The Year of the Birds and Other Stories

Abstract

The creative component of this thesis comprises a collection of short stories that seek to explore the Australian Suburban Gothic, a literary genre that has heretofore not been explicitly defined by critics and theorists. The stories contained in this collection operate within a Gothic mode that engages with theories of the uncanny, juxtaposes natural and built landscapes, and draws on unresolved colonial tensions to narrate a precise feeling of unsettledness and unhomeliness in Australia’s suburban spaces. Collectively, the stories reveal that cultural perceptions of the suburbs obscure their reality as unhomely spaces, fraught with violence, grief, fear, and oppression. These stories are also not solely confined to the suburban ‘home’ in its structural sense but extend to all the spaces that Australian suburbs contain, shape themselves around, and are shaped by: schools, bus stations, playgrounds, ravines. With this collection, I attempt to write into a gap left by scholarship between existing definitions of the Australian Gothic and the Suburban Gothic. Building on the creative exploration of my short stories, my exegesis pursues a working definition of the Australian Suburban Gothic through an examination of existing scholarship on the Australian suburban experience, real and mythologised, and the ways these conditions create a liminality at the site of the suburb that lends itself to Gothic motifs and techniques. I examine the suburbs from two angles: first, from the position of ‘suburbia’ as a cultural or imaginary space; and second, from the ‘suburbs’ as a physical landscape. In addition to cultural and literary theorists, the exegesis considers the work of three contemporary Australian writers, Sonya Hartnett, Carmel Bird, and Tim Winton, whose uncanny and unsettling fictions can be productively examined through a Suburban Gothic lens. With these works, and my own fiction, this thesis presents a definition of the Australian Suburban Gothic genre and its key features and themes.