Australian dark fantasy author Deborah Biancotti, guest blogging at Poe’s Deadly Daughters, con­fesses to some­thing she sus­pects “will never be fash­ionable”: hating the Australian landscape.

I stopped pre­tending I found the land­scape any­thing but creepy and revolting. The sweaty, swollen rain­forests that threaten, in my memory, to tip into the thin wedge of play­grounds. The vast brownness of some places, the spindly silver trees, the ungen­erous scrub by the sides of roads, wild grasses that whip the edges of beaches. Strange powers control those spaces. Indifferent powers.

And later, an emphatic con­dem­nation of Dorothea Mackellar’s famous poem, ‘My Country’:

Man. Has anyone ever written a more banal poem about a more fatal place?

Marcus Clarke fam­ously expressed a sort of pre-Lovecraftian coun­ter­point to the kinds of empty plat­itudes that would later lodge them­selves in the Australian consciousness:

The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is des­ol­ation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair. No tender sen­timent is nour­ished in their shade. In other lands the dying year is mourned, the falling leaves drop lightly on his bier. In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The savage winds shout among the rock clefts. From the mel­an­choly gums strips of white bark hang and rustle. The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grot­esque or ghostly. Great grey kangaroos hop noise­lessly over the coarse grass. Flights of white cock­atoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun sud­denly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into hor­rible peals of semi-human laughter. The natives aver that, when night comes, from out the bot­tomless depth of some lagoon the Bunyip rises, and, in form like mon­strous sea-calf, drags his loathsome length from out the ooze.

With lit­erary pre­cedents like this, it’s not sur­prising that Australia has lately pro­duced such excellent writers of dark fiction — what’s sur­prising is that it hasn’t happened sooner.