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The term Tasmanian Gothic refers to the dark body of literature, art and film which emerges in waves, like the return of the repressed, from the psyches of those held in the thrall to this island. From the time Marcus Clarke wrote For the Term of his Natural Life to the era of MONA, Tasmanians have used art and literature as a way to process the dark history of our home. Though not everyone knows it Tasmania is the only place where war has ever been declared and fought on Australian soil. The so-called Black War involved casualties on both sides as a determined and desperate indigenous population fought to retain their land. The old people of this place had amazing guerrilla skills, evading detection even when a line was formed to walk across the island to flush them out. But of course the invaders had millenniums worth of experience with warfare which had bred fire power weapons, not to mention immune systems used to dealing with things like smallpox. Not only were many Aboriginal people slaughtered indiscriminately or wiped out with disease, concentration camps were formed and the survivors rounded up and sent to these unsalubrious locations where nearly all of them perished. To make matters more awful, if such had in fact seemed possible, there were then instances of grave robbing and the taking of skeletal trophies, both to adorn private collections, museums and sent back to Britain for supposed scientific reasons.
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Tasmania also became famous for a colourful example of cannibalism involving a man named Alexander Pierce and his fellow escaped convicts. Among the other melancholy features of the landscape is our tendency to use the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian Tiger, now extinct, as a emblem of our island identity. This when combined with the fact our other unique animal is known as a devil and the brutalities of the convict system here, mysteries like the one The Kettering Incident is based on, and the silence of some of the almost uninhabited places here, have all combined to create around our home a brooding sense of melancholy through to dread which has been well exploited in literature, film and art.
Peter Pierce in his article for Island Magazine on the Tasmanian Gothic suggest that the term has been used too widely and lacks precision, with many examples better described as melodrama, And whilst for the matter of literary criticism he is no doubt certainly correct that there is a certain indiscriminate quality to what is lumped under the heading of Tasmanian Gothic it is virtually indisputable the idea will continue to exist in the Tasmanian psyche and has only been solidified recently by things like Dark MoFo. At the end of the day our history is fraught with traumatic material that must be processed through the group psyche in some way. We are haunted by a partly suppressed knowledge that what is done to our brother is also done to ourselves.
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We, whether we feel it as moderns or not, are part of the land we draw sustenance from, and thus cannot help partaking of its memory. As John Donne put it: 'Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for thee.' As James Boyce put it: 'We live with a terrible silence.' And taking a leaf from the New Sincerity we can be aware of the shallowness of tourist campaigns, of the ghoulish, fetishising aspect of this appearance of embracing the dark heart of our history. Yet this self awareness needn't, and simply doesn't, remove the necessity to grapple with that history, which does not consist only of things that happened in the past but as the Tasmanian Gothic author Christopher Koch put it: '...connect the present to the past. These form the lattice of history, both personal and private, and this is why the past refuses to be dismissed. It wants to involve us in new variations; and it's dead wait for their time to reappear.'
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For it appears there is something fertile about the darkness, the trauma-bruise, Tasmania has, after all, the largest number of poets per head of population than any haven in this world. This is a rich site of creativity and unique expression, regardless of what one chooses to call the more gothic expressions. Tasmania has Underworld heft behind it, as a creative identity, in a way few parts of Australia do.
Van Diemens Land is not just an old term for Tasmania it points to a time in Tasmania's history when things could have gone more than one way, before the respectable Tasmania of free-settlers and wealth was attempted, a Van Diemens Land known for its lawlessness, buggery, and godlessness. It was known as The Devil's Playground, just as today the island is sometimes called the Island of Poets, the Apple Isle, and the Land of Rainbows (for it's frequent combinations of rain and sun and skies that resemble a Turner painting). In her soul, known as Trowenna by the old people, this land contains all those extremes, from hell hole to island paradise, from cleanest air in the world, to a bleak history of genocide.
Explore some of my work in the genre of Tasmanian (or VDL) Gothic at my blog: Out of the Bridgewater Jerry.