Outsiders in the Outback – Australia’s Cinematic Tradition of the Colonial Gothic and the Representation of the Outsider in Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel

Introduction

Alison Rudd states in her provocatively titled essay Australian Gothic: The Uncanny and Abject Hauntings of Lost Innocence and Guilt, “For Europeans, Australia has always been duplicitous, both familiar as an extension of Europe and also a fantastic other place.”¹ An identity that allied the country from its earliest days with the Gothic tradition, entrenched in themes of “hidden secrets from the past” manifest in “ghosts … or monsters [representing] unresolved crimes.”²

This article examines the development of the Colonial Gothic (as I shall refer to the Gothic sub-genre of many colonial or postcolonial countries) in Australian cinema. As per Rudd, the Colonial Gothic “includes signifiers such as a hostile environment, isolation, entrapment, pursuit … the fear of the unknown, and … the use of the uncanny, whereby a harsh landscape renders the ‘homely’ as ‘unhomely.’”³ The use of Sigmund Freud’s ‘unheimlich’, or uncanny, is particularly pertinent, and writers, including Rudd, Judith Wright, and Anna Backman Rogers, use the term to define the duality of belonging and not belonging in Australian identity. 

The uncanny lies at the heart of many canonical films that define Australia’s national cinema, including Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971), Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971), and Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975); and later, the Colonial Gothic developed in tandem with Australian cinema: George Miller’s Mad Max films (1979-2024) explore a dystopian Gothic future; the outback horror of Wolf Creek (2005) draws on Gothic tropes; and The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) examines grief within an urban Gothic setting. In Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel (2023), however, the traditional fate of the key Gothic figure – the outsider – is reimagined through a feminist lens, thus calling for a significant reassessment of the genre.

Wake in Fright

A History of the Colonial Gothic in Australian Cinema

The Gothic and Australia’s troubled history with colonialism are intrinsically linked. “As it happens,” says Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “this ‘literature of nightmare’ was, from its earliest history in England and Europe, fundamentally linked to colonial settings, characters, and realities as frequent embodiments of the forbidding and frightening.”⁴ A direct link can be made with Australia. John Pilger says of the country, “I have long regarded my own country as a secret, as a land half-won, its story half-told. It was as if the past was another country, mysterious and unexplained.”⁵ In Australia, the oppressive heat, the endless landscape, the alien flora and fauna influenced the emergence of the Colonial Gothic in literature, but it was with the advent of cinema that it properly came to fruition. 

The Story of the Kelly Gang

In the early 20th century, “Australia was the largest film-producing country in the world”, releasing one of the world’s first feature films, the Colonial Gothic-inspired The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906),⁶ the classic folk legend about a thief who hides his head in improvised armour, remade many times since. Then, in 1971, Wake in Fright, a US production entrenched in the Colonial Gothic, portrayed the locals with what Tom O’Regan calls “provincial narcissism”⁷ and added the pivotal role of the Aussie pub to the Colonial Gothic tradition. The film frames its narrative around the outsider, who, in Gothic lore, upsets the status quo of an otherwise balanced environment. Although in this instance, the outsider is the innocent changed by the foreign landscape, a trait which comes to define the Australian Colonial Gothic. Misha Kavka defines the Gothic as “about paranoia, defined as a projection of the self on to the outside world, which is in turn read as hostile.”⁸ In traditional Gothic literature, the outsider appears as an individual who disrupts; in the Colonial Gothic, the roles are reversed, and the outsider is often the protagonist who enters an unknown world that seeks to dispel them. It is, of course, the Australian outback itself that plays a pivotal role in rejecting the colonisers.

