AustLit

Author's note: 'The point here is that I'm supposed to write a story. And I think the best way to do it is to re-write Heart of Darkness but set it in Central Australia. I see similarities between the Congo Interior and the Outback, in their isolating immensity. There are parallels between Kurtz's Inner Station and the violence of colonial history. That violence, through various guises, has seeped into our present day narrative of space. Stories of mad men hiding out in the vastness of the desert, real and filmic, add a contemporary flavour to Conrad's narrative of rogue agents operating beyond their company's control. The Outback is ripe with pickings for a young writer with a predilection for the uncanny and the bloody. The mythical fantasy Outback even comes pre-equipped with equivalent antagonists...' (162)