School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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Author: Harmsen, Andrew Frederik ×

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    Performing (Un)forgiveness: the psychomachia of recognition and the return of the colonial repressed in 21st century settler gothic drama
    Harmsen, Andrew Frederik ( 2018)
    This project explores recent Australian plays that deploy the Gothic as a representational strategy that critiques the nation’s recent Reconciliation project. In these Gothic dramas, non-Indigenous characters and their audiences witness the return of colonial violence and are confronted by the ways in which it continues to influence and shape contemporary Australian culture. This dissertation will argue that the Australian Gothic, as a theatrical mode, is used by non-Indigenous playwrights as a way of representing a kind of Lacanian ‘psychomachia’ – a psychic allegory that dramatises a crisis of moral excess in the formation of identity. This project – a theoretical dissertation and practice-led creative component – is an attempt to recognise and theorise the emergence of a distinct, historically situated, and uniquely national mode of theatrical representation that is, as yet, not fully recognised in Australian Theatre Studies.
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    After the apology: the Australian gothic and reconciliation melancholia
    Harmsen, Andrew Frederik ( 2013)
    This thesis discusses three Australian Gothic texts: the novel Bereft (2010) by Chris Womersley, Rachel Ward’s film Beautiful Kate (2009) and Andrew Bovell’s play When the Rain Stops Falling (2009). It investigates how these texts deploy the features of the Australian Gothic across contemporary literary, cinematic and theatrical forms. This thesis argues that each text interrogates the ongoing role that settler guilt plays in contemporary Australia from a distinctively non-Aboriginal perspective. As a result, this work suggests that these case studies can be read as Gothic allegories for an emerging ‘post-reconciliation’ Australian culture. The final component of this project is a play entitled Doomsday Devices. The play uses many of the conventions of the Australian Gothic in a way that suggests a further discussion of ‘post-reconciliation’ identity as outlined in the critical section of this thesis. The play is a ghost story set in Melbourne in the summer of 2015.