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Palawa playwright Dylan Van Den Berg has been working in the idiom of the Aboriginal Gothic for some time now, though it took a design element in a production of his earlier play, Whitefella Yella Tree, to help him realise it.
‘When I was working on Whitefella Yellow Tree, I went to the preview performance and I realised that the way that it had been interpreted by the directors [Declan Greene and Amy Sole], with this spooky lemon tree at the centre of the set, was incredibly Gothic – this piece of nature that was tainted by colonisation and that haunted the characters at the centre of the play,’ Van Den Berg tells ArtsHub.
‘I thought, “this is obviously something I’m super into, something that helps me tell the stories I want to tell”. But I wanted to find out how I could do it consciously. And so I embarked on my studies to try and build a framework for myself, but also hopefully something that other First Nations writers can use as well,’ he continues.
‘I think it would be fair to say I’ve been quietly obsessed with the Gothic, unconsciously or subconsciously, for a really long time – particularly the idea of history existing alongside the present. I think that’s across all of my work. So I have to think of something new for the next one.’
For Van Den Berg, this moment of being confronted with his own obsession as a result of someone else’s work is part of ‘the beauty of collaboration in the theatre, in that, often people are interpreting things that are hidden deep down in your own brain or deep in the script. So when they when they bring them to light, you have those kind of “a-hah!” moments and realise what you were maybe trying to get at the whole time.’
For The Street Theatre’s production of his new play, The Chosen Vessel, one of Van Den Berg’s key collaborators is director Abbie-lee Lewis, a Kalkadoon woman from Western Australia.
Lewis describes the production’s script as ‘an incredibly poetic piece of heightened text’, adding: ‘That’s something that I’ve always been interested in, what is the Blak version of heightened text? And it’s really exciting to be able to explore that type of text through an Indigenous lens.’
Their collaborators include set designer Angie Matsinos, costume designer Leah Ridley, sound designer Kyle Sheedy and lighting designer Nathan Sciberras. Actor Laila Thaker (a Torres Strait Islander (Meriam/Wagadagam) and Indian (Ratlamwali) woman) plays the central character and a significant secondary character, with Craig Alexander playing a variety of threatening men in The Street Theatre commissioned play.
‘We’re using a very stylised way of working … lighting will be stylised, movement is very stylised… We’re also playing with vertical heights, in terms of being able to explore power structures and dynamics between two characters and through space, in terms of, like, the distance between two characters,’ Lewis explains.
Having rewatched some of her favourite horror films as homework, the director notes that she’s also tried to incorporate ‘little nods to the horror genre as well’, starting with the sound design.
‘The sound especially … creating tension through sound. Our sound designer Kyle is also working with mics and some really cool technology to be able to bring some of those moments of “spookiness” [to life],’ Lewis explains.
Aboriginal Gothic: commandeering a European artform
The Chosen Vessel, which also forms part of Van Den Berg’s PhD, has been in development at The Street Theatre on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country since 2020 and opens in Canberra this week.
‘We have definitely seen the Aboriginal Gothic [before] and it’s been tracked in other art forms – in visual arts and film, in literature – but we haven’t actually kind of considered what it could be or should be on our stages,’ Van Den Berg says.
‘So what I’m trying to do is identify some of the elements of what an Aboriginal Gothic can be. And so I guess whilst Whitefella Yella Tree was definitely clearing the colonial lens … this is kind of “blacking up” a white genre, in a way. That’s how I like to look at it.’
The play is a response to – and an adaptation of – the 1896 short story of the same name by Barbara Baynton, a brutal tale that was originally published in The Bulletin in expurgated form under the title, The Tramp.
Describing the short story as ‘a feminist response to Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife’, Van Den Berg adds that he was ‘struck by the fact that in all of this colonial literature from that time, there were no Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples present.
And if they were, they were just mystical “others” in the landscape. They had no character arc, they had no real substance to them.
‘So I wanted to take this story, which I think spoke to the realities of being alone in the bush, and I wanted to place an Aboriginal woman at the centre of it – to revisit the deleted histories of this nation, I guess, and also to give this woman at the centre [of the story] not a tragic arc, but one that’s actually empowered.
‘So in splitting her character between a woman in real time and a ghost in the spirit world, I’ve been able to, I hope, to kind of give her a voice that maybe she didn’t have in life.’
Van Den Berg sees The Chosen Vessel as a conscious response to the work of other First Nations playwrights over the last 15 years, ‘beginning with Wesley Enoch’s adaptation of Medea, Black Medea, which I know was from the Greeks, but it kicked off this idea that First Nations writers can commandeer the Western theatrical tradition.
‘We can commandeer these stories, put our own twist on them, and actually they can be quite potent ways for us to assert our sovereignty, to represent Blak identities on stage,’ he tells ArtsHub.
Defining an Aboriginal Gothic
Van Den Berg acknowledges that ‘the Gothic’ is already a contested term, so defining an Aboriginal Gothic is potentially even more fraught.
‘But I guess the three main things I like to describe when I talk about the Aboriginal Gothic are, firstly, that unlike the Australian Gothic, which is about the landscape being uncomfortable, in the Aboriginal Gothic the landscape is comfort for Aboriginal folks, and it’s the white ghosts who populate it that disable that place for them – it’s not necessarily place that’s the site of haunting, for Aboriginal [and] Torres Strait Islander peoples,’ he explains.
