Austral Ancestors in Ernest Favenc’s Frontier Gothic

This article argues that ageing and ancestry is integral to Ernest Favenc’s late-colonial frontier Gothic writing. Through his repeated attention to scenes of settler death, and his creation of ghostly seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century explorers, Favenc makes the desert a graveyard and generates sets of settler ancestors, who stake a claim on the land for Euro-Australians. Written in a context of ‘doomed race theory’, which recognised Indigenous generational presence yet foreclosed their futures, white Australians in Favenc’s work become a younger ‘first’ peoples with their own history of dying on the land, just as older Aboriginal Australians en masse are written as going extinct. Whereas ageist rhetoric in the late colonial period indexes Aboriginal Australians as decrepit and weak, white remains and ghosts in Favenc’s works articulate age as a positive, as settlers dying on the land become ancestors. Favenc’s Austral ancestors enact a replacement narrative, writing over Indigenous peoples and further legitimising settlement. Reading ageing and ancestry in Favenc’s frontier Gothic therefore augments understanding the colonial Australian Gothic as imbricated in the settler-colonial project rather than unsettling it.