AustLit

"Using the philosophical position of phenomenology, this article examines the ways in which ideas of wildness combine with Australian Gothic tropes such as the white colonial lost child and the bush as a haunted locale to compose key features of an Australian ecoGothic. On St Valentine’s Day in 1900, three young Australian girls and their teacher disappear from a school picnic at the ancient site of Mount Macedon in Victoria. The analysis of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), which focuses on author Joan Lindsay’s posthumously published chapter eighteen (1987) examines how elements of the material, sensing world combine with the mythological or sacred to connect the human protagonists with the Gothic landscape they inhabit. The resulting intersubjectivity problematises colonial ideology and unsettles notions of national identity." (blurb)