In Nic Roeg’s Walkabout, a British production also from 1971, two colonial children flee into the bush from their father, who, driven mad by the alien environment, attempts to murder them. For Rudd, the bush is the key Colonial Gothic setting. Along with facilitating “isolation, entrapment, pursuit and fear of the unknown,” it “renders the ‘homely’ as ‘unhomely’ and implies that New World settlers find in the Gothic characteristics that overlap with their own experiences of being ‘trapped in a strange world where laws of ‘reason’ no longer function.’”⁹ Children remain the victims in Peter Weir’s second feature, 1975’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, a key Colonial Gothic text, and a film haunted by a strange otherworldliness. 

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Picnic is steeped in Freud’s unheimlich, which, as Anna Backman Rogers notes, is not used simply to denote the unfamiliar, but rather twists the familiar into the abnormal and strange through the repression of truth,¹⁰ and soon, the landscape comes to envelop the colonisers too. As Rudd says, “It is not the strange but the recognition of the familiar in the strange that causes … unease.”¹¹ In the Colonial Gothic, the country becomes defined as an “unsettled space” in the mind of the colonisers, “as dangerously ‘other’, as a perverse form of container for all the violent impulses and drives which it is so absolutely adamant to deny within itself.”¹² A generation later, the outback remains a hostile and foreboding place in Australian Colonial Gothic cinema, but one that the troubled settler has become indistinguishable from. Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek (2005), and its subsequent sequels and TV spin-off, features the twisted psychopath Mick Taylor (John Jarratt), driven mad by alienation in the “unsettled space”, posing as the down-to-earth, permanently cheerful Aussie block, who duplicitously kills any outsiders foolish enough to wander from the highway.

Wolf Creek

The Colonial Gothic, however, is not limited to the rural, and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) transplants it into an urban setting, drawing on the uncanny to explore the nature of grief and its impact on a single mother’s mental health through the manifestation of an unseen monster. The Babadook, a film made by a female writer/director and producer, shifts the Colonial Gothic to a feminist perspective, and the female protagonist manages to tame the beast, not through overpowering it, a classic male trait, but by nurturing and taming it, typically more female traits, ultimately drawing a happier conclusion for the protagonist, which is of course at odds with the Colonial Gothic tradition. Following Kent’s example, Kitty Green wrote and directed The Royal Hotel in 2023. The film takes Wake in Fright’s classic Colonial Gothic premise, following an outsider entering a hostile environment, and mixes it with The Babadook’s feminist revisionism, returning the Colonial Gothic to its most acute setting: the rural pub. The film pushes the genre forward, using modern-day sensibilities, notably channelling the Colonial Gothic through a feminist lens, to redress the traditional balance. 

The Royal Hotel

The Royal Hotel

In her review for RogerEbert.com, Marya E. Gates claims that Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel “plays like a Gen Z twist on the Australian classic ‘Wake in Fright,’”¹³ although the film is just as closely inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie as it is Wake in Fright. In both feature and documentary, the Aussie pub sits in the middle of an isolated mining community, drawing in the population of near-exclusively bored working men – all indistinguishable in appearance, to any outsiders, from Wolf Creek’s Mick Taylor – like a medieval church offering alms to the poor and destitute. Behind the bar, step two outsiders: young American women (pretending to be Canadian to avoid association with Trump), who travel from Sydney via a work programme set up presumably because no urban Australians would dream of travelling to the Royal Hotel for work. They are initially shocked by the foul language (“sour c**t” is the semi-affectionate nickname for Julia Garner’s Hanna), but quickly find themselves acclimatising to the environment, and in the case of Jessica Henwick’s Liv, matching the alcohol intake of the locals. The community is near identical to those portrayed in Wake in Fright and Sunday to Far Away (Ken Hannam, 1975), almost exclusively white, to the point that the Aboriginal food deliveryman, Tommy (Baykali Ganambarr), has not been paid for four months, and is casually denied entry to the bar, even to deliver vital supplies, whilst James Frecheville’s Teeth, is drinking at the bar the very next day after being banned. The girls mostly find themselves drawn into the new world, particularly by charismatic Matty (Toby Wallace, channelling his loveable-rogue role from Shannon Murphy’s Babyteeth in 2019), but whilst Liv finds herself slowly slipping into the role previously filled by the hard-drinking, promiscuous English girls who leave when Hanna and Liv arrive, Hanna is more observant and wary, partly due to her history of an alcoholic mother. It is in the film’s central character that Green draws influence from Essie Davis’ Amelia in The Babadook and subverts the classical depiction of the Colonial Gothic, offering an alternate conclusion to the typical story.

