Unsettled Belonging: The Contemporary Australian Gothic Landscape

Contemporary Australian Gothic is most revealing when it stops treating terror as an exotic disturbance and recognises it as a condition of habitation. In a settler society, the home is never simply home: it is a legal arrangement, a story of possession, a marketable address, and a denial rehearsed until it begins to sound like common sense. The Gothic’s familiar grammar of haunting, secrecy and return therefore acquires a local sharpness. What comes back is not merely a buried crime but the unfinished structure that made ordinary life possible: dispossession, racial classification, migrant dislocation, gendered looking, and the national appetite for heroic self-description.