SAC 4 (1) pp. 43–54 Intellect Limited 2010
Studies in Australasian Cinema
Volume 4 Number 1
© 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sac.4.1.43_1
CATHERINE SIMPSON
Macquarie University
Australian eco-horror and
Gaia’s revenge: animals,
eco-nationalism and the
‘new nature’
ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS
We hear so much about extinction in debates around climate change. But what about
those animals that go feral and then return – bigger, hungrier and angrier – to wreak
revenge on humans who may have done them injustice? Using an eco-postcolonial
framework, this article examines how a number of exploitation horror films have
dealt with environmental topics and issues of trespass. In particular, I examine the
agency of animals – crocs, pigs, thylacines and marsupial werewolves – in some
key Australian eco-horror films from the last 30 years: Long Weekend (Eggleston,
1978), Razorback (Mulcahy, 1984), Dark Age (Nicholson, 1987), Howling III:
the Marsupials (Mora, 1987), Rogue (Greg McLean, 2007), Black Water (Nerlich
& Traucki, 2007) and Dying Breed (Dwyer 2008). On the one hand, these films
extend postcolonial anxieties over settler Australian notions of belonging, while on
the other, they signify a cultural shift. The animals portrayed have an uncanny
knack of adapting and hybridizing in order to survive, and thus they (the films
and the animals) force us to acknowledge more culturally plural forms of being. In
particular, these films unwittingly emphasize what Tim Low has termed the ‘new
Nature’: an emerging ethic that foregrounds the complex and dynamic interrelationships of animals with humans.
Australian cinema/film
animal agency
eco-horror
eco-postcolonial
new nature
Ecological humanities
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1. Thanks to Fincina
Hopgood for this
comment at the Bad
Cinema Conference
(Monash University,
April 2009). My
gratitude to Mark Ryan,
Grisha Dolgopolov,
Anthony Lambert and
the two reviewers for
their useful feedback.
I have also drawn
much inspiration from
my 2009 Honours
cohort’s provocative
engagement with
the new seminar
Eco-Interventions: the
cultures of climate
change, as well as
from postgrads, Emily
Bullock and Kate
Wright. Thanks also to
ecologist Ian Wright.
Animals were exploiting us a long time ago.
(Low 2003: 7)
[C]ontemporary interest in the environment is based on highly mediated representation of its most appealing aspects and today’s symbolism
is drawn from popular culture.
(Bagust 2001: 5)
‘If it moves shoot it; if it doesn’t, mine it, or chop it down’. Such was the prevailing mantra towards nature in Australia throughout the twentieth century
and beyond (Bird Rose 2005). But alongside attempts to utterly dominate lies
a land that so often refuses to succumb, and many have become its unwitting
victims. In Australian film texts, nature is resilient and at times even vengeful towards those who do not treat it with respect. This is explicitly portrayed
in the recently re-made horror flick Long Weekend (Eggleston, 1978; Blanks,
2008) that concerns a young couple who go on a camping trip to save their
rocky marriage and ‘sin against nature’ by mindlessly killing animals and cutting down trees and then pay the ultimate price and become nature’s prey.
On a broader level, Long Weekend reinforces humankind’s ethical responsibility towards the ‘more-than-human world’ (Abram 1996). In her book The
Ecological Crisis of Reason, eco-philosopher Val Plumwood argues that ‘our
failure to situate dominant forms of human society ecologically is matched
by our failure to situate non-humans ethically, as the plight of non-humans
continues to worsen’ (Plumwood 2002a: 2).
With its marauding eagles that cause fatal car accidents and the haunting,
anguished cries of an orphaned baby dugong, there is a strong sense in Long
Weekend that Gaia – or mother-nature, mother-earth – is returning to haunt
us for past wrongdoings. James Lovelock’s book The Revenge of Gaia (2007)
looks at the earth as a dynamic, living organism, as a ‘self-regulating evolving system’ in which everything is interrelated. Lovelock’s thesis is that the
world is ‘so morbidly ill that it will pass into a fever that will last for 100,000
years’. In his most recent work, The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009), amongst
many of his catastrophic predictions that living in a much hotter world that
has already progressed past tipping point might produce, Lovelock discusses
species extinction. A recent study (Brown 2004 cited in Bird Rose 2004: 35)
has predicted that by 2050 one-quarter to one-third of all species of land animals and plants will be extinct. The rate of extinction is so destructive that the
twenty-first century might be known as ‘the age of loneliness’ (E. O. Wilson
cited in Bird Rose 2004: 35). According to biologist Tim Low, Australia has
one of the worst records in the world on extinction (Low 2003: 33). This evident ‘animal holocaust’, as Plumwood (2002a) has put it, is indeed a pressing
issue that needs further exploration on the social and cultural, rather than just
the scientific, front. However in this article I am more interested in the resilience of animals. It focuses on a form of eco-horror and the ways in which this
exploitation genre manages to smuggle in social issues.1
In his most recent book (2009), Lovelock, countering Charles Darwin,
argues that living organisms do not always passively adapt to their surroundings, but often go out of their way to change their environments to suit their
requirements.