The Royal Hotel

The Royal Hotel is the second film Green has cast Garner in the central role; her 2019 debut feature, The Assistant, explores, via a highly naturalistic social-realist tone, a story about a young woman who tries and fails to expose the sexual misconduct of her boss, an unseen caricature of Harvey Weinstein. Hanna is a few years older than Jane in The Assistant, more self-aware, and although the Royal Hotel locals are drawn to her youth, her alabaster skin and blonde hair, she is different from the other young women who have served behind the bar. The Colonial Gothic outsider typically arrives in the alien environment on their own, but Green has Hanna accompanied by Liv to show how the environment traditionally exploits young women’s weaknesses, trapping them, as Rudd says, “in a strange world where laws of reason no longer function.”¹⁴ Twice, Hanna saves Liv from being kidnapped and driven off into the unexplored vast wilderness that surrounds the hotel, too drunk to make her own decisions, by the slimy Dolly (Daniel Henshall) and his cronies. By the film’s conclusion, Liv is finally dragged back into reality by Hanna’s resilience. Hanna is physically no match for the locals, who, on more than one occasion, overpower her and, by the film’s final sequence, amass in and around the pub like the feral biker gang in George Miller’s Mad Max (1979). Hanna’s strength, though, lies in her incorruptibility. The pub’s owner, Hugo Weaving’s hopeless alcoholic Billy, is running the Royal Hotel to financial ruin after four generations of family control, but when two female backpackers have the audacity to upset the status quo of the tiny community, the pub is burnt to the ground in the film’s final moments, quicker than Billy can bankrupt it. The film’s final scene is reminiscent of the climax of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), an early Gothic novel and a candidate for the first vampire story, in which the eponymous house of Usher is both physically and metaphorically destroyed when the grand old mansion house is burnt down. Hanna and Liv are free to return to the lives they had before the Royal Hotel, unlike many Gothic protagonists, such as John Grant in Wake in Fright, who is unable to escape the Colonial Gothic environment and is instead corrupted by it.

Green explores the Colonial Gothic text through the lens of contemporary feminism, and although the film is perhaps the most overt example in the genre, it fits with a growing discourse vital to making sense of the contemporary world. After the prominent period of third-wave feminism throughout the 1990s and early 2000s ended in the early to mid-2010s, as Oren and Press identify, feminism became particularly important as an intellectual and cultural discourse once more in the wake of the #MeToo movement and its call that “women’s rights are human rights,”¹⁵ from 2018 onwards. The Royal Hotel subverts the traditional story of the outsider who finds themself broken by the oppressive alien world of Wake in Fright and Walkabout, etc., but, as a woman, Hanna is not alone in the genre as successfully rebelling against seemingly insurmountable odds. Her incorruptibility reminds one of Furiosa from George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2013) and its prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), two Sci-Fi Colonial Gothic texts that track the journey of the sole female warrior in Imperator Joe’s despotic – highly toxically male – army, who aims to free Joe’s slave wives and return to the ‘land of plenty’. Miller’s reinvention of Max Rockatansky’s dystopian world after a 30-year absence, split audiences in 2015, repelling groups from the so-called “manosphere”, who denounced it as “a feminist piece of propaganda posing as a guy flick,” whilst in reality it simply aimed to evoke the “notion of ‘female masculinities’ as an alternative to traditionally male masculinity,” positioning the female lead into the role of protagonist, and “repositioning … the male hero into the role of ally.”¹⁶ The Royal Hotel is not an action movie by any token, but such repositioning of Furiosa as an action hero allowed Green to reimagine Hanna in a similarly incorruptible mould. Plus, simply by being women, the two characters have more in common than their two worlds might suggest. 

