disappearances are part of an ongoing, living history, and in the course of my research, even I found several personal connections to the missing women, experiences that drove home how careful I needed to be in referencing these stories in At Devil’s Elbow.

In Nest, Simpson avoids exploiting or appropriating the story of Daniel

Morcombe’s murder by referencing it only through layers of obfuscation and distance. She changes circumstances, names, and the gender of the missing child.

Her protagonist, Jen, is not involved in the investigation but a member of the community, a newcomer who does not know the families. She is an onlooker rather than a participant. When the children’s bodies are discovered, there is no immediacy to the event. Simpson distances the discovery, so that Jen learns about it on the television news (Simpson 2014b, 254), and when DNA tests identify one set of remains as belonging to Jen’s childhood friend, it is reported to her over the telephone (ibid., 271). Simpson’s narrative is less about activating horror or suspense in relation to the children’s deaths than it is about exploring their impact on the community.

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In At Devil’s Elbow, however, the traumatic events and actions are intimate.

The missing woman is Callie’s mother, and I was intentionally making use of the

Gothic as a means to explore the effects of her disappearance on her family. Gothic is a genre that relishes fear, horror, and death and that has a problematic history of rendering the marginalised Other monstrous. I was concerned about my use of the

Gothic becoming exploitative of the real-life stories I was drawing on, rather than a vehicle to draw attention to them as increasingly forgotten and obscured histories of place.

In order to mitigate some of the potential problems with regards to exploitation, I have followed Simpson’s example and obscured the precise details of the real-life disappearances in the creative work. The temporal setting of At Devil’s

Elbow is intentionally vague. Callie only references the time of the disappearances as occurring when she was a child. Whereas three women went missing in real life

(although local rumours put the number much higher), four or five (the number is disputed) have disappeared in At Devil’s Elbow. These disappearances are never officially linked to Debbie’s either—the association is quite clearly a product of

Callie’s imagination.

I was particularly interested in a local bogeyman figure associated with the disappearances, nicknamed the Yabba Grabber for Little Yabba Creek, near the sites of the disappearances. In At Devil’s Elbow, the Yabba Grabber becomes the Trapper, associated with the fictional Trapper’s Creek. This is one of a few instances where I have made up or relocated places in the novel. Callie’s and Sorcha’s homes are based on real locations in the Blackall Range, as are the Bunya Gallery and Café but I have changed their names and exact sites for narrative reasons. Trapper’s Creek is a

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tributary of Booloumba Creek but I have located it further south than Little Yabba

Creek and kept its exact whereabouts vague.

My half-remembered knowledge of the disappearances of Bridge, Glassop, and Gaudie is one example of how the dark writing of place, its repressed or forgotten stories, can manifest in the language of the Gothic. It was through the process of researching and writing At Devil’s Elbow that I recalled the events and realised what an ongoing influence they had on my perception of place. It was suitable, then, and perhaps unsurprising, that the story developed along the lines of the classic Female Gothic.

Female Hinterland Gothic

It was apparent to me from early on that the hinterland in At Devil’s Elbow was not simply a Gothic space but also a feminine one, linked symbolically with Debbie’s body through images of entanglement and decay in a way I did not, at first, understand. Reading Claire Kahane’s (1985) description of the paradigmatic Female

Gothic plot—the daughter’s search for her missing, possibly dead mother, through a

Gothic structure symbolically linked with the female body—I experienced a start of recognition. Although understanding by now that I was writing in a Gothic mode, I had not realised I had also been writing closely to the generic template developed by

Ann Radcliffe. Before writing At Devil’s Elbow, I had never read a Radcliffe novel, or any examples of eighteenth-century Gothic, but I had been a keen devourer of

1960s era “drugstore Gothics”, as well as the Brontës, du Maurier, and Austen’s

Gothic parody Northanger Abbey (1817). Through these, I had clearly absorbed the

Female Gothic plot and its concerns with female entrapment, endangerment, and disenfranchisement—albeit in diluted form.

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Understanding that I was writing into a long-established and ongoing Female

Gothic literary tradition was a pivotal moment in both the critical and creative research. Where I hadn’t felt at home at all within the dominant Australian Gothic tradition, as I understood it from fiction and from the critical articulations of scholars like Gelder and Turcotte (as discussed in Chapter 2: Literature Review), I found I had a creative home within a Female Gothic tradition stretching back to Radcliffe and continuing, even, in the Australian tradition with Baynton, Jolley, and the

Hinterland Gothic authors I had begun to discover. These Hinterland Gothic authors seemed to share my view of Australia’s east coast hinterlands as places marked by violence and imbued with hidden stories and histories of the female, the ecological, and the Indigenous. Scholars of the Female Gothic, including Ellen Moers (1976),

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), Eugenia C. DeLamotte (1990), Deborah

D. Rogers (2007), and Ruth Bienstock Anolik (2003, 2007), had already explored the genre’s concerns with women’s domestic entrapment, the symbolic link between female body and Gothic setting, and the figure of the missing, dead, or otherwise absent mother. Their analyses afforded me valuable insights into the unruly Gothic energies circulating in At Devil’s Elbow.

Deborah D. Rogers (2007, 5) reads the Gothic daughter of Radcliffean

Female Gothic as “matrophobic”; scared of mother-figures, scared of becoming a mother herself, and, above all, scared of becoming her own mother. The daughter’s search is as much about understanding and accepting her own place in a patriarchal society as it is about reconciling (at least symbolically) with her oppressed and abjected mother through their shared experiences of repression under patriarchy.

Radcliffe’s heroines are not rescued by their “feminized heroes” (ibid., 61), but by a simultaneous reconciliation and disidentification with their “powerless mothers”

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(ibid., 38). Even though the Female Gothic traditionally ends in marriage, rehabilitating the questing and questioning daughter into patriarchal social structures, the daughter’s relationship with the hero is “less important than reconciliation with a maternal figure” (ibid., 61). These were all recognisably elements in At Devil’s

Elbow, in which Callie’s search for Debbie was always also about her desire to know her mother, to understand who Debbie was outside her family role, and to reconcile her own conflicting attitudes towards motherhood. As a contemporary, postfeminist subject Callie implicitly accepts Debbie’s right for independence and freedom, and yet she also desires a traditional mother, who will “be around the house” whenever her family wants her, “[m]aybe not for anything in particular, but just to be there”

(ADE Chapter Nine).