‘Secondly, for First Nations folks, we don’t have the privilege of ascribing these things purely to a genre framework. A lot of the things that pop up in the Gothic are actually just the lived experiences of First Nations people, so violence, hauntings, dispossession, all of this is stuff that’s really happened to us.
‘And then, thirdly, in an Aboriginal Gothic, what we see is the collision of the past, the present and the future, which is pointing to the fact that for us, our landscapes are irreparably changed and tainted due to colonisation. And so even when we’re on Country, there’s a sense that that place is haunted.’
The Aboriginal Gothic has a long tradition in cinema, including Tracey Moffatt’s beDevil (1993), Warrick Thornton’s The Darkside (2013) and Dark Place (2019), an anthology film with five directors including Kodie Bedford, Liam Phillips and Bjorn Stewart.
When asked to name recent examples on the stage, Van Den Berg replies, ‘I definitely think The Drover’s Wife, Leah Purcell’s adaptation, falls into the Gothic – there’s no return to the status quo at the end of that play. And there’s a real sense the Country is alive. I like to talk about “Country being character” in some of these plays, so Country lives and breathes in The Drover’s Wife, as it hopefully does in my adaptation of The Chosen Vessel.’
Read: The Drover’s Wife – The Opera to have 2026 world premiere at QPAC’s new Glasshouse Theatre
He continues: ‘I would also say that Andrea James and Catherine Ryan’s Dogged, which premiered at Griffin Theatre Company [in 2021] was absolutely within the Aboriginal Gothic. At the heart of it was a dingo who could speak to the audience, played by Sandy Greenwood, and there was a comfort that Dingo had in this place that the whitefellas didn’t, which is, you know, kind of typical of an Aboriginal Gothic,’ he says.
Director Abbie-lee Lewis agrees that the notion of ‘Country as character’ is a key trait of the Aboriginal Gothic, and says a very specific sense of landscape – the continent’s south-east – is strongly reflected in The Chosen Vessel.
‘I was born in the desert. I grew up in in Western Australia, so I’m very used to dry red dirt, and both Dylan and I were talking about this – different landscapes unnerve different people and different mobs. So for me, having a landscape that has a blue tinge to it due to the amount of eucalyptus [oil] in the air, and the different types of gums here, just the amount of trees that this landscape has – it’s quite unnerving to me,’ she explains.
‘The ghost gums I’m used to, but just seeing so many of them, actually, it does unsettle me, whereas I’m very comfortable in the desert…. I showed Dylan my Country, and he was like, “Yes, that unnerves me”, so it is a really interesting way of exploring the unsettling and the unnerving landscape. And actually, I do think that lends itself to the Australian Gothic genre, where the landscape is very much a terrifying place.
‘For me, it is kind of exciting to be able to explore the land as a character in the story. I do feel like there is a supernatural element to it,’ Lewis says.
Aboriginal Gothic: supernatural presence
The presence of the supernatural also plays differently in the Aboriginal Gothic than in the European Gothic tradition, Van Den Berg asserts.
‘One of the difficulties, I guess, of defining an Aboriginal Gothic is that there’s a risk that it could kind of be subsumed into the European tradition of the Gothic, which is that these supernatural figures, these spectres of the castles and landscape, aren’t real.
‘For us, they are part of an extension of the natural landscape and extension of Country, and so in the Aboriginal Gothic, these things are reality. For us, the supernatural world is actually a spirit world or a Dreaming world, depending on your mob and where you come from.’
Lewis agrees, adding, ‘But again, I think for Aboriginal people, First Nations people, Indigenous people, their connection to the supernatural isn’t something that’s foreign. It’s actually something that is spoken about daily, whether or not that’s spoken in hushed whispers. It’s a very living conversation, it constantly takes up a lot of space in conversation, or … it’s a thought.
‘The way we look at the land and the way we interact with it, everything has a spirit. Everything in the land that we walk on is a living spirit. So that actually shapes the way we interact with it. We can’t be removed from the way we tell stories.’
Aboriginal Gothic: escaping the confines of genre
Van Den Berg is excited to see the genre of Aboriginal Gothic continue to flourish and evolve, but is also keen not to be limited by it.
‘I like to say that the Gothic is perhaps a fairly natural genre framework from which Aboriginal [and] Torres Islander peoples can tell stories. But it’s not something you necessarily want to feel constrained by or limited to, no – definitely not,’ he says.
‘I think that the Aboriginal Gothic will keep evolving as more writers consciously decide to write into that genre for one reason or another. But of course, you know, I’m super interested in taking over any other genre framework that’s out there.’
A Chosen Vessel runs from 8-24 August at The Street Theatre, Canberra. Visit the website for dates and ticket details.
Prior to the preview performance this Friday 8 August, the forum Claiming Genre: Towards An Aboriginal Gothic featuring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and hosted by playwright Dylan Van Den Berg, takes place at 6pm. The forum is free but reservations are essential: email your name and telephone number to rsvp@thestreet.org.au to attend.
