Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Australian Gothic: Nick Cave’s The Proposition

Although dubbed an Australian Western by its creators, it seems to me that the 2006 film The Proposition (2006) written by Nick Cave and directed by long-term Cave collaborator John Hillcoat draws heavily on the tropes of the Australian (literary) Gothic – deracination, isolation, entrapment, dislocation and the uncanny – in a really haunting way to forge its unrelentingly violent and poignantly ethereal vision of the lawless Australian outback of the 1880s. To recap, the film pits an English police captain, Morris Stanley (Ray Winstone gives a strikingly restrained performance her