Furiosa

The dramatic conflict in Hanna, Liv and Furiosa’s worlds appears, at first glance, to be entirely external, but, like all women, they are caught at the mercy of their reduced physical strength compared to many male characters, contributing to an ongoing existential internal conflict too. The lawlessness of Furiosa’s dystopian world is not that dissimilar to the apparent lawlessness of the rural outback in The Royal Hotel, environments dominated by physical strength (or the illusion of it) over critical reasoning, thus heightening the characters’ weaknesses. As the feminist writer Florence Given claims, “the most dangerous thing a woman can do is date a man [because] over 90 per cent of all rapes are committed by someone already known to the victim.”¹⁷ In the bar, Hanna and Liv are surrounded by potential Mick Taylors, making every day an existential nightmare. Green is careful not to position Hanna as a superhero, though, and the second time she saves Liv, near the end of the film, it is because of infighting between men, rivals for their attention. However, ultimately, like Amelia in The Babadook, Hanna succeeds not despite her weaknesses (both as a woman and as an individual), but because of them. Amelia’s difficulty with solo motherhood made her empathetic to troubled children, and she uses what she has learned to tame the beast. Hanna’s difficult upbringing earned her the skills to deal effectively with troublesome, toxic drunks, when she so easily could have become one of them. The filmmakers have identified traits that enable the women in these films to survive, whereas, traditionally, in Colonial Gothic texts, outsiders are destroyed by them, thus imbuing a modicum of hope in a contemporary world order that sometimes feels like its own Gothic text.

Conclusions

The Colonial Gothic explores in the Australian psyche the duality of identity, the idea that the settlers somehow manage to both belong and not belong. As Rudd claims, in the modern Australian mind “innocence and guilt… inhabit each other simultaneously,”¹⁸ and along with the “hostile environment, isolation, entrapment… and the fear of the unknown,” Rudd’s defining signifiers of the Colonial Gothic, can be added the modern nation state’s melancholic beginnings, manifest in the ghosts of “the convict past”.¹⁹

Film is perfectly placed to explore the Colonial Gothic and its role in shaping modern Australian identity, as the two developed in tandem throughout the 20th century. Like New Zealand, the tragic events at Gallipoli during the First World War in 1915-16, “helped foster a developing sense of national identity”²⁰ for Australians. The Allied forces may have won the war, and although those “at home were proud of how their men had performed on the world stage,”²¹ the ANZACs returned home having lost the Gallipoli campaign. After the success of Picnic at Hanging Rock in 1975, Peter Weir felt ready to tackle the subject of Gallipoli on film in 1981, the same year that Peter Read published The Stolen Generations, the report that explored the state’s role the removal of Aboriginal children between 1883 and 1969, and Judith Wright wrote in The Broken Links (quoted in Rudd), “on the nature of Australian identity as being composed of two strands: ‘the love of the land we have invaded and the guilt of the invasion… It is a haunted country,’”²² heightening the duality of the ingrained uncanny, and how it can be explored on film. 

The Royal Hotel

In the contemporary era, the nature of the ‘haunted country’ is typified by the ongoing development of the Colonial Gothic, and many filmmakers draw on its traits to explore modern societal issues in Australia’s national cinema. Notably, the importance of the continued discourse on feminism and violence against women, raised globally in the wake of the #MeToo movement in 2018. In the case of The Royal Hotel, Kitty Green uses the isolated mining community, so important to the economic development of the country, to expose the ongoing blasé attitude toward the damaging impact of alcoholism and the continued promotion of deeply ingrained misogyny in a small community. Green’s protagonist hero, Hanna, may be too smart to let the community get the better of her, but the community on show in the film is far from the only one of this type, and Hanna’s perspicacity is likely much less frequent in the many young women still being destroyed by them.

Endnotes