Despite the preponderance of animals in Australian cinema, little work has
been done on their role or function, with the exception of Deb Verhoeven’s
notable Sheep and the Australian Cinema (2006) and Helena Forscher’s
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Australian eco-horror and Gaia’s revenge
exemplary Ph.D. thesis Animals in the Landscape (2008). Rather than an
extended textual analysis, this article focuses on moments in a series of key
films: Razorback (Mulcahy, 1984), Dark Age (Nicholson, 1987), Rogue (McLean,
2007), Howling III: the Marsupials (Mora, 1987) and Dying Breed (Dwyer 2008).
Using what I call an eco-postcolonial framework, I argue that, first, in their
attitudes to foreigners, tourists and/or trespassers as ‘prey’, these films extend
postcolonial anxieties over settler Australian notions of belonging. In the second section, drawing on the work of Val Plumwood, I argue that the existence
of large predators like the crocodile challenges the notion of human mastery
over nature. Using Razorback, Howling III and Dying Breed, the final section
discusses what Low has termed the ‘new nature’: a cultural shift whereby animals have an uncanny knack of adapting and hybridizing in order to survive
and sometimes even thrive. As such, they (the films and the animals) force us
to acknowledge more culturally plural forms of being.2 All the films discussed
exploit ‘nationalist’ discourses (Laseur 1992: 367), particularly in relation to
their attitude towards territory and trespass, natives and non-natives. Many
were released long before climate change emerged as, according to Monbiot
(2006: 15), the biggest global issue. This indicates that they do not raise new
issues, but rather extend old discourses about human-caused environmental
destruction. Their mainstream topicality is the product of urgency surrounding climate change.
2. Evidently it is not only
limited to the horror
film genre in which
these hybrids emerge.
Think also of Babe:
the Gallant Sheep Pig
(Chris Noonan, 1995).
As Verhoeven (2004:
63) has argued, in
order to avoid being
delivered to the dinner
table Babe has to use
compromise, flexibility
and survival and learn
‘how to think like a
sheep and act like a
sheep dog’.
Trespass: foreign prey and fair game; natives and non-natives
Before we can interpret the agency of animals in Australian horror films,
we need to first understand how animals are situated in terms of Australian
nationhood. Tim Flannery (1994: 390) has claimed that, ‘any lasting notion of
Australian nationhood must arise from an intimate understanding of Australian
eco-systems’. And Franklin (2006) has argued in his book Animal Nation that
animals are a rich symbolic source and can tell us much about the nature of
identity, belonging and nationhood. In the Australian context animals occupy
an enigmatic position that goes right to the heart of Australian national values
(Franklin 1994). On the one hand they are perceived as part and parcel of the
mystique and agency of a landscape that has not been tamed like the cultured
gardens of Britain or continental Europe. On the other, the animals are seen
as victims of colonial enterprise.
Like Australian culture(s), fauna in Australia has never been stable, but rather
continually changing and dynamic. Franklin says that in Australia, ‘settler society
was unsettled by nature generally, but especially the fauna, and set about not only
the introduction of domestic farm and household species in the familiar colonial
manner but also of wild animals that were more aesthetically pleasing’ (Franklin
2006: 15), such as those animals that could be hunted like the wild boar in the
Northern Territory or those that could be fished, such as the trout in Tasmania,
which were more favoured than the prolific but less valued carp. ‘Professional
shooters worked their way through country shooting out the wildlife much as the
forests were clear-felled’ (Franklin 2006: 15). On the other hand, Low has also
studied the way in which both rare native species and introduced animals often
thrive in environments where we would not expect them to be, such as cities, so
much so that ‘our image of nature may need refining’ (Low 2003: 33).
But what about Australia’s much prized, so-called native animals? The
argument about maintaining and promoting the so-called purity of ‘native
annimals’, Franklin argues, is problematic because it draws on what he
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3. In addition, the recently
re-released film Wake
in Fright also contains
a much-maligned reallife kangaroo sequence.