Understanding Callie as a Postfeminist Gothic heroine helped me to appreciate and develop the nuances of her relationship with Debbie. Postfeminist

Gothic continues to address mother-daughter relationships and the reality of ongoing female disenfranchisement and gendered violence within a cultural context “which proclaims loudly and consistently that the struggle for women’s freedom is finished” and that “gender equity has been achieved” (Whitney 2016, 2). Postfeminist culture activates a rhetoric of female choice and empowerment (Tasker and Negra 2007, 2) presuming that all women have benefited from the advances made by second wave feminism (the work of which is complete) and that as a result all women’s life decision are feminist choices—regardless of whether the choice is, for example, to remain in the workforce or be a stay-at-home mother (Whitney 2016, 3). Such rhetoric ignores “the social contexts and barriers that shape and bind ‘choices’”

(ibid., 15).

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In an early draft, Callie voices an opinion of her mother’s life coloured by just such postfeminist rhetoric:

She’d been acting like a kid, drinking and smoking and hanging out with her

friends. Neglecting her family. Her responsibilities. Blaming everything on

Dad instead of owning up to the fact that she chose her life, she made her

own decisions (ADE 2011 draft).

In Callie’s mind, Debbie chose her life. She chose to have children. She chose to give up university and a career in order to stay at home and raise them.

Callie sees Debbie’s resentment of her lot in life as a resentment of her husband and children, believing that Debbie made them “the scapegoats for her unhappiness […] like we were holding her back, like we were the reasons she couldn’t have the life she wanted” (ADE Chapter Twenty-Two).

But Callie fails to appreciate that Debbie’s choices weren’t always made freely. In 2017, abortion is still illegal in Queensland. Debbie, as a university student in the 1990s (approximately), was faced with a choice between single motherhood and marriage, and we learn that Pete’s mother pressured the couple into marriage. A combination of socially prescribed gender roles and the uneven career prospects of an artist and an accountant meant that Debbie stayed home to raise the children while

Pete built his career. The late birth of Zeke, just after Callie had started going to school and Debbie had begun to feel she might take back control of her own life, was another setback in a life full of impediments to Debbie’s personal independence and artistic development. Sorcha’s mother, Chris, explains to Callie:

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“Deb had just been thinking about getting her life back, doing something for

herself. Maybe going back to art school. Having a late baby, seven years after

you think you’re finished ….” She shook her head. “Don’t think I’m saying

she didn’t want you all. But sometimes life gives you an unexpected gift, and

it means you have to give up something in exchange. Debbie wouldn’t trade

you kids for the world, but that doesn’t make missing out on other things less

disappointing” (ADE Chapter Twenty-One).

Chris and other characters repeatedly insist that Debbie loved and wanted her children, despite her dissatisfactions with her life. This was not so much an attempt to rehabilitate Debbie from the role of “bad mother” that Schaffer argues is embedded in metaphors of the Australian bush as “harsh, obdurate, fickle, threatening; the one who fails to nurture her children; the one who cannot be trusted”

(1990, 64). Rather, I wanted to undermine the construction of “bad” and “good” mothers altogether. Debbie is neither and both. She is a woman dealing with the complexities of her life in ways that may sometimes appear selfish and irresponsible, sometimes self-sacrificing. Throughout the course of the novel, Callie becomes increasingly aware of the “social contexts and barriers” (Whitney 2016, 3) that have shaped and bound her mother’s choices. Her discovery that her father has not been a perfect husband further unsettles Callie’s perception of her mother’s life, as she realises she has never seen the whole picture.

Callie’s quest to find her mother is, partially, a journey to understand the reasons behind her mother’s choices and resentments, the structural and systemic inequities that dictated her decisions and, crucially, that continue to impact women’s lives in contemporary Australia. Callie, Petra, and Sorcha are no freer from socially

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prescribed gender roles and inequalities than their mothers have been. Callie watches her sister take on Debbie’s domestic role and duties, trying to “fill [her] place” (ADE

Chapter Twenty-Five). Petra’s decision to defer her university studies in order to look after her family and her ambivalence over her secret relationship with Ewan— who represents homeliness and stasis, safety and danger—both repeat Debbie’s quandary of twenty years earlier.

Callie experiences feelings of guilt for what she comes to see as her mother’s oppression and repression. Lucie Armitt writes that the Gothic heroine typically bears some guilt or responsibility for her mother’s death, her backstory often including a mother who died in childbirth, “branding the young woman victim and murderer in one” (2007, 16). Likewise, Helene Meyers (2001, 22) asserts that contemporary Female Gothic texts by white women writers explore their own complicity and guilt in systems of violence and oppression—not just of other women but of other races.

Hinterland Gothic’s activation of metaphors that divide along binaries of natural/human-made and native/non-native suggested possibilities for exploring not only stories of female oppression and complicity but also regional histories of colonial violence against Indigenous people, in which white female characters occupy conflicting positions of guilt and innocence. In developing At Devil’s Elbow I drew on what I had learned from analysing the regionally specific Gothic web of metaphor in other Hinterland Gothic texts.

The Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor in At Devil’s Elbow

A significant finding that emerged from the process of creative writing and critical research underpinning this thesis was my realisation that the hinterland landscape does not function as a mere background or setting for other stories; rather, the

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landscape and stories of the violence done to it are foregrounded. Furthermore, these stories of the environment work as culturally acceptable vehicles through which to metaphorically address those experiences that remain marginalised and repressed in contemporary Australia—and Hinterland Gothic texts do this through the language of the Gothic and the uncanny.

