How the Australian Gothic genre of storytelling became uniquely Australian and uniquely queer

The Australian Gothic has had an interesting evolution from racist colonial rambling to respected literary genre to relatable meme.

The sun creeps under your curtains, bleaching everything it touches. The hills hoist sings as it spins, though there is no breeze. You should be safe in your bed. A magpie swoops you anyway.

The Australian Gothic has had an interesting evolution from racist colonial rambling to respected literary genre to relatable meme. Taking the meat of Gothic conventions and stewing them in an Australian setting, the end result is a genre of storytelling that, along with its problematic history, is always uniquely Australian — and uniquely queer.

Unlike the crumbling castles, medieval decor, and icy winter hellscapes that we expect from Gothic classics such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Castle of Otranto — the Australian Gothic employs the same spooky vibes but in sun-drenched outback settings full of snakes and spiders.

Never one to take itself too seriously, the Australian Gothic is often laced with melodramatic characters and camp scenes giving these stories a sense of humour, but also lending themselves to queer readings. In fact, many would argue that the Gothic is ideally suited to discuss queer desire because, quite frankly, there are a lot of parallels between the way Western society fears vampires and the way it fears homos.

As a genre which is conventionally drawn to historical settings, the Gothic has the ability to rewrite queer people — especially women and non-binary folk — back into the histories from which they have been marginalised. It’s also important to recognise that the Australian Gothic was initially used by white invaders to position themselves as victims of the hostile upside-down Australian landscape.

Today, the genre has been taken up by Indigenous writers such as Alison Whittaker, Ali Cobby Eckermann, and Kim Scott evoking the Australian Gothic to explore the violence and subsequent silence of Australia’s colonial past and present.

For literature that challenges the image of the historical Australian as a straight white man bravely pioneering all over the bush, the Australian Gothic has evolved to offer something unique to queer readers today.

Themes such as a preoccupation with the unconscious mind, the unspeakable, the repressed coming to the surface, and the transgression of boundaries - physical or social. These are all themes prevalent in the Australian Gothic.

Sound familiar? That’s because it sounds pretty gay.

The Gal Pal-isation of Sapphic Yearning

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) by Joan Lindsay, along with Peter Weir’s 1975 film of the same name, is often cited as the gold standard for Australian Gothic - and for good reason. The book is full of Gothic imagery warning the school girls of the venomous snakes, the “jagged line of rock cutting across” the skyline, the trees with “leaves hanging limp in the noonday heat.” In the Australian Gothic, the natural landscape is the spooky castle, while the sun is a force that can take life just as easily as it gives.

The story has been criticised for its (lack of) portrayal of Indigenous people. In her introduction to the 2019 edition of the book, Romy Ash says, “contemporary readers might infer a disconcerting sense of terra nullius to the text.”

The book is also teeming with queer subtext, ever threatening to simmer to the surface and boil over as the girls strip off each layer of European clothing unsuited to the Australian climate.

Hypothetically, if we were to do a queer reading of Picnic at Hanging Rock, it would look something like this:

1.     The opening chapter and Valentine’s Day setting sees all the girls expressing their love for each other and exchanging love letters. This is pretty damn sapphic.

2.     Specifically, Sara Waybourne’s love for Miranda is referenced throughout the whole story — she writes poetry about her, she carries Miranda’s portrait around everywhere, she misses their goodnight kisses. You can’t tell me that they are just gal pals.

3.     Michael and Albert’s storyline is a prince and pauper meets Brokeback Mountain whirl wind romance that ends with them running away together. At no point do they say, “no homo”.

All of which can be added up to say that the entire book is an allegory for the fatal consequences of trying to fit into a society that represses your identity, in a place where you clearly don’t belong.

The Gothic has always been a space to examine anxieties and fears, specifically straight men’s fear that a hot sapphic is going to crawl out of the shadows and steal their girl.

Sapphic desire is particularly suited to the Gothic because of the way Western history has denied its existence. As Queen Victoria famously proclaimed, “I ain’t afraid of no lesbians,” history has treated the lesbian like a ghostly figure lurking in the shadows. Carmilla is the classic example (was lurking the original yearning?) but Picnic at Hanging Rock doesn’t feature any villainous queers in this way.

Instead, there is a repressed sexual charge between the entire cast of characters that sees them strain against the rigid rules of their English boarding school incongruously peeking through the trees of the Australian bush.

I would argue that this book represents a turning point in the development of the Australian Gothic. While still not entirely self aware, this text provides an important foundation on which future generations of literature can build. 

Picnic at Hanging Rock can be read as feminist and queer. It can also be read in a multitude of other ways. The reason this text has endured in the Australian literary consciousness for so long is precisely because of this complex layering. It is worth criticising, and it is also worth enjoying. It is after all, a very fun book — an element of literature that is thoroughly underrated in academic circles.

