"Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern," wrote Marcus Clarke in 1867. "Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle in their black gorges a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade."
The English-born Clarke coined the term "weird melancholy" in a preface he wrote for fellow writer Adam Lindsay Gordon's Sea Spray and Smoke Drift. His description of our landscape has now been attached to an exhibition of paintings and photographs at the The Ian Potter Museum of Art, subtitled "The Australian Gothic".
For curator Suzette Wearne,Clarke's writing offered a new way of looking at the landscape and the art that has come from it. For among the frowning hills and grotesque and ghostly animal life, there was, he wrote, beauty to be found for those who learn to decipher "the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write". So too in "the hieroglyphs of haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue". It just takes a certain kind of looking.
In curating an exhibition of the University of Melbourne's 18th and 19th century painting and photograph collection, Wearne sensed anxiety, claustrophobia and fear. Prevailing views around these works focus on the idea that they express optimism, reflecting the excitement Australia's early settlers felt about the bucolic tranquillity of this promising new land and their desire to forge a spiritual union with nature, the freedom they felt being in such wide, open spaces. But these weren't the emotions she felt when she looked at the works. Even in the archetypical works of the Heidelberg school such as Frederick McCubbin's Lost Child she saw it: "the real, palpable fear people of that era had of being swallowed up and consumed by the bush".
She was puzzled by this romantic idiom, employed to make a hostile land seem more palatable for audiences in Britain and here. And the contradiction between it and the anxiety expressed in the journals of settlers and explorers Burke and Wills, Charles Sturt and Ernest Giles. "Their accounts are written in very gothic tones as if they're describing a haunted house."
She sensed the same feeling of eeriness in a von Guerard lithograph of giant tree ferns. "Like John Skinner and many other artists, he had a fascination for these Jurassic-looking ferns. But rather than a classic celebration of the sublime majesty of nature, they evoke a sense of claustrophobia, as if there's no way out."
Wearne was drawn to the idea that gothic fiction emerged in England at the same time as Australia was being colonised and settled; explorers to the Antipodes wrote of discovering a land that was dark and disorienting, stricken with heat, bushfires and floods.
She decided to build an exhibition around the theme of the Australian gothic; a popular framework for studying fiction and film, but hitherto a little underdone in the visual arts. She wanted to explore a counter narrative to this prevailing idea of Australia as a land of promise; she wanted to explore the fear.
The Australian gothic is a special place: while the endangered heroines and violent predators of the traditional gothic genre remain a mainstay, the bush assumes the role of the haunted house (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Wolf Creek). Wearne speaks of the recurring motif of the dead gum tree: "Almost every artist includes it, the dramatic icon of a splintered trunk pointed up to the sky with an ominous, snake-like quality."
As for the repressed "other", another central trope of the gothic tradition, Wearne posits that our collective repressed is haunted by the ghosts of our indigenous past. She suggests "a fear of retribution for the mistreatment of Aboriginal people explains the menace projected onto the landscape in the Australian gothic. Where Aboriginal presence is denied, or repressed, the landscape is embedded with this trauma - the ghosts of the brutal colonial encounter."
In building the exhibition, Wearne began with two cornerstones. The first was Fred Williams' Sherbrooke Forest. Rather than an enchanted wood, Wearne felt Williams' eucalypt saplings resembled prison bars. "People tend to look at him as an artist who engaged only with the idea of form, but there's a kind of anxiety that penetrates his practice. There's a moodiness and darkness of the tone of that painting that says something about the nature of Australian forests."
The second was Arthur Boyd's Spring Landscape, an ironic title, she felt, given its desolate depiction of windswept trees, birds in flight and grey, moody clouds. "In the centre of that work is a little figure bent over a fence and it seems to me highly symbolic of man's futility in their attempts to domesticate the land and contain the forces of nature."
Also enveloped in a sense of stifling closeness is a photo of a family of settlers on horseback standing inside a giant gum tree. Taken in Gippsland in 1901, Wearne felt that despite being an ethnographic work, in conveying "the dogged determination of the settlers to really penetrate the land" it was decidedly gothic in its approach.
The exhibition spans work from three centuries; Wearne felt it was important to reach from colonial to contemporary practice to show the vitality of the gothic theme. She was also keen to include work by indigenous artists; Leah King Smith's playful yet poignant use of gothic tropes made for a perfect fit. In the 1980s King Smith undertook a project at the State Library of Victoria working with 19th century photographs of Aboriginal people on missions.
"Leah describes this sense of anger and resentment at what those images represent but also this feeling of connectedness she felt looking into the eyes of these Aboriginal people in the photographs. She layered those images over images she'd taken of the Victorian bush and then photographed them with a fish eye lens." In effect, she readdresses the absence of Aboriginal people by placing them back in their landscape.
The exhibition has a magnificently eerie feel about it; Wearne says she wasn't tempted to create any "light moments" in the gloominess, but rather to let people relish the power and foreboding our land can exert. The exquisite terror, if you will, of being dwarfed by nature.
Weird Melancholy: The Australian Gothic is at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, until August 9.