School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemKenneth Slessor’s Gothic Harbour( 2022)Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971) often turned to Sydney Harbour as a productive site for his poetry and writing. Reading Slessor’s Harbour in its historical and cultural contexts, this thesis argues that he developed a poetic concerned with loss, memory, sexual desire and the uncanny return of repressed forces from the Harbour’s depths. The thesis begins in 1927, a year which saw two important episodes of drowning in Sydney Harbour: the death of Slessor’s friend Joe Lynch, subject of his later elegy “Five Bells” (1939), and the Greycliffe ferry disaster, to which Slessor responded in the pages of Sydney magazine Smith’s Weekly. In the wake of these twin tragedies, Slessor created a distinctive poetic vision of Sydney Harbour which fused imagery and atmospherics originating in Sydney’s popular press with a Gothic-modernist aesthetic he adopted at least in part from the work of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). This thesis proceeds to read Slessor’s Harbour poetry as it developed through the 1930s, before leaving Sydney Harbour to read Slessor’s poetic evocations of Kings Cross and the battlefields of the Second World War, arguing that his Harbour poetic infuses poetry that may at first sight seem unrelated to the Harbour. It concludes with remarks about Slessor’s relationship to what Michael Cathcart has called ‘necronationalism’, exploring some of the ramifications and consequences of Slessor’s poetic project of populating an iconic watery Australian space with dead bodies and ghostly apparitions. The thesis draws on theories of the uncanny and the weird, derived from Freud among others, as well as Maria Tumarkin’s notion of the ‘traumascape’, and recent scholarship in literary studies which emphasises the role and agency of the sea, in order to formulate a new reading of Slessor’s relationship to Sydney Harbour and to literary categories such as modernism, the Gothic, and elegy. By recasting Slessor’s Harbour as a traumatising Gothic space, this thesis gestures toward a new perspective on the work of a seminal figure in Australian literary modernism.