terms eco-nationalist logic. For in parallel with Australia’s assimilation policies (such as the White Australia policy) to ensure national purity, the nation
also undertook aggressive species-cleansing policies to maintain the native
flora and fauna, using a very similar logic. The fear and threat of outsiders
did not only relate to ‘other’ people. As Hage (1998: 169) has argued, ‘the
ecological fantasy is part of the nationalist fantasy and vice versa’. For example, Australia’s so-called native dog, the dingo, is known to have originated
in Asia but has been ‘caught up in the symbolic politics of belonging’ perhaps because it was here before 1788, the beginning of colonization, and is
an aboriginal totemic ancestor (Franklin 2006: 15). This is nowhere more evident than in the film Evil Angels (Schepisi, 1988) based on the famous Lindy
Chamberlain case where the central debate concerned whether a dingo
was capable, or not, of attacking a baby. Despite the claims of Indigenous
locals that a dingo could indeed take a young baby, Chamberlain was convicted, and then later acquitted. Or take the brumby – when the New South
Wales Parks and Wildlife were reported in the media shooting brumbies
there was an outcry because the brumbies were ‘inscribed on Australian
popular memory, culture and history […] in the unfolding of the Australian
nation’ (Franklin 2006: 21), something that, particularly for the generation of
Australians that grew up in the 1980s, was captured and cemented in popular imagination through the Man From Snowy River and its sequel (Miller,
1986; 1988). So what we have here is a hierarchy of attachment to specific
animals that cannot be claimed to have necessarily originated in Australia,
which in turn complicates what constitutes the notion of a ‘native animal’ in
the first place.
So-called ‘native’ animals like the kangaroo hold a particularly ambivalent
position in Australian culture. In one context, there is a strong attachment to
the kangaroo as a national icon and exemplar of unique fauna. The successful
nature documentary Kangaroo – Faces in the Mob (Aldenhoven and Carruthers,
1992) did much to cement the furry and loveable reputation of this animal
through following a ‘mob’ of kangaroos for a year and tracing their sociable living habits. In the 1980s Professor Gordon Grigg championed ‘eating
skippy’ as a solution to ‘the plight of the continent’s devastated ecologies’
(Craw 2008: 82). In addition, it was seen as a nationalistic activity: ‘an authentically Aussie cuisine’ (Craw 2008: 82). In yet another instance, a fact that
Razorback (Mulcahy) exploits for its premise, kangaroos are cruelly hunted and
used as a source of pet food.3
In Razorback an American journalist and animal rights activist, Beth, is violently killed by a giant rampaging pig, a razorback, while reporting on the
barbarity of the nascent kangaroo pet-food industry. Razorback’s pigs have
morphed into monsters that exist in a sinister symbiotic relationship with the
workers at the Pet-pak factory whose livelihood depends on the slaughter
of kangaroos (O’Regan 1996). The majority of the film concerns the quest of
Beth’s husband, Carl, who ventures to outback Australia to avenge the death
of his wife at the hands of the razorback and the deviant Pet-pak workers
who have played a part in propagating the beast.
Curiously this is not the only film in which American women suffer at the
hands of the local flora and fauna and are sacrificed in the landscape (Lambert
2009: 63). At the end of Dallas Doll, the manipulative American central character, Dallas, (played by Sandra Bernhardt) is trampled to death by a flock of
rampaging sheep. In Ray Lawrence’s thriller Lantana (2001), the audience is led
to believe that the American writer and academic has been opportunistically
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Australian eco-horror and Gaia’s revenge
murdered, but it turns out her death is accidental, or rather, nature’s fault; she
has tripped on the lantana weed and fallen to her death down a rocky harbour
outcrop. In Crocodile Dundee (Faiman, 1986) journalist Sue Charlton (Linda
Kozlowski) only just escapes the jaws of a giant croc. In the more recent Rogue
and Black Water the giant crocs kill and maim extensively and indiscriminately,
American and UK tourists alike as well as Australian locals, theories for which
I return to in more detail below.
On the one hand, these deaths of Americans can be read simply as more
‘invasion scenarios’ (Morris 2002): foreign imperialists getting their just desserts from meddling in another nation’s business. On the other hand, perhaps they also show that these foreigners and tourists are unable to know,
understand and read the land and the things in it. This is a hostile land that
forges a particular type of Australian: a laconic, laidback and tough character
who is often able to survive despite the odds. The sacrifice of the tourist in
the landscape enables the Australian locals to perform the role of the ‘knowing guides’ in the films, to claim a greater sense of belonging, if only through
‘knowing’ about the dangers in the landscape that they have to take care in
(Simpson 2006).
An interesting comparison occurs in Japanese Story (Brooks, 2003), where
the geologist Sandy (Toni Collette) and her Japanese companion, Hiromitsu
(Gotaro Tsunashima) get bogged out in the bush after they have trespassed
on Indigenous land without permission (at Hiromitsu’s urging). Sandy performs the role of the knowing guide who predicts much of the looming trouble, with her comments about people ‘dying out in the bush all the time. Lots
of people!’ Hiromitsu eventually falls victim to the consequences of cultural
trespass that they both commit. In an extraordinary scene two-thirds into that
film, Hiromitsu, unaware of the dangers lurking below the surface, is instantly
killed after diving into a gorge, thus realizing Sandy’s fears about the threatening
landscape (Simpson 2006).
