Ghosts of the Great South Land

Turcotte, Gerry

doi:10.2979/gso.2007.1.1.109

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…They happen because there are people who are made ghostly by the silencing of their voices' (Frosh 2013: 4). This is an argument that is also made by some postcolonial literary theorists, including Gerry Turcotte who has written about Australian and Canadian postcolonial gothic literature and the ghosts of those that have been rendered invisible, beginning with the declaration by the invaders of 'terra nullius' and continuing for over two hundred years (Turcotte 2007).…”

Section: Hauntingsmentioning

confidence: 84%

Writing working class ghosts

Gandolfo

2016

Text

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

On 15 October 1970, in one of the worst industrial accidents in Victoria's history, a span of the West Gate Bridge collapsed during construction. Thirtyfive workers were killed. Very little has been written about the West Gate Bridge collapse, the men who died, the men who survived or the families that were left behind. The Bridge has become a road, too often clogged with traffic, a nuisance, an annoyance. It's a tragic history, one that the city seems to have forgotten, but more than forty years later, it haunts my imagination and demands to be written. This is a self-reflexive article that explores the process of writing the West Gate Bridge collapse into a work of fiction. It focuses on the challenges of capturing the voices of the working class who are often marginalised and occasionally mythologised (as working class heroes) but rarely the central focus of literature, and the ethical risks associated with aestheticizing a traumatic historical event. Like Gerry Turcotte, I believe that engaging with our ghosts is the 'only remedy for the distressing legacies' (Turcotte 2007: 115) of our history, and argue here that fiction has a role in giving the ghosts of our past a voice in the present.

show abstract

Section: Hauntingsmentioning

confidence: 84%