I've started going though the archives on the hard drive of the Mac-Pro  in the studio to see what I was photographing  when I was using  the Leica. I'm looking back  to see if it was  just  snaps or did I start exploring themes? 

Sadly, most of the images look like happy snaps. The pictorial equivalent of the readymade characterised by unpretentious snapshot effects, documentary value, and deadpan anti aesthetic qualities.    They were not the result of a deliberate abnegation of authorial control in favor of chance, accident, and automatism. 

This picture of a window in Clunes, Victoria, circa 2009 is an exception. It's darker than most of the pictures--and  it expresses a  darker side of the senses and imagination than Australia's blue skies and bright clear light: 

It  represents the experiences  caused by unresolved loss, commonly known as a state of mourning. Mourning refers to what has  passed away, leaving  us with only images. It refers to the trauma that loss evokes--in this picture  the loss of the  way of life of the country towns in regional Australia. 

Historically,   Australia was represented and imagined  by explorers and cartographers  as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters. It was a place of darkness and convicts.  Its sense of disorientation and complete isolation from the civilised European world was unnerving. The Antipodes were  held to be a dark and evil place, an unconquered territory overbrimming with dangerous secrets.

The Gothic is more than  the haunted house and the monstrous--the words that are associated with the dark  representation of Australia are melancholy, grotesque, ghostly, monstrous, loathsome, dismal, fear inspiring and gloomy. The Gothic refers to paranoia, barbarism and taboo.

There  is a photographic  Gothic tradition in Australia that refers to the landscape that is wild and oppressive with traces of  tragedy, terror or disaster that have occurred in the past. It is less established that the  more well known literary genre that gives expression to the  colonial loathing  and fear of nature  because the land  had the power to bring about defeat, madness, despair, isolation and death. 

There is a darkness and wildness in the cities of post-colonial Australia--eg.,  the white (post)colonial fears, traumas and anxieties--as well as the more traditional view of natural landscape  that has  haunted white Australians because it was  seen as harsh and hostile. 

These urban  fears, traumas and anxieties, both individual and collective, that reside in the unconscious are often expressed  visually in a distorted form--what Freud called the return of the repressed. The threats to life are very real in the capital cities, which can be violent, destructive and oppressive.  The Gothic  becomes a subversive mode, a counter discourse, to the “normal” white male Western voice that constitutes Australianness.