Much like the post-Mabo consciousness (Collins and Davis 2004) that
marks Japanese Story where the Japanese tourist Hiromitsu pays with his life
for trespassing on Indigenous land without permission, the tourists in David
McLean’s Rogue, as the female tour leader Kate (Radha Mitchell) tells us,
have also trespassed onto an Indigenous-controlled waterway: ‘We’re really
not supposed to go through here – this is sacred land’. After their boat is
bumped and damaged by a giant crocodile they are stuck on an island in a
mangrove swamp deep in Arnhem Land. With the rising tide, they finally get
trapped by the lure of the rogue crocodile that is tagging his prey one by one.
Earlier in their tour, Kate informs the tourists that crocodiles ‘watch their prey
and learn their habits’. In both Japanese Story and Rogue Indigenous people
are displaced and the issue of ownership and protocol is realized through
the expertise of the white woman guide and not directly represented by an
Indigenous person.4 Rogue, Razorback as well as Lantana and Japanese Story in
one way or another, as with many of the films I discuss below, depict a failure
to read the signs, and pay attention to them, leading to eventual death, ‘out
there’ in the land.
Rogue’s eco-postcolonial framework is made manifest through the issue
of double trespass, both cultural and ecological. We are repeatedly told in the
film that not only is this Indigenous land, but it is also the ‘crocodile’s territory’. Through the process of granting agency to the more-than-human other,
like much eco-horror, the terrifying crocodiles in Rogue, Black Water and Dark
Age undermine the notion of human supremacy over nature.
4. Interestingly, in both
films an indigenous
presence is marked
by indigenous music
(non-diegetic in the
case of Japanese Story
and diegetic in the case
of Rogue) that can be
heard at the beginning
of both films.
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5. This film, while
released in the United
States in the 1980s, has
never been released
in Australia. Dark Age
came to prominence
as a result of Quentin
Tarantino’s fascination
with it in Mark Hartley’s
Not Quite Hollywood
(2008).
Crocodile territory and eco-terror
Home to the widest variety of dangerous species of animals and insects
in the world, including ten of the most venomous snakes and four of the
top six animals categorised globally as ‘most dangerous’– viz: the Great
White Shark (No. 6), the Box Jellyfish (No.5), the Saltwater Crocodile
(No.4) and the Funnel Web Spider (No.2) (Animals & Wildlife, 2006) –
Australia has no shortage of indigenous animal subjects to demonise.
(Forscher 2008: 210)
The crocodile has been called ‘the archetypal sum of mankind’s fears’ (Carroll
2001). Giblett claims that the crocodile has been playing the role as an ‘orally
sadistic monster’ for a long time, but of course, ‘only since humans appeared
on the earth long after it’ (Giblett 2006: 300). In his article ‘Alligators,
Crocodiles and the Monstrous Uncanny’, he argues that through the human
projection of fears and fascination onto these more-than-human others, the
crocodile becomes a manifestation of Freud’s ‘uncanny’ (Giblett 2006: 300).
However, there are also stories of humans and crocodiles coexisting in relative peace and harmony, such as those locals in Port Douglas, related by Kate
Rossmanith: ‘When Christopher Skase purchased […] the Mirage Resort, he
could never have known that 20 years later there’d be crocodiles living at the
11th hole of the golf course. Visitors play the shot quickly’ (Rossmanith 2007).
In the following section I resist the anthropocentric temptation of an engagement with animals on a purely psychoanalytic level, and explore the eco-postcolonial terrain that these films might provoke.
A broader notion of Gaia’s revenge and interconnected ecologies comes to
the fore in Black Water. Prior to a crocodile terrorizing a young couple and their
niece on a fishing trip we are told en route to a crocodile farm that the crocs
there are bred for tourism and then harvested at 18–24 months – ‘the optimum
time for the handbag market’. While not the direct actions of the characters
themselves, like in Long Weekend, the tourists in Black Water evidently belong to
a broader anthropocentric culture of animal exploitation and commodification.
When Grace’s (Diana Glenn) boyfriend Adam (Andy Rodoreda) is taken by the
crocodile, her anguished cries echo throughout the mangrove swamp and the
camera cuts to close-ups of nature’s minutiae – bees buzzing, ants crawling –
as if to signal that this is the ‘natural’ cycle of life where the predator becomes
prey in the crocodile’s domain. In fact, this scene echoes many of those in the
much earlier Long Weekend. However, in the context of Long Weekend it is Gaia
mourning one of her losses as a result of some mindless human desecration
carried out by the campers, rather than the human-centred mourning in Black
Water. As Plumwood claims, who was herself a survivor of a vicious crocodile
attack, ‘The idea of human prey threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery
in which we humans manipulate nature from outside, as predators but never
prey’ and in this way the eco-horror genre itself reflects a ‘deep-seated dread of
becoming food for other forms of life […] Horror and outrage usually greet stories of other species eating humans. Even being nibbled by leeches, sandflies,
and mosquitoes can stir various levels of hysteria’ (Plumwood 2002b).