Val Plumwood argues that women and nature are united in their shared experiences of “backgrounding and instrumentalisation” (1993, 21). Both women and nature are “defined as passive, as non-agent and non-subject, as the

‘environment’ or invisible background” (ibid., 4). The environment is backgrounded and intsrumentalised as a provider of resources for human requirements, and women are backgrounded into traditional roles such as housewives, secretaries, nurses, and—especially—mothers (ibid., 21-22). To be cast as nature, Plumwood argues, “is to be defined as a terra nullius, a resource empty of its own purposes or meanings, and hence available to be annexed for the purposes of those supposedly identified with reason or intellect, and to be conceived and moulded in relation to these purposes” (ibid., 4). Not just women but non-white Others are also cast into the role of passive, backgrounded nature in such binaries.

Keetley (2016, 10) suggests that when the natural world refuses to be backgrounded and instead actively obtrudes itself on human perception, horror and terror are created. This, I argue, is what occurs when the Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor is activated. Through the Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor, the natural environment is uncannily foregrounded and metaphorically linked with the

Indigenous and the female, becoming a conduit for these other stories.

Unlike stories of violence against women or against Indigenous peoples, stories of ecological violence are openly addressed in At Devil’s Elbow and other

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Hinterland Gothic texts—the deforestation caused by timber-getters, the incursion of foreign weeds like lantana, the plundering of the bunya pine, the damming of the Obi

Obi. I would argue that this is due to more than the green consciousness that is present in many hinterland communities, or the fact that the landscape itself is a key attraction in hinterland tourism. Rather, the texts’ recognition of and focus on environmental damage and changes wrought by colonisation is possible because “the ability to tame and improve the landscape” (Smith 2006, 171) has functioned as a means of asserting white Australian ownership and belonging. Stories of violence against women and Indigenous people, which do not assist and even undermine, such narratives, remain culturally taboo topics that are less directly addressed. However, through metaphorically linking the environment, women, and Indigenous people, the

Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor functions to voice or gesture towards those taboo topics, revealing the traces of dark writing inscribed on and in the hinterland landscape.

Of the six categories of Hinterland Gothic metaphor identified by this thesis—water, weeds, trees, animals, earth, and the human-made—At Devil’s Elbow makes greatest use of water, weeds, and the human-made. I reflect on some of these usages below, and highlight how I both draw on and further develop the Hinterland

Gothic web of metaphor as it has been used by the other writers discussed in this thesis.

Water Creeks in At Devil’s Elbow are liminal spaces. The creek at the bottom of Callie’s yard is a threshold zone, a meeting and crossing place, situated, as Callie imagines it, between “[t]he two safest places in the world” (ADE Chapter Twenty-One), her own home and the Friedrickson farmstead, whose lights shine “like beacons on the other

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hill, my second home” (ADE Chapter Six). Because the James and Friedrickson children have played at the creek for years, it is a site of comfort and familiarity. But it is also a place of fear, associated with the bogeyman-like Trapper and dark hollows and secret dangers hidden beneath the surface. Callie imagines the creek banks riddled with “underwater caverns” (ADE Chapter Ten) where frightening creatures might live. The creek is, as well, a site of sexual encounter and potential sexual danger.

In early drafts, the creek in At Devil’s Elbow was not a sinister place; it was simply a place of meeting, of friendship between the James and Friedrickson families. Depictions of creeks as dangerous, secret, unpredictable, or sexual sites in

Hinterland Gothic texts such as Salt Rain, Mullumbimby, and Deeper Water, however, led me to develop the creek’s darker qualities in At Devil’s Elbow. In what became a pivotal scene, Callie, suspecting Ewan of having murdered her mother, comes across him with Petra in the creek, late at night:

The first thing I saw was the white of my sister’s limbs, of her arms outflung

along the bank. She was twined into it the way the tree roots were twined into

it, holding herself up above the water. Moving against her, the muscles of his

back moving beneath his skin, liquid as the clear water that slides over stones

in the shallows, his movements as sinuous as a water snake’s, his hair

dripping black, was Ewan. My sister made a sound, a groan. Not an everyday

sort of noise but a midnight sound, a secret sound, the sort I thought a woman

in labour might make, and her body convulsed, her hands came up and

gripped Ewan’s hair and he strained against her and she flung back her head

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and I saw her long hair, wet and dark as blood in the moonlight, mingle with

the dirt (ADE Chapter Thirty).

Sexual pleasure and physical danger are inextricable in Callie’s perception within this scene. Ewan, persistently linked with water in the third sentence becomes elemental himself, taking on water’s dangerous qualities, and also becoming connected to the Trapper, whom Callie associates with the creek. Petra’s hair, like spilled blood in the dirt, foreshadows later images of Debbie’s death, as imagined by

Callie when she visits Devil’s Elbow Lane:

I imagined standing at that spot and staring at the freshly-slashed ground

where she had lain for so long. The ground that had soaked up her blood and

bodily fluids as she had putrefied and decayed. The ground where insects

scurried and burrowed, taking tiny of parts of her with them (ADE Chapter

Thirty-Four).

Callie also persistently imagines all the creeks of the range as connected, an uncanny network traversed by the inescapable Trapper, who glides along the waterways “as swift as an eel” (ADE Chapter Ten). The Trapper is an ambiguous figure representing not only violence against women, associated as he is with a series of women’s disappearances when Callie was a child, but also with colonial violence against Indigenous people and the environment. As Pete explains to Nan, the origin of the creek’s name is unknown. It dates back to “the old timber-getting days” (ADE

Chapter Fourteen) when the forest around the creek was logged, and may relate to colonial hunting practices, or may have been a settler’s name. Equally, however, it

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could be related to a violent historical event or massacre, as is Murdering Creek on the coast.

Baroon Pocket Dam also functions as a Gothic site and a link in the chain of water metaphors established within the text. Callie explains how the site of the bunya festivals—located in the valley behind the Friedricksons’ farm—was flooded to form the dam and describes the drowned valley in Gothic terms:

I couldn’t help but imagine the valley as it would be now, the ghostly

waterfall still running beneath the surface of the dam. The trees reduced to

rotted stumps, the grass transformed to long, waving streamers of weed. We

drank the water that came from that dam, and so did most of the coast, and

suddenly it seemed to me sort of macabre. Like drinking rainwater pooled on

a grave (ADE Chapter Thirteen).

