Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-m6qld Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-09T04:09:25.987Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Unsettled Waters: The Postcolonial Gothic of Tidelands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2022

Get access

Summary

Abstract

Tidelands (2018), the first standalone Australian production in the Netflix Originals portfolio, imports the monstrous figure of the siren from Greek mythology to the South-East Queensland coast, unsettling not only the iconic Australian beach, but also the domestic television genres of the beachside soapie and crime drama. However, while Tidelands innovates in Australian Gothic, it also continues to engage with – or become entangled within – some of the genre's oldest preoccupations: nation, inheritance, belonging, and colonial guilt. Tidelands's spaces function as gothic heterotopias, reflecting tensions between multicultural, Indigenous, and Anglo-Celtic Australia which the series attempts to resolve by replacing First Nations peoples with the half-siren Tidelanders, imagining a future in which hybridity and assimilation erase the need for Reconciliation.

Keywords: Australian Gothic; heterotopia; Netflix; Queensland; beach; sirens

Tidelands (2018), the first standalone Australian production in the Netflix Originals portfolio, represents a new kind of Australian Gothic for an international border-crossing digital age. Filmed on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, the eight-episode series leaves behind Australian Gothic's traditional home in the outback and bush to focus on the everyday space of the beach. Importing the monstrous figure of the siren from Greek mythology to this new site unsettles not only the iconic Australian beach (as both setting and symbol) but also the popular domestic television genres of the beachside soapie and crime drama. However, even while this new gothic hybrid attempts to move beyond the genre's traditional trappings, the series continues to engage with – or becomes entangled within – some of Australian Gothic's oldest preoccupations: nationhood, inheritance, belonging, and colonial guilt.

Postcolonial gothic genres, such as the Australian Gothic, typically work to critique the mechanisms and aftereffects of colonization, and to reveal the unsavoury matter of the nation's colonial past. In doing so, the genre is able to effect a kind of restitution; according to Gina Wisker, postcolonial Gothic ‘reconfigures spaces and places, returning the value they had to the people who initially were the traditional owners of the land’ (108). However, Tidelands operates in a different mode, using gothic tropes and techniques not to acknowledge but to efface First Nations peoples’ experiences of violent dispossession and displacement.

Type
Chapter
Information
Screening the Gothic in Australia and New Zealand
Contemporary Antipodean Film and Television
, pp. 21 - 44
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×