Australian Hauntings: A Second Anthology of Australian Colonial Supernatural Fiction

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2011, 2013 by James Doig

Published by Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidebooks.com

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful to Douglas A. Anderson, Leigh Blackmore and Mike Ashley for supplying stories and information, and to Professor David Ritson for giving me permission to reprint his father’s (Max Rittenberg) story, “The Sorcerer of Arjuzanx.” I am also grateful to Neil Cladingboel for his tireless editing over three volumes.

INTRODUCTION: THE COLONIAL GHOST STORY

As the title suggests, the majority of stories in this collection involve ghosts or hauntings. The ghost
story is by far the most common type of colonial weird tale. This is not surprising, as the ghost story was extraordinarily popular in the nineteenth century, and its structure and dynamic reached a standard form in the middle decades of that century. The ghost
interacts with the living in order to exorcise or ameliorate past sins or unrealised promises. A consequence of this limited dynamic is that the vast majority of ghost stories are conventional and unremarkable, and the Australian ghost story is no exception—most are commercial offerings of little merit. Occasionall
y, however, an exceptional writer extends the possibilities of the form and takes it to a new level.

The typical colonial Australian ghost story is exemplified by the first known supernatural tale set in Australia, “Fisher’s Ghost” or “The Ghost Upon the Rail” (Gelder, 1994, 2007) a well-known tale by John Lang (1816-1864) in which the ghost of a murdered man leads the authorities to his killer. The story survives in several versions, the earliest appearance of which was anonymously in
Tegg’s Magazine
in 1836. The basic plot of justice obtained through supernatural means is extremely common in colonial supernatural fiction; Mary Fortune, a prolific writer of crime stories, wrote several stories in this vein which appeared in the
Australian Journal
. One of these is “Mystery and Murder” (Gelder, 2007), published in 1866, in which Mr Longmore, a successful merchant and well-known resident of Hobart, recounts to a detective how the apparition of his wife appeared to him at the foot of his bed. The wife had eloped years before with a ship’s captain named Walter Cuvier, “a most disgraceful and low rascal”. The ghost leads the detective to her body—she had been stabbed to death by Cuvier and buried in a shallow grave in the grounds of her husband’s house, presumably while on her way to seek forgiveness from her husband for her dreadful behaviour. Again and again in the stories in this anthology we shall see similar scenes played out—of a crime committed, and revenge or redemption obtained through supernatural means. In what follows I will describe colonial ghost stories in relation to an aspect of the Australian experience or environment against which they are set.

The Australian Penal System

The great colonial novel of the Australian penal system is Marcus Clarke’s
His Natural Life
, which describes the ordeals of Richard Devine, later the convict Rufus Dawes, who is unjustly transported to Port Arthur in Tasmania. When a group of convicts escape from Port Arthur they are ill-equipped to deal with the harsh environment of wilderness. When they run out of food they start cannibalising each other. The last remaining escapee, Gabbet, is picked up by a whaling vessel with a half-eaten human arm hanging out of his swag. Dawes survives in the version of the novel originally serialized in the
Australian Journal
in 1870; however when Clarke substantially revised the work as
For the Term of His Natural Life
for book publication in 1885, Dawes and his love interest, Sylvia, drown in a cyclone, a much bleaker ending. Clarke is intent on describing the terrible depredations of the penal system; there is no scope for a happy colonial future.

For all of its gothic trappings
His Natural Life
has no supernatural or fantastic elements; there is enough real life horror to obviate the need for otherworldly fears. Other writers of the penal system followed his example, most notably William Astley who wrote under the pseudonym “Price Warung”. Astley wrote powerfully of the physical horrors of convict life in stories like “How Muster-Master Stoneman Earned his Breakfast” (1890) and “The Liberation of the Three” (1891), both anthologised in Neil Stewart’s
Australian Stories of Horror and Suspense from the Early Days
(1978). However, there is a small body of supernatural tales that touch on convict life. Hume Nisbet’s “The Haunted Station” (
The Haunted Station and Other Stories
, 1894; Gelder, 1994, 2007) is arguably the best-known colonial Australian ghost story, and it draws heavily in its outline from
His Natural Life
. The narrator is a young doctor, who is wrongly convicted of murdering his wife. Saved from the gallows by influential friends he is transported to Western Australia. While working on a chain gang he escapes with two fellow convicts and after a breathless pursuit in which one of the convicts is recaptured, the other shot dead, and the narrator shot above the elbow, he arrives at a remote station house. From the moment he lays eyes on it he senses an overwhelming uncanniness about it:

I felt the weird influence of that curse even as I crawled into the gully that led to it; a shiver ran over me as one feels when they say some stranger is passing over your future grave; a chill gripped at my vitals as I glanced about me apprehensively, expectant of something ghoulish and unnatural to come upon me from the sepulchral gloom and mystery of the overhanging boulders under which I was dragging my wearied limbs.