Through descriptions such as these, water in At Devil’s Elbow becomes haunted, metaphorically linked with instances of violence against women and

Indigenous people and functioning as a means to bring those stories closer to the surface of representation.

Weeds In At Devil’s Elbow the metaphor of weeds prevalent in the Hinterland Gothic texts examined in Chapter 5: A Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor changes somewhat. Whereas other Hinterland Gothics tend to focus exclusively on non-native weeds, rarely mentioning or gothicising other plants, At Devil’s Elbow brings a range of flowering plants not generally considered weeds into its web. Lantana is the central symbol in At Devil’s Elbow’s web of metaphor, alongside other pest plants

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such as morning glory, with its poisonous seeds and “pale purple flowers with dark throats turned up towards the sky” (ADE Chapter Twenty-One) and “thick, tangling kudzu vine” (ADE Chapter Twenty-Four). However, hibiscus plants also have

“flowers as red as the inside of mouths” (ADE Chapter Four); frangipani trees have branches like a “dead man’s fingers”, and their fallen white petals turn “brown and rank, bruised” (ADE Chapter Six) in a manner that suggests the contemporaneous decay of Debbie’s body; and nasturtiums, seeds for which are given Zeke by his mother’s killer, are associated with the maternal because they can be suckled for honey-like nectar (ADE Chapter Nineteen). These and other flowering—generally non-native—plants are included in At Devil’s Elbow’s network of gothicised vegetal matter, complicating the divisions between plant and weed, ugly and ornamental, useful and useless.

Lantana, however, remains the dominant metaphor in this category in At

Devil’s Elbow. An early reader pointed out that my use of lantana was strikingly similar to that of the 2001 film Lantana. The film—directed by Ray Lawrence and based on the Andrew Bovell play Speaking in Tongues (1998)—opens with a long panning shot over the green leaves and bright flowers of a lantana thicket. Slowly, the camera delves into the dark depths beneath the canopy. Closing up on the lantana’s brittle, brown stalks the camera finds a bloodied foot and traces the leg down, the leg seeming to blend, to be a part of, the labyrinth of stalks. Slowly, the camera pulls back to reveal an unidentifiable woman’s body tangled in the lantana thicket. The film, which is largely set in the hilly, forested suburban areas just outside Sydney (which could be called its hinterlands), activates uncertainty—about the location of this particular lantana thicket, about who the dead woman is, who is responsible, and when the death occurs. Finally, it is revealed that the woman’s death

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was only a tragic and mundane accident—in the manner of the Female Gothic’s explained supernatural, discussed further below.

The film’s use of lantana draws conceptually on Eleanor Dark’s in Lantana

Lane and longstanding cultural uses of and attitudes towards lantana (Beal 2004,

124; Fisher 2006, 10). In Lantana as in Lantana Lane, lantana figures as a Gothic repository, a place for hiding—“When you are at your wits’ end to get rid of something, it is the local custom, hallowed by long usage, to Throw it Down in the

Lantanna” (Dark 2012, 105).

Lantana’s excess, its flourishing and tangling, its deceptively bright canopy, covers up a silence, a secret. In the Gothic, excess points to something unsaid, something unseen. The Gothic unspeakable is not just silent, it “exceeds language”

(Leach 2011, 31). The unspeakable manifests as proliferation, an abundance of articulations or meanings that speak around an unrepresentable void. According to

Nathaniel Leach, to activate the unspeakable through excess is an ethical approach to telling stories of traumatic experience or marginalised Others. Through an “ethics of excess” (ibid.) such experiences are “shown to be irreducible to the artificial structures of language and narrative” (ibid., 34). An ethics of excess recognises that violence “inheres within all language” (ibid.) and rejects to claim “mastery of the experience of the life of the Other” (ibid., 34–35). Within lantana’s tangling stalks are ravelled up all the complexities of colonial, patriarchal, and ecological violence and oppression.

In At Devil’s Elbow, Callie conceives a horror of lantana after she learns it has been Debbie’s “shroud” (ADE Chapter Thirty-Two). Lantana becomes associated with secrecy, death, decay, and violence:

206 Chapter 7: Reflective Practice

I look along the banks of the creek, to where the lantana dips its leaves in the

water. But in my mind this is Trapper territory too. And the lantana. I can’t

get it out of my head, the image of the hillside where she lay for so long. My

mother’s bones, tangled in lantana.

As we sat in our living room with policemen turning our words into

scrawled black notes, her body was slowly bloating under the summer sun.

As bacteria broke down the haemoglobin in her blood, the cells burst open,

decorating her flesh with a road map of red streaks along the veins. Her skin

would have been fragile, blistering beneath the surface with fluids. Her

beautiful red hair would have come off in clumps if touched. She was right

there. So close (ADE Chapter Forty).

Because it is located all over the range, along roadsides and creeks, within the domestic space of the James’s yard, lantana becomes—like creeks and waterways— an omnipresent symbol of threat, of excess, and invasion—a Gothic labyrinth stretching across the range. In the image of Debbie’s decaying skin marked with “a road map of red streaks”, lantana links as well with roads.

(Hu)man-made Roads are a prominent feature in the hinterland landscape, their steep descents, smooth bends, and spectacular views attracting weekend drivers and motorcyclists.

They are also sites where accidents and collisions occur frequently, dangerous to wildlife as well as humans—as Jen experiences in Nest when she strikes a kookaburra in her car. In At Devil’s Elbow, Debbie is killed on a road by a drunk driver. The road and car culture, as discussed in Chapter 5, are persistently imagined as sites of male violence and colonial enterprise (Gibson 2002; Gelder 2007, 2012;

Chapter 7: Reflective Practice 207

Johinke 2009). Australian men are statistically much more likely to engage in dangerous, negligent, or drunk driving than women (ABS 2010) and male binge drinking and alcoholism is the focus of much media and popular cultural attention.

Debbie’s death as the result of the actions of a drunk driver is, thus, linked with dysfunctional Australian masculinity. Pete may not be the direct agent of her death, but he is implicated as part of a dysfunctional Australian masculine culture. His repressive attitudes towards Debbie’s role as wife and mother cause many of the problems in their relationship, and his infidelity is a large part of the reason why

Debbie is walking on the dangerous mountain road at night.

