Uncanny parallels: Jennifer Kent’s the Nightingale, violence, and the Vandemonian past

ABSTRACT

Set in mid-1820s Van Diemen’s Land, The Nightingale depicts a dark and disturbing Tasmanian past populated with redcoats, convicts, Aboriginal people, and a few free settlers. Controversial scenes include the repeated rape of a young female convict, the murders of her husband and infant, and the rape and murder of an Aboriginal woman. Uncanny parallels can be drawn between the on-screen experiences of the white female lead, and the violence visited on the bodies of Tasmanian colonial woman Elizabeth Tibbs, her husband, and infant in 1826. After situating the film within its historical context, this paper provides a mimetic reading through elaborating these parallels. It interrogates key points of divergence between these fictional and historical accounts of women’s lives to explore what they reveal about gender, class, race, violence, and justice in colonial Van Diemen’s Land and its depiction in twenty-first century Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Van Diemen’s Land
• Tasmania
• colonial violence
• convicts
• Aboriginal people

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Kristyn Harman is an Associate Professor in History & Classics at the University of Tasmania. She specialises in cross-cultural encounters across Britain's nineteenth-century colonies, and twentieth-century Australasia.

ORCID

Kristyn Harman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0567-3736

Notes

1 Bushrangers were predominantly male and were usually convicts who had absconded into the bush to live outside of colonial law. Some colonial officials also deserted their posts, took to the bush, and became bushrangers.

2 Elizabeth Grant and I have written about the extensive use of neck chains to restrain Aboriginal prisoners, a practice that was demonstrably used in Van Diemen’s Land (Harman and Grant 2014). Numerous Aboriginal people’s corpses were mutilated following their murders or deaths. Well known instances of the heads of deceased peoples being severed include Yagan in Western Australia and Cannabygal in New South Wales. The Conciliator of Aborigines in Tasmania, George Augustus Robinson, is known to have robbed the graves of numerous deceased Tasmanian Aboriginal people while he had oversight of them at Wybalenna on Flinders Island, while in Hobart colonial surgeons mutilated Tasmanian Aboriginal remains, most notably those of William Lanne (see, in particular, Petrow 1997).