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Unsettled Waters: The Postcolonial Gothic of Tidelands
Book chapter

Unsettled Waters: The Postcolonial Gothic of Tidelands

Emma Doolan
Screening the Gothic in Australia and New Zealand: Contemporary Antipodean Film and Television, pp.21-43
Horror and Gothic Media Cultures, Routledge
2022

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Abstract

Arts & Humanities Film, Radio & Television
Tidelands (2018), the first standalone Australian production in the Netflix Originals portfolio, imports the monstrous figure of the siren from Greek mythology to the South-East Queensland coast, unsettling not only the iconic Australian beach, but also the domestic television genres of the beachside soapie and crime drama. However, while Tidelands innovates in Australian Gothic, it also continues to engage with - or become entangled within - some of the genre's oldest preoccupations: nation, inheritance, belonging, and colonial guilt. Tidelands's spaces function as gothic heterotopias, reflecting tensions between multicultural, Indigenous, and Anglo-Celtic Australia which the series attempts to resolve by replacing First Nations peoples with the half-siren Tidelanders, imagining a future in which hybridity and assimilation erase the need for Reconciliation.

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