Hinterland Gothic: Subtropical Excess in the Literature of South East Queensland

Emma Doolan

doi:10.25120/etropic.18.1.2019.3679

Abstract

South East Queensland’s subtropical hinterlands—the mountainous, forested country lying between the cities of the coast and the Great Dividing Range—are sites of a regional variation of Australian Gothic. Hinterland Gothic draws its atmosphere and metaphors from the specificities of regional landscapes, climate, and histories.In works by Eleanor Dark, Judith Wright, Janette Turner Hospital, and Inga Simpson, South East Queensland’s Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast hinterlands are represented as Gothic regions “beyond the visible and known” (“Hinterland” in Oxford Dictionaries Online 2019), where the subtropical climate gives rise to an unruly, excessive nature.In Gothic literature, excess is related to the unspeakable or the repressed. Bringing Gothic, postcolonial, and ecocritical perspectives to bear on the literature of South East Queensland’s hinterlands reveals a preoccupation with the regions’ repressed histories of colonial violence, which are written on the landscape through Gothic metaphors.

Highlights

In works by Eleanor Dark, Judith Wright, Janette Turner Hospital, and Inga Simpson, South East Queensland’s Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast hinterlands are represented as Gothic regions “beyond the visible and known” (“Hinterland” in Oxford Dictionaries Online 2019), where the subtropical climate gives rise to an unruly, excessive nature
This paper surveys a selection of literature set in or written about Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast hinterlands by writers including Vance Palmer, Judith Wright, Janette Turner Hospital, Eleanor Dark, and Inga Simpson
The landscape retains histories of colonial and ecological violence which return to the surface through Gothic metaphors of excess drawn from the subtropical environment: invasive lantana, treacherous mountain roads, rainforest vines, felled trees

Summary

Approaching the hinterland

The hinterland texts surveyed here are not necessarily generically Gothic, and the use of Gothic landscape metaphors is not necessarily intentional, but Gothic motifs within these texts give rise to a pervasive sense of the uncanny that can be linked to a national unease about unacknowledged aspects of Australia’s past and present. While recognising the shifting and uncertainly bounded nature of the hinterland, this paper focuses on a narrower definition of hinterland, focusing on those areas where the label “hinterland” adheres in local, administrative, and tourism discourses—in particular, the Blackall Range in the Sunshine Coast hinterland and Mt Tamborine in the Gold Coast hinterland It highlights overlooked Gothic representations of these subtropical landscapes in literature and supplements Blair and McKay’s catalogues of hinterland literature with some more recent works. The hinterland, for both Blair and McKay, is a region of contrast: for McKay, between the urban coast and the rural hinterland The overwhelming excess of subtropical hinterland nature contrasts against the imposed order of European building and agricultural practices, gesturing towards something left unspoken in the text

Into the Hinterland

Scarred postcolonial landscapes

Landscapes of contrast and excess

Conclusion