Other elements of the built environment in At Devil’s Elbow also contribute to the Gothic web of metaphor, and link to other elements; the barbed wire fences that mark boundaries but are encroached on by morning glory, lantana, and orange trumpet creeper; the “motley buildings” (ADE Chapter Thirteen) of Montville which

Callie perceives as false and fragile, uncannily “teetering out over the sidewalk […] sickeningly superficial” (ibid.). The space of the James home, which would usually be a site of entrapment and menace in the Female Gothic remains surprisingly benign, even when Callie is grounded. The Friedricksons’ house, however, Callie’s

“second home” (ADE Chapter Six) operates by proxy as a Gothic space when she begins to suspect the men at the farm of involvement in Debbie’s disappearance:

At night, when I looked out across the gully to Sorcha’s house, it no longer

looked to me like a beacon blazing on the hill. Instead, all I could see was

how the darkness crept over it from the east, coming up out of the deep valley

that now held the dam, spreading out from beneath the boughs of the trees,

from the eaves of the dairy. How it crowded up against the walls of the house

208 Chapter 7: Reflective Practice

and the workers’ cabins, only held at bay by windows glowing with artificial

light (ADE Chapter Twenty-Six).

As well as the built environment, the Gothic web of metaphor in At Devil’s

Elbow also extends into the categories of trees, animals, and earth and in various places throughout the novel I have made use of these not only to generate a sense of place—for example, by naming and describing trees and birds commonly found in the region—but also to activate the Gothic. However, these elements have been less central to the development of the novel’s themes and its Gothic effects.

Narrative Voice, Structure, and Point of View

Throughout the writing process, problems with voice, structure, and perspective have recurred. It was important for me to understand what perspective and position Callie was narrating from—what her attitude towards and knowledge of her mother’s death is when she begins to narrate, and why she tells the story. From the beginning I envisioned a retrospective narration, similar to that in Jane Eyre, in which Callie narrates from some distant present and recalls the events of her mother’s disappearance. However, the original opening line, “My mother’s bones lay tangled in lantana” (ADE 2011 draft) made it clear right away that Debbie was dead. A later version, “My mother disappeared in spring” (ADE 2016 draft) obscured the fact of her death but made her disappearance—presumably long term—apparent. Both these approaches effectively defused the Gothic, and early readers suggested that I needed to withhold this knowledge. Gothic fear is, after all, the fear of uncertainty, of the not quite known. Edmund Burke located sublime terror in “dark, confused, uncertain images” (Burke 2008, 63). Sublime terror erupts in the face of uncertainty, of what is imperfectly seen or obscured: “it is our nature, when we do not know what may

Chapter 7: Reflective Practice 209

happen to us, to fear the worst that can happen; and hence it is, that uncertainty is so terrible” (ibid., 83).

In experimenting with narrative point of view and structure as I attempted to rectify this problem, Callie’s narration has variously been written in past tense, present tense, first person, and third person, and I have experimented with including other narrators and points of view as well—Petra’s, Pete’s, Debbie’s, and Sorcha’s.

Ultimately, however, I decided a retrospective narration allowed Callie to have a more mature and reflective voice. Although Gothic heroines are often very young,

Gothic novels are not necessarily young adult—even if they have often been read by young adults, as Catherine Morland’s enthusiasm for “horrid” novels in Northanger

Abbey attests to. Callie’s voice as a sixteen year old girl often tipped At Devil’s

Elbow in younger territory, and I did not see it as a young adult novel.

There was also the question of how much Callie would know, how much information she could believably share with the reader. Whereas in Nest Jen can lecture young Henry on the history of the bunya pine, or think of the region’s

Aboriginal history when she looks at a red cedar, a sixteen year old might not have the same level of knowledge. Debbie, and the stories she has told Callie, became a conduit for knowledge about place, which had the added effect of figuring bonds of belonging or home through stories shared between mother and daughter. It was also the case that that the project of withholding information from the reader for the purposes of creating uncertainty and suspense worked better when I limited the narrative point of view to Callie’s.

Despite this, I wanted to include Debbie’s voice in the text, rather than reducing her to an unknowable absence. Debbie has been a slippery character to write—and name—from the first. For a long time she was nameless, just “her”,

210 Chapter 7: Reflective Practice

“she”, “Mum”, Pete’s “wife”. I tried out various names for her—Lillian, Carolyn,

Carol—before I fixed on Debbie. It was longer before I could imagine her voice, and for a time, I believed maintaining her silence was the most effective approach. Part of the horror and pathos of the story is that, even after the James family finds out how Debbie died, they (and the reader) will never truly know what happened in the last moments of her life. Callie will never really know or understand her mother, or be able to develop a relationship with her. Zeke will grow up without her. Petra will not have her mother’s guidance as she decides whether to stay with Ewan or go back to university. However, by giving Debbie’s point of view I could challenge some of

Callie’s perceptions of her character and motivations, and by beginning the novel with the uncertain moment where a car approaches Debbie on the dark road I could generate suspense.

For these reasons, I have bookended the text with third-person, present tense accounts of Debbie’s journey up the range and her death. However, many of Callie’s internal reflections about her mother and imaginings about where she might be also take place in third-person, present tense, which introduces some ambiguity around the status of the narrator in these sections. They may be Debbie’s point of view, or they may be Callie imagining her mother’s experience. This is further complicated by Callie’s continuance of present tense, although in first person, in the novel’s final scene.

From the earliest stages of the project I knew that I wanted At Devil’s Elbow to have a mundane, even deflating ending in which all Callie’s imaginings of conspiracy and murder are found to be wrong. However, the real horror of the breakdown of the James family, of betrayal, misunderstanding, and death would

Chapter 7: Reflective Practice 211

remain. This is, I realised later, an essential feature of the Radcliffean Female

Gothic: the explained supernatural.

In this trope the Gothic heroine’s “irrational fears of ghosts, skeletons and supposed murders” (Knowles 2007, 144) are given mundane, rational explanations. It should be noted that the supernatural is not “‘essentially’ a defining component of the Gothic” (Mighall 2003, xix), and can be exchanged for anything sublime, chaotic, or terrifying that “transcends human reason” (Aguirre 2008, 3). In At Devil’s

Elbow, Callie’s fears of murder and conspiracy function as the “supernatural” threat.

