Atopian landscapes: gothic tropes in Australian film, theatre, and literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Gothic has been a pervasive trope in Australian narrative fiction, in part because European settlers found the isolated land alienating and strange, a place of exile. This presentation examines the connection between disturbing aspects of the settler-colonial experience and the perpetuation of the Gothic mode in contemporary Australia. Springing from an interest in experiences of displacement, I investigate how landscape and location are mediated in Australian Gothic narratives from Marcus Clarke’s 1878 novel For the Term of His Natural Life and its many cinematic and theatrical adaptations, through the desert Gothic in Kenneth Cook’s novel Wake in Fright (1961) and Canadian director Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film of the same title, to contemporary films such as The Daughter (Dir. Simon Stone, 2016). I argue that Australian Gothic texts are defined not only by characteristic settings and themes, but also by the figure of the outsider. Geographer Edward Casey’s concept of atopos, which means “no place,” or “strange,” relates to the sense of estrangement that accompanies the experience of place in Australia’s Gothic landscapes. Accordingly, this examination of the recurring figure of the outsider, immigrant, convict, or traveller investigates how atopia relates to a uniquely Australian sense of place in Gothic narratives. Atopia is powerful in its self-reflexive capacity to foster an appreciation of home. Indeed, concepts such as home, belonging, and emplacement can’t fully be grasped without invoking their opposite—displacement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".