Stolen Spirit: The Gothic Reconstruction of Aboriginal Identity

Aboriginal Gothic begins as a refusal of a convenient inheritance. The European Gothic arrived in Australia with its familiar machinery of haunted houses, ancestral crimes, spectral returns and threatened innocence, but on this continent those conventions could not remain merely decorative. Transplanted onto stolen land, the Gothic’s old anxieties about inheritance, legitimacy and buried violence acquired a sharper historical charge. What had often functioned as a “silencing discourse” within colonial writing—casting Indigenous presence as primitive, uncanny, vanishing or monstrous—becomes, in Aboriginal Gothic, a means of writing back to Empire. The genre turns the settler’s own imaginative apparatus against him.