The McMillan Notes : exploring the Gippsland Massacres through historiographical metafiction

Abstract

This thesis has two parts: a creative component titled The McMillan Notes; and an exegesis, "Its Roots Must Hold up the Sky": Danielewski's House of Leaves and Archived Trauma. The critical component will deal with metatextual depictions of trauma, particularly historical trauma while the creative component will make use of techniques of this kind. The Gippsland Massacres that took place between 1840 and 1850 saw the murder and/or displacement of 2,000 of the Gunaikurnai people. Despite the gravity of the event, the Federal seat of East Gippsland is still named after the perpetrator of the massacres, Angus McMillan. Plaques and statues dedicated to him dot the region. While there have been moves to rename the seat, even from conservative factions, they have yet to be put into action The McMillan Notes refers to ancestral curse narratives to examine the effects of colonialism on the present and could be described as a work of Postmodern Australian Gothic fiction. The McMillan Notes models itself chiefly on Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, a notable 2000 Postmodern Gothic novel that parodies academic exegesis to communicate the unrepresentability of trauma. The text's metafiction is made up of a multitude of layers and framing devices that vie for the reader's attention, a method employed to communicate the complex and layered nature of trauma itself. The McMillan Notes develops techniques used in Danielewski's House of Leaves in terms of presenting itself as a critical reflection or exegesis of a metatextual object, utilising a variety of techniques to communicate the unrepresentable nature of intense trauma. The McMillan Notes is also in dialogue with an earlier classic of Postmodernism, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, utilising some of the techniques Vonnegut introduced that Danielewski later refined. This essay acts as both an exegesis of The McMillan Notes and a formal analysis of House of Leaves, outlining which formal elements of Danielewski's text have been adapted for the creative component as well as offering an examination of the historiographic elements throughout. The methodology will chiefly be concerned with close examination of the text itself but will also refer to a range of secondary sources on the text and relevant theorists. The exegesis will also discuss how postmodern, self-reflexive methods develop a means of communicating neglected historical trauma in defiance of the apparently unrepresentable nature of this trauma.

Date of Award	2018
Original language	English