In recent years, nations around the world have faced a veritable crisis of ineffective government. Basic governmental functions – preventing private violence, resolving disputes through lawful means, providing an infrastructure to enable people to meet their most elementary needs for shelter, nutrition, transportation, communication, education – go unmet. In some countries, these basic functions are met but longer-term governance issues languish, and government is perceived to be unresponsive in ways that some believe contribute to political backlashes, including those against minority groups. These failures in governance are also perceived to have contributed to a global upsurge in authoritarianism and a concomitant decline in democracy.1

Moreover, the basic freedoms protected in many democratic constitutions – freedom from state-sanctioned torture and from punishment or coercion without fair process; freedom of expression, of religion, of movement; freedom from invidious discrimination; enjoyment of property without arbitrary government interference; free exercise of the suffrage – cannot exist, in an organized society, without government effective enough to control itself and its agents and otherwise to secure the protection of those rights.

Effective governance is necessary in a successful constitutional democracy. This is not to deny that a central animating force in a democracy must be respect for the human individual. But a government that is not effective and seen as such is not likely to be able to protect individual rights. It is thus a mistake to conceptualize individual rights simply as in conflict with the collective goals of a democratic government: those goals are effective governance and rights preservation, and – in a democracy – these two are connected.

The framers of the US Constitution well understood that a constitutional state must act for public-regarding purposes – to “establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty.” To the extent that it fails to move in these directions, government will lose the confidence of the people. Effective government in constitutional democracies requires effective legislatures to promote all of these purposes.

Ecogothic cinema might be approached in many ways. One could pay attention, for example, to changes of place, like deforestation or beach erosion caused by rising sea levels, or to weather extremes resulting from climate change, such as heatwaves or torrential rainfall. This chapter traces an ecogothic pathway through two contemporary Australian films, The Hunter (2011) and The Rover (2014), through a consideration of the representation of animals in both films. Given that Catherine Simpson has lamented that ‘despite the preponderance of animals in Australian cinema, little work has been done on their role or function’ (44), this chapter attends to the representations of animals in The Hunter and The Rover to enable a broader engagement with death and extinction in Australian twenty-first-century ecogothic cinema.

Animals as a Portent of Death and Extinction in The Hunter and The Rover

The current increase in global awareness of ‘green’ concerns, such as climate change, environmental catastrophe, and urban and non-urban habitability is likely to raise the profile of animals in cinema studies. The Hunter and The Rover tender different perspectives on animals themselves and on the always already troubled distinction between ‘non-human animals’ and ‘human animals’ in the face of environmental and social collapse. Rather than offering an exhaustive textual analysis, this chapter engages with The Hunter and The Rover through a number of thematic lenses in order to contribute to the scholarship around Australian ecogothic cinema.