Modern Variations
Works by novelists Richard Flanagan, Christopher Koch and Chloe Hooper are regarded as a continuation of the Tasmanian Gothic tradition. Flanagan's 2001 novel Gould's Book of Fish, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, is a fictionalised account of Van Diemonian painter William Buelow Gould, focusing on his years spent imprisoned at the notorious convict settlement of Macquarie Harbour. According to Carmel Bird, Helen Hodgman's novels "distil the very essence of Tasmanian gothic." Danielle Wood's Tasmanian Gothic novel The Alphabet of Light and Dark won the 2002 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. Rohan Wilson won the award for his 2011 novel The Roving Party, a historical "re-imagining" into the misdeeds of John Batman and the band of convicts and Aboriginal trackers he led through Van Diemen's Land in 1829. The debut novels of Cate Kennedy (The World Beneath, 2009) and Favel Parrett (Past the Shallows, 2011) have also been aligned with Tasmanian Gothic.
Roger Scholes' 1988 film The Tale of Ruby Rose is about a young woman's fear of darkness in the Tasmanian highlands. Tasmanian sculptor Gay Hawkes created a series of wooden sculptures based on the film, citing Tasmanian Gothic's "synthesis of the present and past" as an inspiration. National Gallery of Victoria director Patrick McCaughey called her work the "visual embodiment of the fatal shore". Julia Leigh's 1999 novel The Hunter is about a lone man's search for the last Tasmanian Tiger. Described as being in the "best tradition of Tasmanian gothic", the novel won the 2000 Kathleen Mitchell Award, and was adapted into a 2011 film of the same name. The story of Alexander Pearce was made into two feature films: The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce (2008) and Van Diemen's Land (2009). The 2008 horror film Dying Breed is about Pearce's fictional descendents in the backwoods of Tasmania.
The Gothic sensibility is evident in works by many Tasmanian visual artists, among them Pat Brassington, Terry O'Malley, Elizabeth Barsham and Helen Hopcroft.
In 2011, Tasmanian art collector David Walsh opened the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, the Southern Hemisphere's largest privately owned museum. The popularity of MONA—with its theme of "sex and death"—and the wider Tasmanian Gothic movement, has led Tasmanian tourism operators to promote the state's "dark, eerie, cold and bracing history and climate".
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