Critics are divided as to the ultimate function and effect of the explained supernatural. Montague Summers called it “A stupid convention” (quoted in Castle

1995, 120), and for Fred Botting the device “excites, frustrates and ultimately disappoints readerly curiosity” (2007, 173). In restoring rational, conventional order, the explained supernatural is often considered a conservative device. However, Terry

Castle, reading Radcliffe, argues that the explained supernatural in fact generates lingering unsettling effects:

The supernatural is not so much explained in Udolpho as it is displaced. It is

diverted—rerouted, so to speak, into the realm of the every day. Even as the

old-time spirit world is demystified, the supposedly secular world is

metaphorically suffused with a new spiritual order (Castle 1995, 124).

In Castle’s reading, by explaining the supernatural, Radcliffe does not lay it to rest but instead effects its integration into everyday life. Its effects are not defused but diffused. Likewise, Rogers recognises that the “[d]eflating and mundane” (2007,

41) explanations of Radcliffe’s novels may not convince the reader as effectively as

212 Chapter 7: Reflective Practice

the heroine that the threat was all in her imagination, and instead leaves a lingering sense that “some of [the heroine’s] fears may be justified” (ibid.). The revelation that the human psyche can be the locus and driver of fears and neuroses can be just as, if not more, unsettling than the fear of the supernatural (Romero 1979, 575–576), and the reality of “conspiracy and persecution” (Botting 2005, para. 8) often remains in the real actions of the text’s human villains. Once the supernatural is explained, heroines are left to confront the more mundane, everyday structures and horrors that caused the phenomena they mistook for the paranormal. Often, these invisible structures working on women’s lives—such as gender, race, and class—are more terrifying than the imagined spectres, because they are inescapable and real.

Postfeminist Gothics even more strongly “suggest that female persecution complexes are justified; indeed, female paranoia seems not only a reasonable but also a necessary survival strategy” (Meyers 2001, 112). These narratives often refuse closure and instead take “uncertainty a step further by not always providing definitive resolutions” (ibid., 23). Whereas Anne Williams had argued that the

Female Gothic “demands a happy ending” (1995, 103) in conventional marriage,

Postfeminist Gothic heroines “are denied any assurances of security” (Meyers 2001,

40).

In At Devil’s Elbow, the revelation of Debbie’s death by accident, caused by a drunk driver’s hit and run, fits with the contours of the explained supernatural.

Although the cause of death is mundane, deflating Callie’s “irrational fears”

(Knowles 2007, 144) of murder and conspiracy, it is also the effect of real social problems that are particularly linked with Australian masculinity. Debbie’s death is not a punishment for maternal aberrance, for being a “bad mother”. Rather, she is killed because she is returning home, to her family and her role as a mother and wife.

Chapter 7: Reflective Practice 213

If she had chosen to run away, she would have survived. The heroine of classic

Female Gothic gives up her name and identity when she marries (Williams 1995,

103). For Anolik, this is a symbolic social and legal death (2003, 26) as the wife’s identity is subsumed within her husband’s under the doctrines of coverture and primogeniture. Although occurring within a contemporary context, Debbie’s death can nonetheless be read as a symbolic extension of the subsumation of her identity beneath the roles of wife and mother as a result of her decision to return to conventional structures of marriage and family.

I did not want the sense of the Gothic to be extinguished at the end of At

Devil’s Elbow, because the threat, ultimately, is not overcome. The “problematics of femininity” (Kahane 1985, 336) that Callie confronts—repressive attitudes towards motherhood and female freedom, male violence and carelessness— remain intact.

However, the final scene of the first completed draft of At Devil’s Elbow has the

James family scattering Debbie’s ashes in the ocean, a restorative act that ultimately defuses the Gothic. In the final draft presented here, I wanted to forestall a sense of closure and instead highlight the remaining mysteries surrounding Debbie’s death, those final moments that the family will never know, the fractures that have opened up between Callie, Pete, Petra, and Zeke that may not ever fully heal. The James family will never entirely recover from Debbie’s death or the events of the story. For this reason, I decided that, rather than spread Debbie’s ashes as a cathartic symbol of release, the James family would divide them up, dismember them, some spreading them in the very landscapes Callie has conceived such a horror of—the creeks and hillsides of the range—and some choosing to keep them, stored in the living room display cabinet along with Debbie’s jewellery and artwork, an homage to the classic

Female Gothic in which women “just can’t seem to get out of the house” (DeLamotte

214 Chapter 7: Reflective Practice

1990, 9). I also rejected any symbolic closure in marriage by having Jess plan to leave the range.

Conclusion to Reflective Practice

The story of At Devil’s Elbow has grown out of the sense of place I experienced in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, out of historical research and textual analysis, and out of my awareness that At Devil’s Elbow writes into and out of a range of traditions— the Female Gothic, Australian Gothic, and Hinterland Gothic.

The Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor was developed both in response to the landscape and to the process of critical research. By bringing the hinterland landscape into the foreground I was able to both generate a strong sense of place and gesture towards the silenced stories and histories of violence against women and

Indigenous people. Lantana emerged as the text’s central Gothic metaphor and can be considered, I would argue, a Hinterland Gothic, and indeed an Australian Gothic, metaphor par excellence, signifying excess, vegetal horror, and the postcolonial uncanny and capable of binding up in its tangling stalks a wide range of cultural material.

In the next chapter I will review the arguments made by this thesis, articulate key findings and conclusions, and suggest future avenues of research.

Chapter 7: Reflective Practice 215

Chapter 8: Conclusion

Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Maria Beville argue that the Gothic can function as a perspective on the world or on events, forming “a unique part of personal and cultural expression” (2014, 3). Through Gothic frames, “[c]ertain events and realities

[…] become ‘Gothicised’” (ibid.). Not just fictional worlds, but readers’ realities are perceived through Gothic “filters” (ibid.). Throughout this thesis I have explored the ways in which Australians perceive east coast hinterlands through a Gothic filter, identifying a distinct and heretofore unrecognised strain of Hinterland Gothic literature emerging from Australia’s South East Queensland and northern New South

Wales hinterland regions—a tradition to which At Devil’s Elbow belongs.

