Andrew McCann’s angular colonial application of Freud stresses that the settler uncanny is anchored in the falsity and extinguishment of Aboriginal totemism. That is, the weird melancholy of the uncanny in settler poetics is contingent on the disenchantment of its Aboriginal object, always already mimetically staked in its haunting presence. Furthermore, the alternate, defamiliarizing pole of this dialectic enchants and mythologises the symbols of colonial modernity: the white grave, the slab-hut, the prophesied metropolis. This argument reads Aboriginal and settler gravesites in early colonial poetry as dynamic and disingenuous artefacts of an eliminatory discourse.
Jonathan Dunk is a critic and essayist, he co-edits Overland Literary Journal, and lectures at Deakin university.