Without exploiting tourists as easy prey, a much earlier rampaging crocodile thriller, Dark Age, seems to be hinting towards a more complex relationship with these non-humans.5 Set somewhere in the Northern Territory, a
local park ranger and two tour guides are given the task of managing a giant
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Australian eco-horror and Gaia’s revenge
saltwater crocodile that has been attacking and killing the locals (Carroll 2001).
However, the ranger (John Jarratt) finds himself at odds with the crocodile
‘guardians’, the local Indigenous population, who believe the crocodile is a
totemic figure in which the spirits of their ancestors have manifested, and
want this beast preserved, even after it has taken one of their own. After the
giant crocodile attacks and kills a little boy, the ranger and some bounty hunters are ordered to seek out and destroy the beast. The Indigenous people want
the crocodile transported to a safe secluded place where it can live peacefully.
The ranger seeks to collaborate with the Indigenous people to respect their
wishes, and tries to protect the local residents threatened by the crocodile.
On the one hand, the existence of ‘large predators’ such as crocodiles can
be read as a sign of a country’s inhabitants’ acceptance of their ecological
integrity and identity: ‘When they’re allowed to live freely, these creatures
indicate our preparedness to coexist with the otherness of the earth, and to
recognize ourselves in mutual, ecological terms, as part of the food chain,
eaten as well as eater’ (Plumwood 2002b). The existence of the rogue crocs in
Dark Age, Rogue and Black Water, along with their resilience to the attacks of
many humans, may in the first instance reflect a level of ecological coexistence
with this large predator.6 However, in Rogue and Black Water the crocs eventually have to pay for their sin of taking human lives, and they meet grisly fates
with drawn-out violent deaths. In the context of the films discussed thus far,
and from the perspective of ecological integrity, some of us might have to be
mercilessly sacrificed, but there are, evidently, more points for tourists, and
especially Americans. Ultimately, on a broader level, they illustrate the resilience of Gaia: the land and everything in it.
In the next section I deal with thylacines, marsupial werewolves and razorbacks. These animals are hybrid species, mixtures of the ‘native’ and ‘nonnative’ that have dynamically morphed, adapted, become bigger and better
and thoroughly thrived in the Australian environment, thanks often to their
human accomplices. What these films unwittingly emphasize is what Low has
termed the ‘New Nature’: an emerging ethic that foregrounds, amongst other
things, the complex dynamic of animals’ interrelationships with humans.
6. In his article ‘Alligators,
Crocodiles and the
Monstrous Uncanny’,
Giblett (2006: 299)
claims that while most
stories construct the
crocodile as a predator,
they are more precisely
scavengers.
THE ‘NEW NATURE’ AND THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN
Morris argues that many films from the 1970s and 1980s feature bizarre, apocalyptic invasion-scenarios and also seem particularly fascinated with ‘breeding’ and ‘degeneracy’ (Morris 1998). While not all the films that I look at in
this section are from this period, both breeding and degeneracy nevertheless
do come to the fore, particularly in the first film I examine, Razorback.
Like Howling III, Razorback is a parody of the horror genre. In addition to
Carl avenging his American wife’s rape by the ruthless Pet-pak brothers, who
then leave her for dead with knowledge that the razorback is on its way to
finish her off, the other central narrative thread concerns the fate of Jake. Jake
has been charged with the murder of his grandson, even though at the beginning of the film we witness the baby boy’s cot being rampaged by the vicious
razorback. The prosecution’s case rests on the testimony of the two sinister
and conniving Pet-pak brothers Dicko and Benny. Through their comments
about the razorback as a, ‘shy and cunning beast […] a kind of cowardly bastard’ and easily scared off by ‘a good boo!’, they question the possible agency
of the animal in killing or maiming anything. Jake on the other hand, maintains that ‘God and the devil couldn’t have created a more despicable species’
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and that ‘it has two states of being – dangerous or dead’. The brothers from
the outset are symbols of bestial degeneracy. They mercilessly leave half-killed
kangaroos to suffer and have perfected an evil pig-snorting squeal to boot. As
such, the film hints at a ‘secret depravity’ (Rayner 2000: 29), and the brothers’
symbiotic relationship with the feral pigs themselves recalls Low’s comment
that ‘animals will exploit the opportunities that we provide’.
