A recent arrival in Queensland, I’m struck by how obsessively neat people keep their lawns. We live in fecund tropical chaos, but it is warded off by a religious adherence to a suburban ideal. There’s a parallel here with the nuclear family and the stepmother. Stepmothers, as I am, represent chaos to the neat, trimmed, insularity of family structure. Unseen by outsiders, often unwelcome to children, our roles are complex, ill-defined and shadowed by ugly myth. D’Cruz describes the uncanny “as a kind of unsettling affect, a disquieting structure of feeling” (2017, n.p.). As an adoptee I’m familiar with ghosts. Also invisible within families, we are haunted by the “hungry ghosts” (Lifton, 1994, p. 12) of our unknown birth families and who we could have been. To take on the role of stepmother was to step profoundly back into a ghost-world, haunted by the absent mother and by real children who are not the children we imagined. Stepmothers exist in a liminal, uncanny space where the chaos of expectations can threaten to overwhelm us.
In a short non-fiction film and accompanying paper I explore the strange connections between Queensland lawns and stepmothering through the lens of hauntology and the uncanny. As a Pākehā/Ngāi Tahu (Māori) creative practice researcher, I work with an autoethnographic methodology. My decolonizing “epistemological/theoretical position is not outside …. It’s my being!” (Diversi and Moreira, 2009, p. 53) as I prioritize embodied ways of knowing through image and sound, seeking a way to make seen the unseen.