How did nineteenth-century gothic sensibilities of cannibalism, as sensationalized by Mrs Eliza Fraser in the popular press, create an Australian identity against which the Aboriginal ‘Other’ is pictured?

Abstract

The historical archive dealing with the shipwreck of the Stirling Castle, and the subsequent experiences of its survivors, is a site that has been contested and re-contested by a multiplicity of readings since its inception. The myths that were generated by the accounts of Mrs Eliza Fraser’s shipwreck on what came to be known as Fraser Island helped to create a stereotype of the Aboriginal ‘other’ as ‘savage cannibals’. Cannibal discourse is located within a particular genre of colonial fantasy that differentiates the colonial citizen from savagery and violence. Europeans suspected cannibalism wherever they went, and this was fuelled by missionary tales of horror and pagan excess of the savage places beyond the borders of civilisation. The paranoid ethos associated with cannibalism finds its expression in the dark fantasies of gothic novels of the late Romantic period. This thesis and its accompanying studio work demonstrates that the nineteenth-century narratives surrounding the shipwreck and subsequent ‘capture’ of Eliza Fraser off the coast of Queensland were constructed using the literary conventions of the gothic novel. Employing a polylogic epistolary style in the manner of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the studio work seeks to re-position Eliza Fraser within the horror of her ordeal and provides a re-interpretation of events.