Helen Forscher claims that, ‘analysis of the horror genre foregrounds
the nexus between Australian identity, assimilation and metamorphosis into
animality. The feral/Indigenous dichotomy is identified as a key trope in
Australian representation and the portrayal of particular modes of human–
animal relationships are seen to function as indicators of deviance in characterization’ (Forscher 2008: 5). While this applies directly to Razorback, there
seems to be something much more than just deviance in characterization that
is happening in Phillipe Mora’s classic, Howling III: the Marsupials as well as
Jodi Dwyer’s Dying Breed.
The ‘extinct’ thylacine is another ‘native’ animal that haunts many recent
cultural texts about Tasmania (Bullock 2009, Forthcoming). Bullock (2009)
argues that the thylacine constitutes an important element of what she terms
Tasmanian gothic, and the ‘sightings’ or attempts to bring it back to life
through cloning are attempts to ‘assuage our collective guilt over the environmental degradation of the past 200 years’ (Bagust 2001: 5). In his article
about the rather controversial attempts to clone the thylacine at the Australian
National Museum, Bagust argues that one of the primary reasons why the
thylacine remains such a pervasive influence in the popular imagination is the
existence of the famous short film footage Benjamin (Tasmanian Parks and
Wildlife service, 2000) made about the last thylacine in Tasmania in 1933 who
died a few years later in captivity in 1936. As he paces his cage, the ghostly
anguished presence of the soon-to-be-extinct Benjamin belies the animal’s
status as a predatory carnivorous marsupial. While there are frequent socalled ‘sightings’ of the thylacine in Tasmania, ‘for the majority of “experts”
the thylacine is gone forever’, as Bagust (2001: 2) claims: ‘a tragic exemplar of
the price nature has paid in the creation of our global industrial society’.
In the recent horror film Dying Breed, the thylacine is not extinct, and still
exists in a remote Tasmanian wilderness area. The thylacine’s existence has
been supported by the small island-village of Sarah, whose sinister and parochial inhabitants recall those of another horror film, Peter Weir’s (1974) The
Cars that Ate Paris. In much the same way that the residents of Paris exploit
the bodies and remnants of car accident victims to keep the town alive, the
country town locals in Dying Breed rightfully consider anyone who enters
their territory as an opportunity to be exploited. They literally feed off tourists
who venture into their town looking for the elusive thylacine. The residents
of Sarah Island are the descendants of Alexander ‘the Pieman’ Pearce, the
infamous, escaped convict who existed in the harsh Tasmanian wilderness in
the 1820s by devouring his companions. Pearce was re-captured and hanged
in 1824 after he was found with human flesh in his pockets. Evidently the
thylacine and the Sarah Island community ‘need to stay hidden to survive’ as
one of the locals puts it, but both species also need fresh ‘stock’ to reproduce,
and naïve tourists who wander into their domain are there for the taking/
eating/raping. While the narrative link is only hinted at, rather than explicitly
portrayed, the thylacine has evidently managed to survive due to its symbiotic
relationship with the residents who leave the remains of their victims for the
carnivorous thylacine to devour.
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The film’s primary focus is on the main descendant of Alexander Pearce
who inhabits the lush but brooding remote wilderness around the town and
picks off the central protagonists, a group of four campers, one of whom, the
zoologist Nina, is intent on finding both evidence of the thylacine’s existence
and how her sister died in the village eight years before. When the campers
become perilously lost downriver, deep in Pearce-country, they catch sight of
one of the Sarah Island inhabitants watching them from a distant dam wall.
Nina’s boyfriend, Jack, justifies why they should ask for directions: ‘it’s their
territory, they know their way around’, thus reinforcing the campers’ outsider
status. In the final few moments of the film, just before Jack is (we are led to
assume) devoured, Pearce’s great-grandson justifies his actions by lamenting,
‘you tourists have no tradition’. The notion of trespass remains at the centre of
many of these films, whereby outsiders, or foreigners all ‘deserve’ what they
get for committing eco-cultural trespass; whether they are the tourists who
stumble into the crocodile’s territory in Rogue and Black Water, or the ones in
Razorback, The Cars that Are Paris or Japanese Story, or the unfortunate campers
in Dying Breed. Meanwhile, provided they have lived in the area long enough
to be able to ‘read’ its signs, and understand its dangers and mythology, local
white settler Australians can claim a greater sense of belonging.
The tone of Howling III is more comedy-horror in line with Razorback than
the horrifying-horror of Dying Breed. The film is a spoof of the earlier Howling
films and revolves around a strange species of marsupial werewolves, or rather
were-thylacines – produced from the coupling of humans with thylacines.
