Haunted Country, Convenient Ghosts: Settler Vulnerability and Indigenous Absence in Australian Gothic

This essay argues that the Imperial Gothic lays a foundation for Australian culture by organising artistic representations of place around settler unease and white vulnerability. Its most durable mechanism is the "White Vanishing" trope, which transforms the colonial landscape into a scene of disappearance and mourning. In colonial art, this appears through the visual grammar of the lost child and the bush as entrapment. In literature and film, it becomes a national myth in which white absence stands in for origin, belonging, and victimhood. In music and contemporary Gothic forms, it persists as a melancholy aesthetic that allows white Australia to mourn itself with impressive stamina. Across these mediums, Imperial Gothic does not merely decorate Australian culture with fog, rocks, shadows, and ominous trees. It supplies a structure of feeling: one in which settlers become the haunted, the land becomes the threat, and Indigenous presence is made to vanish without ever quite disappearing.