It’s curious how little attention has been paid to the Gothic tradition in Australian literature compared to that accorded to some other cultural forms, notably architecture and cinema. Australian literature boasts a rich history of narratives focussing on distinctively Gothic concerns: identity fragmentation, psychic and bodily disintegration, difficult liminal states, transgression of boundaries, and spatial oppressions. Perhaps the peripheral status accorded the Gothic in Australian literary studies is an unspoken strategy for resisting the ‘colonial’ presence in the nation’s literary heritage, or reflects an oblique deference to the original English models that cannot conceive of their transplantation elsewhere. Even one of the most prominent Australian theorists of the Gothic in other settings, Ken Gelder, has not up till now fully applied the concept to Australian examples, preferring in this context to focus more explicitly on the ‘ghost story’ or the truncated category, ‘Goth fiction’.¹ Yet the term ‘Gothic’ is not only fruitful in considering Australian fiction of the past; it is also amenable to more contemporary ‘multicultural’ uses, not least if we view it as more than just a genre, or a kind of writing, and regard it also as a mode of representation and a way of thinking about certain issues. The Gothic, because of those central concerns with which it grapples (transgression, excess, ugliness, violence), can be liberated from its historical, cultural and ideological particularities and may encompass divergent histories, cultures and ideologies beyond Western paradigms.

Gothic fiction is well known for its deployment of space to mirror psychological ruptures and oppressive states of being. Whether it is the menacing ‘out there’ (forests infested with brutal bandits, the denuding postmodern cityscape), or, more insidiously, the domicile which has become unheimlich (or unhomely), Gothic spaces discomfit their inhabitants’ sense of coherence and stability; they acquire an excessive dimension that disturbs security and familiarity because this ‘excess’ is precisely unspeakable, unknown or unknowable. A Gothic refraction that is distinctively Australian can be traced in the fiction of Australia from colonial times, and even in postcolonial works in which the settings or spaces are not confined to Australian territory.