‘Could this be a combination far too dangerous for the world to see?’ the
DVD cover proclaims. However, when the anthropologist Professor Harry
Beckmayer (Barry Otto) witnesses the birth of the central character, Jeboa’s
were-thylacine baby, he is awestruck: ‘a marsupial human that has evolved
in secrecy, simultaneously with our own species’. Like the thylacine and the
inhabitants of Sarah Island in Dying Breed, the were-thylacines continue to
exist as an isolated community in the remote Australian bush as well as in
Siberia. Beckmayer’s liberal attitude towards cross-species coupling has a
‘touch’ of the Donna Harraway about it, and echoes Low’s notion of emerging interrelationships between animals and humans:
[…] the cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between
human and animal is transgressed. Far from signaling a walling off
of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and
pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of
marriage exchange.
(Harraway 1991: 152)
Like the Indigenous crocodile guardians in Dark Age, Beckmayer believes the
were-thylacines should be regarded as an endangered species that are in need
of protection, while others deem them evil deviants because of the havoc
they create when provoked. Another central narrative thread concerns Olga,
a ballerina but more importantly, a Russian-Siberian relative of the endangered were-thylacine species who has defected to Australia. When there is
a manhunt for the were-thylacine community, Olga justifies were-thylacine
aggression towards humans on the grounds that, ‘We kill to protect ourselves.
You’ve been killing us for thousands of years – what choice do we have? We
are human like you!’ As Forscher argues, unlike most werewolf scenarios,
through Howling III’s emphasis on Jeboa’s voracious sexual appetite, it is her
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animality, rather than her deviant monstrosity, that is foregrounded. During
the post-coital coupling between Jeboa and the American film-maker Donny,
it is more loving fascination than horror when he discovers for the first time
that Jeboa has a pouch. The other romantic coupling, or species transgression, in the film involves Beckmayer, who falls in love with the beautiful asylum-seeking ballerina Olga. At the end of the film we see these two couples
existing happily, as well as evidence of offspring carrying the were-thylacine
gene with the trademark tiger lines. As a result the film becomes, as Forscher
mentions, more an allegory about social justice, and I might add here, ‘an
interspecies ethics’ that can be read as a demand to extend a notion of justice
to all those more-than-human others who may indeed be dangerous when
provoked but nevertheless have the right to exist. However, it must be noted
that filmically bringing the thylacine back to life as a hybrid were-thylacine
in Howling III, and its brief but eerie appearance in Dying Breed, signals, as
Bullock (2009, Forthcoming) has argued, attempts to assuage our guilt over
collective human environmental destruction, which originally resulted in the
thylacine’s extinction.
CONCLUSION
One of the problems with anthropocentrism, argues Plumwood, is that it ‘fosters illusions of invincibility and hides our real danger’ (2002a: 2). And Wood
(1986: 75) has claimed that, ‘the true subject of the horror genre is all that our
civilization represses or oppresses’. So in many ways, eco-horror performs an
important societal and cultural function. What these examples of Australian
eco-horror display, where humans become prey for animals, is not always an
acceptance of our ‘ecological identity’, but more the existence and agency of
the ‘more-than-human world’. In much the same way that Plumwood writes
of particular types of literature that write nature as agent, ‘re-subjectivising
and re-intentionalising the non-human as an ethical and intentional subject
of narrative’ (Plumwood 2002b, 2002a: 54), this type of eco-horror also rewrites the animal as agent, the power of which we fail to acknowledge at our
own, human peril.
Films such as Howling III, Dying Breed and Razorback emphasize the interrelationships between humans and non-humans in an evolving concept of
Gaia. This in turn provides a de-centring of human actors/agents and the
emergence of what can be regarded as disturbing transgressions in the case of
Dying Breed and Razorback or alternatively perhaps, a ‘pleasurably tight coupling’ (Harraway 1989) between human and animal in the case of Howling III.
This ‘New Nature’, claims Franklin, is very different to ‘the nativist ideal ecology of eco-nationalists’, which relies on establishing pure species and ‘boundary maintenance’ (Franklin 2006: 24–5). Instead it is ‘characterised by hybrids
and transformations, movements and disturbance – much of it irreversible
and none of it completed’, which also underscores Flannery’s adoption of
Gaia as a dynamic system (2008). ‘Australia is a place that has been altered
irrevocably by migration and mobility of people, things and natures. And it
is this fertile mixing and hybrid vigour that generates, paradoxically, the true
nature of Australia’ (Franklin 2006: 238). I doubt whether Franklin, Flannery
or Plumwood had Razorback or Howling III in mind when writing their exemplary environmental treatises. However, far from being mere entertainment value, exploitation eco-horror cinema can be a rich source with which
to examine societal and cultural attitudes towards the environment and its
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more-than-human others. And to be perfectly honest, given that Australia
has ten of the world’s most venomous snakes, I am waiting for a good Aussie
snake film. Anyone?
REFERENCES
Abram, D. (1996), The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World, NY: Random House.