I have argued that Hinterland Gothic can be read as a continuation of the

Female Gothic in postfeminist, postcolonial Australia. Like the castle in the classic

Female Gothic, the hinterland is symbolically linked with the female or maternal body, and through this space Gothic daughters quest for their absent, dead, or missing mothers. Hinterland Gothic texts use stories of the environment as particularly visible and culturally acceptable vehicles to address those experiences that remain marginalised and repressed in contemporary Australia—the female and the Indigenous. The landscape, however, is not simply a passive background or projection screen—its own stories are at the forefront of representation.

In some respects, the hinterland landscape itself appears to lend itself to

Gothic representations, especially in the tradition of the Radcliffean Female Gothic, linking mountains, forests, and sea. Australia’s east coast hinterlands, the land behind the coast, exist for many Australians as both real and imaginary spaces beyond the everyday activities of metropolitan life. In At Devil’s Elbow and the other Hinterland

Chapter 8: Conclusion 217

Gothic novels identified by this thesis, the hinterland is a liminal zone located between the coast and the natural barrier of the Great Dividing Range, between

“known”, quotidian Australia and the mythologised space of the interior. Lush, fertile, and green, the hinterland disrupts essentialist depictions of the Australian environment as hostile, barren, and dry, which have served ideological functions in

Australian nationalist cultural traditions.

On the alternative ground of the hinterland, I have argued, dominant cultural narratives grown out of these nationalist traditions can be unsettled and rescripted. At

Devil’s Elbow and other Hinterland Gothic texts use the hinterland as a heterotopic counter-site in which marginalised stories of the female, the Indigenous, and the ecological are privileged. In many of the texts identified by this thesis as Hinterland

Gothic, the Gothic operates as a mode rather than a genre, and it is not always mobilised intentionally. Recognising that a strength of the Gothic is its ability to articulate, or at least draw attention to, the unspeakable or repressed, At Devil’s

Elbow further explores and develops the relationship between the ecological, the female, and the Indigenous through consciously activating the Gothic, in particular to explore the ongoing repression of the mother in contemporary Australia and to bring to the surface marginalised stories and histories of the hinterland’s Indigenous significance. By mobilising a regionally specific web of Gothic metaphor drawn from the hinterland landscape, including lantana, creeks, rainforest, roads, and barbed wire, At Devil’s Elbow explores the dark writing of place, its hidden and overwritten stories and histories—female, Indigenous, and ecological. Thematic concerns with the marginalised and unspeakable are manifested in terms of liminality, the uncanny, and excess.

218 Chapter 8: Conclusion

Findings and Significance

In Chapter 1: Introduction I have introduced the new critical concept of the hinterland as a specific geographical and cultural space that lends itself particularly well to Gothic modes. This theory of the hinterland as a Gothic heterotopia in which cultural norms can be reflected, inverted, and rescripted underpins the thesis as a whole. The three east coast Australian hinterland regions on which the thesis focuses,

Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast hinterlands, and the Northern Rivers hinterland region in New South Wales, are shown to share certain geographical, cultural, and historical similarities beyond their shared designations as hinterlands.

Further research, however, has revealed just as many regional differences between these spaces, indicating that even Hinterland Gothic cannot be considered a uniform and unified category.

Chapter 2: Literature Review intervened in studies of Australian Gothic by dismantling the myth of essentialised and universalised Australian landscapes on which much of the genre’s foundational criticism relies. This chapter argued that rather than conceiving of a single, monolithic category of Australian Gothic, criticism should recognise an interlinked body of Australian Regional Gothic. It identified an emerging body of work on Australian Regional Gothic, including

Desert, Bush, Tropical, Northern, and Tasmanian Gothic, and considered how

Hinterland Gothic fits within this catalogue while also extending on common critical approaches by combining feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical analyses to a greater degree. The survey of existing scholarship on and creative work about Australian east coast hinterlands reveals a vibrant tradition of cultural production, both Gothic and otherwise, about these regions which, I have argued, has grown significantly since the turn of the millennium.

Chapter 8: Conclusion 219

In Chapter 3: Research Design I brought together a range of theoretical approaches within Gothic studies—spatial, postcolonial, ecocritical, and feminist—to construct a hybrid analytical lens through which to study selected Hinterland Gothic texts, as well as the landscape of the Blackall Range in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. I also outlined the bricolage of methods used in the thesis, including textual analysis, reflective practice, and adapting Paul Carter’s method of “ground truthing” (2010) as a means of tracing the spatial history of the region.

Chapter 4: A Spatial History of the Blackall Range, Queensland put a range of these theories and methods into practice in its analysis of the landscape that inspired and provided a setting for At Devil’s Elbow. This chapter directly addressed the first research question: What does an analysis of Australia’s east coast hinterlands as Gothic heterotopias—cultural counter-sites—reveal about the marginalised or unspoken stories of place, the dark writing of the hinterland?

Exploring the literature, history, landscape, and culture of the Blackall Range

I uncovered the traces of its dark writing in repressed stories of colonial violence against Indigenous people as well as a more recent history of femicidal violence in the disappearances of a series of women in the late 1990s. These traces were evident within the landscape itself—in the false architecture of Montville, the prevalence of lantana, the cleared fields, and remains of rainforests—as well as in written traces, such as Vance Palmer’s often telling ambivalences and omissions and the Gothic undertones in Eleanor Dark’s Lantana Lane. I found that, read as a heterotopic space, the hinterland can be seen as an alternative zone in which marginalised aspects of national identity and culture are explored both in literature and life.

The findings and insights arrived at in Chapter 4 informed the textual analysis conducted in Chapter 5: A Hinterland Gothic Web of Metaphor in which

220 Chapter 8: Conclusion

I analysed a range of South East Queensland and northern New South Wales hinterland texts, specifically addressing the research question: How can a regionally specific Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor be used to create atmospheres of uncertainty and dread, while also ethically treating marginalised or unspoken stories of place?

