'"What sort of spot is Port Arthur?": For the term of his natural life and the Tasmanian gothic'

Abstract

...Tasmanian Gothic cinema... tends to be a response to its dark and wet landscapes, which register a paradoxical sense of beauty and menace. The dramatic inclines of Tasmania's topography, its volatile climate, together with the wild and dense temperate forest, which covers a third of the state, form a forbidding mise-en-scene suggestive of a Gothic sublime... The island continues to be cast, derisively as well as romantically, as a strange outpost that harbours secrets. Tasmania is the end of the line. There is nothing new about the Tasmanian Gothic. In The Life and Adventure of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) Charles Dickens has his hero, Augustus, fearfully write about his imminent voyage to Van Diemen's Land and imminent death: 'Ere this reaches you, the undersigned will be - if not a corpse - on the way to Van Diemen's Land'. In 1874 Marcus Clarke's seminal novel 'His Natural Life' engagingly narrativised the nightmarish miasma that would inform all future texts exploring the theme of the Tasmanian Gothic and the subject of convictism. In his description of this frightful milieu, Clarke histrionically introduces Van Diemen's Land in the following fashion: the sea-line is marked with wrecks. The sunken rocks are dismally named after the vessels they have destroyed. The air is chill and moist, the soil prolific only in prickly undergrowth and noxious weeds, while foetid exhalations from swamp and fen cling close to the humid, spongy ground. All around breathes desolation; on the face of nature is stamped a perpetual frown..