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 Richard Watts looks at the prevalence of the Gothic in Australian art.
"Long before the fact of Australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers, it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters ... and with the advent of the transportation of convicts its darkness seemed confirmed. The Antipodes was a world of reversals, the dark subconscious of Britain. It was, for all intents and purposes, Gothic par excellence, the dungeon of the world,” writes Gerry Turcotte in his chapter in the collection, The Handbook of Gothic Literature.
As Turcotte observes, the Gothic (by which we mean a literary or artistic style characterised by gloom, the grotesque, and the supernatural) has long been a part of Australian culture. Even before Australia graduated from being a penal colony to a nation in its own right, a Gothic sensibility was expressing itself ‘down under’.
“From its inception the Gothic has dealt with fears and themes which are endemic in the colonial experience: isolation, entrapment, fear of pursuit and fear of the unknown,” Turcotte claims, and one doesn’t have to look hard to find evidence supporting his theory in Australian fine art.
From the Gothic melodrama of Frederick McCubbin’s 1890 painting A bush burial, to Albert Tucker’s vivid reactions to wartime morality in his Images of Modern Evil series (1943–1947), explorations of the Gothic are plain to see. Nor should it be thought that the mode was restricted just to the visual arts, and literary works such as ‘Fisher’s Ghost’ and the various melodramas about ‘innocent’ white women abducted by ‘pitiless blacks’ that abounded in the colonial era.
Axeman Lullaby is the latest creation of Melbourne dance company BalletLab, and seeks to explore the Gothic as evoked in Australian cinema of the 1970s. Films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Last Wave (1977) and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) offered up a vivid exploration of the uneasy relationship between white settlers and the bush; and have now inspired BalletLab’s Artistic Director, Phillip Adams, in the creation of his latest work.
“Growing up in Australia in the 1970s and 80s, I witnessed a flood of films that captured that very raw and experimental identity about Indigenous myths and offered this very eerie portrayal of our landscape, its past and its future,” Adams says.
“I vividly have this horrific memory of seeing The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith as a young man. This Gothic cinematic experience, where an Aboriginal man chopped up a bunch of white women in a house in central NSW, certainly left its mark on me.”
For the dance work, Adams has re-imagined Thomas Keneally’s novel, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, on which the film was based.
“I use axes live on stage [and] at the same time I project footage from the film, of the beheading of the women and the killing in the house, onto a pile of wood in the theatre. It’s my aim to bring that sense of hysteria and displacement that cinema captures to the stage.”
BalletLab’s Axeman Lullaby at Chunky Move Studios, August 7-17. www.balletlab.com
Photo: Jeff Busby
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