Associate ProfessorPeter Kirkpatrick

The poet Judith Wright once wrote that, for non-Indigenous Australians, the landscape ‘has been the outer equivalent of an inner reality’ where, for all its promise of ‘newness and freedom’, there persists an underlying sense of displacement and what she called ‘the reality of exile’. The ‘gothic’ has offered a powerful means of expressing this dystopian theme, along with some of the historical traumas and lingering fears that continue to unsettle Australian culture. ‘Weird Melancholy’ (working title) is a book-length study of some of the key gothic themes and tropes within Australian literature and cinema, from early colonial poetry to contemporary horror films.