File(s) not publicly available
Writing murder: Elements of Gothic horror in Matthew Milat’s ‘meat axe’ poetry
Eighteen-year-old Matthew Stephen Milat, the grand-nephew of convicted serial-killer Ivan Milat, wrote a series of poems while in custody for the murder of seventeen-year-old David Auchterlonie in 2010 in the Belanglo State Forest, New South Wales; the same bushland in which Milat’s great-uncle had killed seven backpackers throughout the
1990s. Matthew Milat’s choice to narrate the aftermath of David Auchterlonie’s murder
in the genre of poetry quite literally draws this form of writing about death, specifically
from the perspective of a real-life teen-killer, toward the macabre fringes of literary and
popular culture. This examination of Milat’s verse-writing – ‘Your Last Day,’ ‘Cold Life,’
and ‘Killer Looks And On Evil Side’ – situates an analysis of his poetry against the
broader journalistic trend to write the nature of Milat’s crime utilizing elements of both
the Gothic family tradition and the monstrous. Shared blood-ties between great-uncle
and grand-nephew provided a rich site in framing the perverse convergence of heredity
and monstrosity within the teen-killer/serial-killer narrative. In the absence of Gothic
literary tradition focussing attention on this form of poetry – by a teen-killer, by a teenkiller
with blood ties to a convicted serial-killer – this examination of Matthew Milat’s
verse-writing also aims to offer a contribution to this scholarship while simultaneously
tracing the contemporary emergence of the Gothic into new sites as an idiosyncratic form
of writing murder by a real-life adolescent killer.
History
Issue
Special issue 35Start Page
1End Page
14Number of Pages
14eISSN
1327-9556Publisher
Australasian Association of Writing ProgamsAdditional Rights
Freely available from journal website.Peer Reviewed
- Yes
Open Access
- Yes
Era Eligible
- Yes