The chapter identified six interrelated categories within what I have called the

Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor: water, weeds, trees, animals, earth, and the

(hu)man-made, and analysed the ways Sarah Armstrong, Jessie Cole, Eleanor Dark,

Melissa Lucashenko, and Inga Simpson have made use of its elements as a means of articulating or gesturing towards the marginalised stories of place. It found that

Hinterland Gothic texts share a concern with mother-daughter relationships played out on and through the hinterland landscape. The privileging of female voices and experiences intervenes in the masculinist tradition that sites the iconic locales of outback and bush as both the paradigmatic or only Australian spaces, and as predominantly masculine. Maintaining the connection between woman and natural world, these texts rescript the cultural values ascribed to each. Hinterlands are homely, fertile, lush, sublime and beautiful. They are, like the women who live in them, scarred by male and colonial violence. The landscape is not a locus of threat, but it is a site of Gothic energies.

With the exception of Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby, the Hinterland

Gothic texts analysed in this chapter were written by non-Indigenous women, who veer between acknowledging and obscuring their uncanny positions as oppressed subjects of patriarchy and complicit in racialized systems of oppression. In

Mullumbimby, the female and Indigenous experience are much more intertwined and equally weighted than in the other texts, in which the Indigenous remains largely

Chapter 8: Conclusion 221

silent and latent. Non-Indigenous female authors, however, were able to use the shared experiences of oppression and violence of Indigenous people, the natural world, and women to speak about all three at the same time, through the Hinterland

Gothic web of metaphor. This articulation was channelled through, rather than projected upon, the natural world. The natural world in Hinterland Gothic is not inert matter for other stories to be projected upon; rather, the history of ecological degradation and violence in hinterland regions is often foregrounded and explicitly addressed.

This chapter also identified a range of strategies for using the Hinterland

Gothic web of metaphor, including using “acceptable” or known histories of ecological violence to stand in for unacknowledged or repressed stories of violence against women and Indigenous people; using anthropomorphism and attributing agency through the use of active verbs to the non-human environment, including animals and plants; using place names and associations to indicate unspoken pasts; using binaries such as native/non-native to link otherwise dissimilar elements together, but allowing for slippage between categories; relying on a gradual accrual of meaning across the network of metaphor; and leaving room for the reader to interpret obscurity and uncertainty rather than employing didactic direct references.

A key finding from this chapter was that even within the geographically, culturally, and climactically proximate hinterland settings analysed regional differences existed. New South Wales hinterland texts such as Salt Rain,

Mullumbimby, and Deeper Water drew far more heavily on metaphors of rain, flood, and creek, than did either Nest or At Devil’s Elbow, set in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. The Northern Rivers region has a strong association with rivers and experiences rain and flood with more frequency than the elevated Blackall Range. In

222 Chapter 8: Conclusion

contrast, Nest and Lantana Lane mobilised metaphors of plants and weeds, particularly the regional icon lantana, to much great effect. From this it can be concluded that Australia’s hinterlands are both a kind of space, generalised and mythic, and a series of discrete localities with their own histories, features, and cultures that nonetheless partake of the general character accorded to the hinterland in the Australian imagination.

Having presented the abridged creative work At Devil’s Elbow in Chapter 6,

Chapter 7: Reflective Practice then brought together the findings and concerns of the previous chapters in order to reflect critically on the writing process. I identified ethical difficulties that arose around the appropriation of Indigenous stories and the treatment of traumatic local events that remain part of the living history of the

Sunshine Coast hinterland. I also considered the difficulties in using the Gothic in order to treat sensitive subject matter, given its sometimes exploitative and sensationalising tendencies and analysed some of the ways I used Hinterland Gothic web of metaphor both to generate uncanny atmospheres and to gesture towards the dark writing of place.

The Indigenous experience of the hinterland, however, was not my story to tell—especially given that the Blackall Range is a particularly spiritually significant region. Likewise, the story of Callie’s missing mother was indelibly linked with the stories of women who had gone missing in the Blackall Range area, and I had to mediate between the Gothic’s ability to animate the unspeakable through metaphors of liminality, excess, and the uncanny, and its concurrent tendency to exploit, render monstrous, and marginalise the Other

An exciting area for future study that has emerged during the course of this research is the possibility of a Melbourne or Victorian Hinterland Gothic in literature

Chapter 8: Conclusion 223

and television. As discussed in Chapter 2, Joan Lindsay’s classic Australian Gothic novel Picnic at Hanging Rock can potentially be read as a Hinterland Gothic novel, and other recent texts set in and around the Macedon Ranges and Gippsland region, such as Peggy Frew’s Hope Farm, the television movie Little Oberon, and the television series Glitch suggest an ongoing engagement with Victorian hinterlands through a Gothic lens.

Although my focus has been on east coast Australian regions commonly labelled hinterland, future research may also consider the question of whether international hinterlands share similar qualities. Hinterland may also be applied to smaller scales, referring to, for example, the hilly forested areas of suburban Sydney depicted in Lawrence’s Lantana.

Hinterland has proven to be a useful critical term, capable of bearing the weight of definitions and associations it has been freighted with in the two centuries since it entered into the English language. Ultimately, too, the Gothic has provided a flexible and poetic language for talking around gaps and silences, for drawing attention to the dark writing of the hinterland, its broken and incomplete stories, without attempting to appropriate or destroy them by bringing them fully into the light.

224 Chapter 8: Conclusion

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Appendices

Appendix A

Sunshine Coast Hinterland, Queensland

Figure 15. Sunshine Coast hinterland map (Queensland Government Statistician’s Office 2011b). .

Appendices 265

Appendix B

Gold Coast Hinterland, Queensland

Figure 16. Gold Coast hinterland map (Queensland Government Statistician’s Office 2011a).

266 Appendices

Appendix C

Northern Rivers Region, New South Wales

Figure 17. Northern Rivers map (Regional Development Australia 2017).

Appendices 267

Appendix D

At Devil’s Elbow Chapter Eighteen–Chapter Thirty-One

CREATIVE WORK EMBARGOED

268 Appendices