Strange dreams and unforgiving landscapes: Australian Gothic and the prose poem

The Australian Gothic is rooted in loss, alienation and angst, concerned with boundaries, transgression and the horror of the “unseen, or the half-seen – the repressed matter that threatens to return” (Doolan, 2019). As a genre which turns on “the perceived hostility of the natural environment, the violence of colonisation … and fears of the racial Other” (Doolan, 2019), it is also embedded in complex ideas about the uncanny, the haunting of borderlines and margins; liminal spaces in which conceptions of belonging, dispossession, and the body interact in uneasy ways; and abjection. While there is significant scholarship on the Australian (colonial) Gothic in relation to cinema and fiction, its connection to poetry is relatively neglected. In this paper we consider the broader implications of prose poems by Samuel Wagan Watson, Thomas Shapcott, Ania Walwicz and Meredith Wattison, as well as prose poems of our own, focusing on how the Australian Gothic may be understood as a form of neo-Gothic, and how the Australian neo-Gothic prose poem possesses an uncanny ability to subvert traditional colonial notions. In doing so, we argue that the Australian neo-Gothic prose poem, partly due to its hybrid form, is well suited to recognising that tragic colonial histories are simultaneously past and present in a postcolonial world – a form of haunting in which violent encounters may not be safely relegated to the past or contained within static visions of time and place.