Shot at and slashed and whacked: The Gothic Slaughterhouse in New Zealand Fiction

Critics such as Ian Conrich and Jennifer Lawn, among others, have identified various versions of the Gothic in New Zealand, locating dystopian representations of ‘what lies beneath’ in small town, urban, rural and domestic spaces. While these various forms of Gothic certainly take on particular inflections relating to New Zealand, such as the isolated farmstead in Mike Johnson’s 'Dumb Show' (1996), or the dysfunctional family holed up in a lakeside bach in Kirsty Gunn’s Rain (1994), there is nothing inherently ‘New Zealand’ about provincial, urban, rural or domestic Gothic, which occur in other national traditions. Where the Gothic does become specifically local is in fictional scenes of agricultural slaughter that work to express a nightmarish version of a settler nation based on notions of the pastoral that is actually revealed to be defined by violence, death and decay. As Patrick Evans points out, a key trope in this country’s literary production is the disparity between idealised notions of New Zealand as a pastoral paradise and actual dystopian realities. Although Evans is correct to suggest that the trope of the slaughterhouse works to expose the proletarian actualities so frequently obscured by colonial romance, the slaughterhouse is less an element of a corrective realism in novels such as David Ballantyne’s 'Sydney Bridge Upside Down' (1968), Jean Devanny’s 'The Butcher Shop' (1926), Laurence Fearnley’s 'The Hut Builder' (2010) and R. H. Morrieson’s 'Pallet on the Floor' (1976) than it is a manifestation of a genuinely local Gothic in which the return of repressed material relating to settlement stages a devastating return.