AustLit

'T'he grotesque holds a pivotal place in Australia's cultural history It is the purpose of this paper to showcase the significance and history of the Australian grotesque by exploring the intricate network of aesthetic and intellectual preconceptions that underpins it. The category of the Australian grotesque provides a specific instance of a larger argument I am at present developing about the role of utopian thought in the foundation of nonindigenous Australia, and it is in relation to this larger theoretical perspective that I argue that the Australian grotesque forms a quilting point at which two oppositional modes of representing Australia, the utopian and the dystopian, converge. The grotesque, in other words, has served contradictory aesthetic and intellectual ends throughout Australia's history, but has ultimately provided a form of coping mechanism for dealing with what was perceived to be the strangeness of Australia, that is, the incomprehensible elusiveness and ineffability of the Australian experience as felt by the European subject Due to the fact that the grotesque permeates Australian culture in a myriad of ways, my discussion of it is necessarily selective But since my focus Ices on the long nineteenth century, the period in which the aforementioned feeling of estrangement was arguably most acute, my discussion should spotlight what constitute the most prominent issues and principles of the grotesque in an Australian context By the same token, such probing into the aesthetic and philosophical roots that predate and inform the Australian grotesque inevitably brings to light how the transplantation of this European aesthetic into the Australian environment played a critical role in the ideology of settlement Thus, the representational processes by which the Australian grotesque supported and legitimized imperial ideology are also of particular concern ' (Introduction)