He naturally takes the house to be deserted, but closer inspection reveals the skeletons of a mother and her daughter in an upstairs bedroom, and down in the servant’s quarters, the bare bones of three domestics with shattered skulls, still clothed in their bloodstained nightdresses. Clearly a terrible slaughter had taken place there years before which had remained undisturbed until now.

In the climax of the story, which takes place, inevitably, during a stormy night, the murdered woman’s husband arrives, a stereotypical gothic villain, with pallid complexion, thin black moustache, blood-red lips and fiery eyes. Weeds and slime trail from his saturated clothes as if he has spent a long time submerged in water. The revenant relates the terrible history of the events that occurred there—of treachery, murder, and revenge from beyond the grave. When the storm is at its height the woman and her ghostly child manifest themselves and the narrator, by this time in a paroxysm of fear, flees the house, not a moment too soon, as it is destroyed, like Poe’s house of Usher, by a fork of lightening.

Squatters, Drovers, and Aborigines

In Australian history, squatters were people who occupied large tracts of crown land in order to graze livestock. In its original derogatory context the term was usually applied to the illegitimate occupation of land by ticket-of-leave convicts or ex-convicts. However, from the mid-1820s, the occupation of Crown land without legal title became more widespread and was often carried out by those from the upper echelons of colonial society. As squatters became wealthy entrepreneurs, the term came to refer to a person of high social prestige who grazed livestock on a large scale. A society of bush workers developed—drovers, stockmen, shearers, superintendents—to work the stations. Naturally, the hardship and lawlessness of station life became a popular subject for Australian writers who seized on the dramatic possibilities of life far from the civilising influence of the cities. Many of Australia’s best-known colonial writers wrote about bush society—the conflicts, tragedies, loneliness—often with humour and pathos, for example the bush ballads of A. B. “Banjo” Paterson and Adam Lindsay Gordon, and the short stories of Henry Lawson.

In R. P. Whitworth’s “A Strange Story”, published in the
Australian Journal
in 1895, the narrator and his cousin, Jim Welsh, come to Australia to make their fortunes as squatters, preferring the adventurous life on a cattle station to a tame sheep run: “…the headlong galloping through crashing timber, and down stony defiles and steep gullies, the camping out beneath the giant gum trees in the solemn bush, the cracking stockwhips, the cabbage-tree hats, the blue shirts, the breeches and boots, and the other glories that render the life of the stockman so desirable.” The cousins acquire 70,000 acres on the upper Goulburn River in Victoria and set to work. Things go well for them at first, but soon a tribe of aborigines in the area start spearing their cattle indiscriminately. Fearing that they might soon start to kill colonials, Welsh decides to ride to the nearest neighbour to discuss what to do. A few hours later, after an uneasy sleep, the narrator sees an apparition of his cousin: “Coming slowly up the path, not twenty yards from me, and gliding rather than walking, was a form, the form of my cousin, Jim Welsh, whom I had seen start for Carfrae’s some hours before. Pale to lividness, shadowy, ethereal, with a look of pain on his erstwhile handsome face, and a crimson blotch of blood welling from a deep gash in his breast.” The narrator’s worst fears are confirmed when he finds Welsh’s corpse in a “gloomy” gorge, stuck through with a spear. “A Strange Story” is a conventional English ghost story, down to the dismal, gliding spectre that portends unnatural death, transposed to a striking Australian setting. It produces a melancholic effect in the thwarted optimism of the young English men, one of whom is destroyed by the hazards of the new land.

Another conventional trope is the ghost that repays a favour. William Sylvester Walker’s “The Wraith of Tom Imrie” (
From the Land of the Wombat
, 1899; Doig, 2011) is related by a station hand named McIlwaine around a campfire in traditional ghost story fashion. Twenty-five years earlier he and his friend, Tom Imrie, stop at a bush hotel while droving cattle. While they are playing cards a murder takes place; Tom Imrie pursues the killer on horseback and shoots him dead, but then unaccountably turns the gun on himself and commits suicide. McIlwaine visits Tom’s mother in Sydney to tell her the news of her son’s death, and from her he learns that the man Tom killed was her own brother, which explains why he committed suicide. Soon afterwards McIlwaine is droving rams through the same country when he is bitten by a deadly snake. He passes out, but is roused by Tom’s dog, Joker, which would not leave Tom’s grave. Tom’s ghost appears and guides McIlwaine to a pool of water, saving his life.

