Catherine Nosky

stories which speak to what people in that era saw as wrong in the Australian landscape.

So what sort of period?

So we're talking around the 1890s here, even a little bit earlier, through to the very early 1900s.

And it inherited from the Gothic of England, so those very classic Gothic texts of Anne Radcliffe and that sort of thing, the vampires and castles and all of those wonderful creepy things.

very traditional Gothic elements, but in the Australian setting that became instead the bush or, you know, Indigenous people, Australian Aboriginals as the creepy spectres within the space.

And it sets up a very direct relationship between white Australian bodies and the Australian landscape that contemporary fiction has tried to undo and contemporary fiction is trying to speak back to.

So it's an interesting heritage to trace through our literature.

So you might have noticed that at the start of my book I have a sort of fake colonial diary, which is part of pointing to that tradition in Australian literature.

So some of the writing that I have on my bookshelf is very much going back to that tradition.

colonial space and to the Australian Gothic in Australian literature.

So there's the short story collections of various people, Barbara Bainton, Henry Lawson, and there is alongside that some colonial diary writing.

But the texts that I think were most interesting to me are actually a little bit later than that.

And one of the most important was Randolph Stowe's Tourmaline.

It might not be a novel that's terribly well known.

Randolph Stowe's better known for The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea.

But Tourmaline's one of my favourite of his books.

And it's about a small community in the Wheatbelt or the Goldfields in WA who...

Sort of enter into a collective madness following a very enigmatic preacher who emerges from the desert.

So it's got a lot in common for me in terms of how small communities latch on to beliefs and how they become desperate followers, turning to a single figure as a figure for hope.

There is some, yeah.