Camping it up in the Outback

There is a certain ruggedness that we associate with the Australian outback that makes a butch sapphic figure believable, but renders an effeminate male figure out of place.

This is essentially the premise of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It’s funny because drag queens belong in cities. They would never survive in the rough, red dirt of the Aussie outback.

The film carries many of the markers of an Australian Gothic tale, such as the hostile landscape, the harsh sun, the fear of the Other (in this case, homophobic small town locals), characters being haunted by their past, not to mention drag as one of the most obvious and transgressive ways to cross an arbitrary societal boundary. And yet, this film is rarely considered Gothic.

Mad Max: Fury Road, however, is considered a classic of Australian Gothic cinema. While also being a fast-paced action movie, the film features a hostile landscape, harsh sun, fear of the Other (in this case, rival groups competing for resources), characters being haunted by their past, not to mention Furiosa’s blatant crossing of a physical yet arbitrary boundary by smuggling the only supermodels left in the world out of their prison.

A large vehicle makes a long and treacherous journey through the red dirt of the Australian desert. The travellers face many obstacles along the way, and at times they only just escape with their lives. At other times characters perform atop their large vehicles while in motion in an over the top display of their prowess. In the end they survive the harsh journey by working together and finding the strength to go back to their roots.

As you can see, Mad Max: Fury Road and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert are essentially the same movie. So what makes one Gothic and not the other - the soundtrack?

Australian Gothic is always a debatable label – anything that fits into this genre will also fit somewhere else. One of the core traits of the Australian Gothic is that it is resistant to definition and constantly in development. Much like queerness.

While Mad Max: Fury Road is a gritty action movie in which all the actors are very good at the broody and smouldering facial expressions, there is also a campness underscoring the action which gives the film a similar sense of humour to Picnic at Hanging Rock. The famous guitar guy shredding away on his double-necked flame throwing guitar in order to motivate the Warboys (I would also argue that “Warboys” is a pretty camp gang name, by the way), or the costume design — especially that of The People Eater (Mayor of Gas Town) with his dusty business suit featuring perfectly tailored Regina George-style nipple holes complete with decorative chain clamped onto each nipple.

As a side character with minimal dialogue, whose function in the plot can be summarised as “one of the bad gays”, The People Eater’s identity and sexuality is irrelevant. But also, I’m getting they/he late-in-life-bi vibes.

A bit of camp is definitely conventional of the Gothic. But perhaps at a certain level of campness a film stops being Gothic and starts being a comedy. And yet the opposite of comedy is not Gothic — it’s tragedy. By and large, queer audiences today are not yearning for more tragedies.

Perhaps the Gothic offers a way to explore queer stories that are not all sunshine and rainbows, but at the same time not all doom and gloom. Even though ‘doom and gloom’ sounds exactly like a Gothic tale — but the Australian Gothic is known for its representation of the sun!

Since the 1970s queer writers have been using the Gothic to bring queer representation “out of the shadows”— but this trend is lagging behind in Australian publishing. In what is comparatively a small industry, “there is certainly scope in the Australian literary landscape for more historical queer content.”

So, Are We There Yet?

Today the Australian Gothic is not just a genre of literature and film, but also a genre of meme. This most often takes the form of text posts on tumblr, using dot pointed micro fiction to connect to a sense of place from a local perspective and highlight the Gothic in the everyday.

I recently read 40 of these posts (the most I could find on blogs that are still active) and didn’t come across a single queer moment. In trying to capture the Australian experience, the queer experience has been left out. Keep in mind these are not published stories with plots or characters per se — more akin to a literary Pinterest board. But this is why reading older Australian texts with a queer lens is important. Often we have to find ourselves between the lines, but we can be found. Otherwise it’s easy to assume that queerness is irrelevant to Australianness.

Rhiannon Wilde’s 2022 novel, Where You Left Us, is an Australian Gothic queer coming of age story which follows two sisters navigating mental health and relationships as they uncover their family’s mysterious past. Set in a small seaside town, this text evokes the Gothic within a coastal landscape rather than the outback. It also employs a contemporary setting, rather than historical. But the Gothic motifs of graveyards, family ghosts, and well-timed thunderstorms create the perfect context in which queer themes can be taken seriously without heading into tragic territory.  

Wilde strikes a delicate balance between cosy and Gothic, drama and levity, perhaps as a result of targeting a younger audience, but perhaps also as a reflection of the trend away from tragedy within queer storytelling.

This is what the Australian Gothic can offer queer stories today. We can be written back into histories that sought to eliminate us, and we can explore the present with more nuance than a comedy/tragedy binary might allow. We can connect with a sense of place, and a sense of identity. Most importantly, we can have fun and be ourselves.

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Emily White is a writer and performer from Boorloo/Perth, currently living in Turin, Italy. They are an advocate for ecofeminism and a high fibre diet.