Similarly, in Edwin M. Merrall’s “The Spectre of the Black Swamp: An Overlander’s Story” (Doig, 2011), first published in the
Australian Journal
in 1875, the narrator, a drover, tells of events that took place many years earlier on a remote cattle station in New South Wales. John Warsfield is the “dashing” station overseer or superintendent who mysteriously disappeared while droving cattle to a neighbouring station with Mike, a “low-browed, brutish-looking” stockman. At about the same time Mike’s wife disappeared and it was generally believed that she eloped with the boundary rider who left about the same time. Soon afterwards a headless rider is seen in the vicinity of a drovers’ camp called Black Swamp. Years later, Mike is employed by the narrator on a droving job in the same region. Although they are warned not to camp overnight at Black Swamp because the headless rider will disturb the cattle, the narrator dismisses the story. With supernatural punctuality the headless rider appears at the stroke of midnight. The apparition, a “horrid presence” with “two luminous eyes”, accosts the narrator, and then attacks Mike in his tent before rushing down to the swamp shrieking with triumphant laughter. In the morning a bloody trail from Mike’s tent leads them to a headless skeleton concealed in the swamp and Mike confesses to the murder. He had intercepted a letter from Warsfield to his wife asking her to elope with him to Sydney; when he did not show up she left instead with the boundary rider. The droving party camp at Black Swamp another night so that the sceptical superintendent can investigate the apparition for himself; the revenant reappears and again attacks Mike who dies of fright.

Again, this is a formulaic ghost story, a typical tale of supernatural revenge in which the ghost realises justice for a past sin. The author also preserves familiar notions of social hierarchy with the dashing superintendent contrasted with the brutal stockman, though some moral ambiguity is introduced—is not John Warsfield culpable for having designs on the stockman’s wife? Nevertheless, traditional views of hierarchy and literary form are central here; indeed, the author places the tale firmly in a venerable literary tradition by introducing the familiar supernatural form of a headless ghost, common to British legend and folklore and best known in literary terms in Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. The headless horseman also appears in “The Phantom Horseman”, published in the
Australian Town and Country Journal
in 1881, and like Irving’s exemplar, the phantom turns out to be a fake. Again the action takes place on a remote outback cattle station where there is a tradition of the ghost of a murdered man, which appears every Christmas Eve. The phantom horseman dutifully appears, but it turns out to be a drover—his horse has bolted while he is unsuccessfully trying to remove a blanket that has knotted itself around his head.

A Christmas Eve legend figures also in Frances Faucett’s “A Bushman’s Story” (
Thou Must Write. A Bushman’s Story
, 1886; Doig, 2007) when a young squatter, travelling alone one Christmas eve, finds that purgatory has emerged from the “grand silence” of the bush: “It was a city of the dead—they were dead men who walked in its streets—who had raised its stately towers—who sought in this great white dome the objects they had striven to attain all their lives.” The ghostly people stream silently along its streets and the squatter is drawn irresistibly to join them. On a bridge he is accosted by ghouls that rise up from the river, presumably denizens of hell, but he manages to escape. The city disappears in the mists and the squatter never returns there again.

Arguably the most important Australian colonial writer of weird fiction was Ernest Favenc (1845-1908). He wrote numerous stories of the supernatural for the popular magazines of the day, including
The Bulletin
, and many of them draw on his experiences as a station hand and explorer.
[1]
In “The Boundary Rider’s Story”
(My Only Murder and Other Tales
, 1899; Doig, 2007) Favenc’s theme is the greed and lawlessness of the bush. During a terrible storm a boundary rider arrives at a bush pub with the news that he has seen the revenant of a Chinaman who had earlier been found dead with his throat cut. It turns out that the station contractor has murdered him for his paycheck. The contractor is found with his throat torn out and a terrified expression on his face; the Chinaman’s grave has been disturbed, and when it is dug up the check is found clutched in his hand. Indifference for human life was often expressed in the senseless killing of aborigines. In “The Ghostly Bullock Bell” (
The Bulletin
, 1893), the sound of the spectral bell makes one of the drovers recall how, as a young man, he caused the death of his brother. In “Doomed” (Gelder, 2007), published in
The Australian Town and Country Journal
in 1899, one of a party of five young squatters fires into a group of aborigines for a lark, killing an aboriginal woman and her baby. Before she dies she curses the squatters and each in turn suffers a premature death; the last thing they see is the woman carrying her baby. More often, though, it is the aborigines who are the threat, and in these stories the casual and often brutal racism of many colonial writers is starkly apparent.