Bagust, P. (2001), ‘The End of Extinction? Playing the Devil’s Advocate for
Designer Thylacines and Theme Park Ecosystems in the Age of PanEntertainment’, Australian Journal of Communication, 28: 1, pp. 1–18.
Bird Rose, D. (2005), Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonization,
Randwick: UNSW Press.
Bullock, E. (2009), ‘The Cultural Poetics of Tasmanian Gothic’, Unpublished
Ph.D. thesis (forthcoming), Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University.
Carroll, D. (2001), ‘Dark Age: A Review’, http://www.tabula-rasa.info/
AusHorror/DarkAge.html. Accessed 1 August 2001.
Collins, F. and Davis, T. (2004), Australian Cinema After Mabo, London:
Cambridge University Press.
Craw, C. (2008), ‘The Ecology of Emblem Eating: Environmentalism,
Nationalism and the Framing of Kangaroo Consumption’, Media
International Australia, 127: May, pp. 82–95.
Flannery, T. (1994), The Future Eaters, Sydney: Reed Books.
—— (2008), Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia?, Sydney: Black
Inc Books.
Forscher, H. (2008), ‘Animals in the Landscape: An analysis of the role of the
animal image in representations of identity in selected Australian feature
films from 1971 to 2001’, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Faculty of Humanities
and Social Sciences, Bond University, April.
Giblett, R. (2006), ‘Crocodiles, Alligators and the Monstrous Uncanny’,
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 20: 3, pp. 299–312.
Hage, G. (1998), ‘White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural
Society’, Sydney: Pluto Press.
Harraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
London: Free Association Books.
Lambert, A. (2009), ‘White Aborigines: Women, Space, Mimicry and Mobility’,
in C. Simpson, R. Murawska and A. Lambert (eds), Diasporas of Australian
Cinema, Bristol: Intellect.
Laseur, C. (1992), ‘Australian Exploitation: The Politics of Bad Taste’,
Continuum 5: 2, pp. 366–77.
Low, T. (1996), ‘Cats: Scoundrels or Scapegoats?’, Nature Australia, Autumn,
p. 80.
—— (2003), The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia, Canberra:
Penguin.
Lovelock, J. (2007), The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of
Humanity, Canberra: Penguin.
—— (2009), The Vanishing Face of Gaia, Canberra: Penguin.
Monbiot, G. (2006), Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, London: Allen Lane
Publishing.
Morris, M. (2002), ‘White Panic or, Mad Max and the Sublime’, Senses of
Cinema 18: Jan/Feb, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/18/
mad_max.html. Accessed 1 August 2009.
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O’Regan, T. (1996), Australian National Cinema, London & New York:
Routledge.
Plumwood, V. (2002a), Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis O Reason,
London and New York: Routledge.
—— (2002b), ‘Prey to a Crocodile’, Bealtaine, 30, http://www.aislingmagazine.com/aislingmagazine/articles/TAM30/ValPlumwood.html. Accessed
15 July 2009.
Rayner, J. (2000), Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction, Manchester &
New York: Manchester University Press.
Rossmanith, K. (2007), ‘Crocodile Fears’, The Monthly, June, http://www.themonthly.com.au/nation-reviewed-kate-rossmanith-crocodile-fears – 537.
Accessed 1 August 2009.
Simpson, C. (2006), ‘Antipodean Automobility and Crash: Treachery, Trespass
and Transformation of the Open Road’, Australian Humanities Review,
pp. 39–40, September, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/
archive/Issue-September-2006/simpson.html. Accessed 1 August 2009.
Verhoeven, D. (2004), ‘A Notional or a National Cinema? Thinking (Nothing)
of the Australian sheep films’, in Conference Proceedings of the 12th Biennial
Conference of the Film & History Association of Australia and New Zealand,
Australian National University, Canberra Australia, 2–5 December
2004, National Film and Sound Archive & Australian Film Commission:
Canberra & Woolloomooloo, pp. 61–71.
—— (2006), Sheep and National Cinema, Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press.
Wood, R. (1986), Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, New York: Columbia
University Press.
SUGGESTED CITATION
Simpson, C. (2010), ‘Australian eco-horror and Gaia’s revenge: animals,
eco-nationalism and the ‘new nature’’, Studies in Australasian Cinema 4: 1,
pp. 43–54, doi: 10.1386/sac.4.1.43_1
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Catherine Simpson has been seconded from Media to the Science faculty
to set up a new Science Communication programme. She is co-editor (with
Renata Murawska and Anthony Lambert) of Diasporas of Australian Cinema
(Intellect, 2009). Catherine has organized film festivals in Australia and Turkey
and writes on the cinema of both countries. She has a growing interest in the
ecological humanities and is working on a new book with Anthony Lambert,
Ecologies of Australian Cinema.
Contact: Faculty of Science, Macquarie University, North Ryde 2109, Australia.
E-mail: [email protected]
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