Presumed Dead (abstract)

Emma Doolan

Death, Dying, and the Undead Conference

Presumed dead: Gothic representations of the missing person in contemporary Australian literature ABSTRACT 35 000 people are reported missing in Australia each year—one every fifteen minutes. Most return home, unharmed. Some don’t. For those left behind, the grieving process is complicated by uncertainty: the missing person is neither certainly dead, nor certainly alive. Pauline Boss characterises this experience of ‘ambiguous loss’ as uncanny. The missing person is physically absent but remains psychologically present for families and friends while there is hope for their return. Missing person figures haunt the Australian cultural imagination. In literature and in life, explorers are swallowed by the desert, children are lost in the bush, schoolgirls vanish at picnics, hitchhikers are abducted by serial killers, and a prime minister mysteriously disappears while swimming. This paper is interested in the ways contemporary Australian writers like Sarah Armstrong (in 2004’s Salt Rain) and Jessie Cole (in 2012’s Darkness on the Edge of Town) use the Gothic to articulate the uncertainties of the state of being missing, representing the missing person as a ghostly or un/dead figure occupying uncanny spaces— islands, hinterlands, in-between spaces, and peripheral zones. The figure of the missing person mediates between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead, exposing and exploring cultural fears about uncertainty and about death, about all that lies beyond knowledge and control.