Catherine Nosky

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, that history can tend to be, you know,

more gruesome than the general.

The islands are the places of extremes in that sense.

And Marcus Clarke, and for the term of his natural life, has got wonderful scenes on the islands off the coast of Tasmania where things are detached and set loose and become so much more heightened because of that.

Absolutely.

And there is a lot of them.

I think Elizabeth McMahon, who's an academic at the University of Sydney, has done some amazing work on islands and the Australian imagination and how they function.

That was a big part of the research that went into the writing of the book was that background on how an island functions, how it works.

The first draft of the novel was written as part of my PhD at Monash University.

My PhD was in creative writing, so it involved a creative artefact and an exegesis, so a critical response.

And the exegesis I wrote was considering how colonial writing had a legacy in contemporary literature.

So a lot of my research was looking at tracing some of the elements of colonial diaries, of

The emergence of the Australian Gothic in that period of Australian literature and looking at how contemporary writing had both inherited that history and how it could turn away from some of those manoeuvres, try and find different ways to approach the landscape and approach writing.

Australian place, which tried to speak back to some of that colonial instinct and some of that colonial heritage or admit to what the reality of that was and speak to some of the effects, some of the trauma and some of the violence of colonisation.

What do you mean by the Australian Gothic?

The Australian Gothic was sort of been a genre in Australian literature that's really got that long history in our first writing as our first nation writing, if that makes sense.

When Australian Federation was happening and a lot of nationalistic energy was happening, we started devising our own types of literature as well.

And the Australian Gothic was a very early genre in that sense.

It's