Tasmanian Gothic
A densely populated Europe of the Industrial Revolution prompted Urban Gothic literature and novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).
Frederick Sinnett (founder of the Melbourne Punch),[4] writing in 1856, considered traditional gothic romanticism inappropriate to Australian literature precisely because the colony lacked the requisite antiquity.
[6] The dramatic landscape and impenetrable rainforests of Tasmania and the real and imagined brutality of the original penal colony provided a ready source of horror stories.
Unsettling events such as the story of Alexander Pearce, the wandering cannibal who roamed through Van Diemen's Land in the 1820s, also influenced the bleak and sinister atmosphere that provided an ideal setting for gothic fiction.
Benjamin Duterrau's historical epic painting, The Conciliation, which depicts the signing of a treaty between George Augustus Robinson and Indigenous freedom fighters, provided a foundation for Tasmanian Gothic.
These families passed on stories of hardship, of encounters with Aboriginal people, convict servants, bushfires and floods as surrounding forests were cleared for farmland.
[9] During the 20th century, a new generation of artists and authors living and working in Tasmania began to explore the gothic sensibility, drawing on Tasmania's colonial and more recent history for bizarre people and events, factual or imagined, and creating a uniquely Tasmanian stock of gothic characters and situations: deranged convict escapees ("bolters"), cannibals, corrupt and drunken officials, tough women, troubled and homesick immigrants, malevolent forest spirits, deformed halfwits and feral backwoodsmen, set among spectacular mountains, remote forest camps and Tasmania's crumbling penal colony infrastructure.
[10] Works by novelists Richard Flanagan, Christopher Koch and Chloe Hooper are regarded as a continuation of the Tasmanian Gothic tradition.
[12] Rohan Wilson won the award for his 2011 novel The Roving Party, a historical "re-imagining" into the misdeeds of John Batman and the band of convicts and Aboriginal trackers he led through Van Diemen's Land in 1829.
