The Colonial Australian Gothic Ken Gelder, University of Melbourne Writers who have in fact never been to Australia have sometimes imaginatively restaged its European “discovery” in Gothic ways. Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), for example, was published fifty years after the establishment of a British colony at Port Jackson in New South Wales; even so, it chronicles a journey to the Southern extremities of the world by some American whalers and explorers who are cast as if they are the first to arrive at an island named Tsalal, "a country differing essentially from any hitherto visited by civilised man". 1 It is often noted that Poe drew on "widely circulated travel narratives" that emphasised the "backwardness of 'barbarous' non‐Western peoples, including the dark‐skinned [A]borigines of Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania". 2 In Poe's novel, the encounter between Indigenous people and the explorers who arrive on their shores is presented in stark, Manichean terms: a point the editorial note at the end of the novel underscores when it tells us, "Nothing white was to be found at Tsalal..." (201). The sheer blackness of the islanders (their skin and clothes, even their teeth) unsettles the new arrivals. Nevertheless, they soon establish a trade agreement with local Indigenous leaders, recognising that the colonial project is always first and foremost a matter of commercial development. It isn't long, however, before the explorers find themselves under attack, with many of the ship's crew killed by natives who see no value in the terms of trade: this is how the novel reinforces its sense of the "backwardness" of Indigenous people. A few years before the publication of Poe's novel, colonial authorities in Van Diemen's Land had in fact waged a large‐scale military campaign against local Aboriginal people, either killing them en masse during what was infamously known as the Black War or placing them in captivity and exiling them from the island. Groups of Aboriginal people had been raiding settler properties during the 1820s; but settler and military reprisals were so great that by the early 1830s the "decline in the island's original population was precipitous", with very few Indigenous survivors remaining. 3 The Gothic effect of Poe's novel relies on both the