Australian Gothic

Abstract

The Gothic came to Australia as an imported literary genre that quickly adapted to local conditions. Early colonial explorers evoked the foundational tropes of the Gothic as they made their way into the Australian interior, so that the desert and the bush could seem - in an explorer's gloomier moments - as ancient and godforsaken as any ruined castle. As Roslyn Haynes has suggested, colonial explorers could slide from an exhilarating sense of the interior as an endless wide-open space to an often overwhelming feeling of “enclosure and entrapment” expressed in Gothic terms (Haynes 1999: 77). The explorer's psychological condition found its reflection in the landscape, especially when the earl..