Ghost Stories and Mysteries (2 page)

The years following this flurry of activity were relatively barren, in terms of both writing and exploration. Favenc appears to have returned to Sydney where he experienced ill health, which according to Favenc’s biographer, Cheryl Taylor, could be a euphemism for the drinking problem that affected him intermittently for the rest of his life. It was not until the end of the decade that he began to write regularly again. The monograph
Western Australia, Its Past History, Its Present Trade and Resources, Its Future Position
was published in 1887, and resulted in a commission to explore the Gascoyne region north-east of Geraldton, which he undertook between March and June 1888. In the same year he published the magisterial
The History of Australian Exploration
, which has remained a classic of its kind and is still regarded as a useful source. Dedicated to the Premier of New South Wales, Sir Henry Parkes, the book reveals Favenc’s passion for exploration and adventure; he wrote in the preface that a complete history of the exploration of Australia can never be written as “[t]he story of the settlement of our continent is necessarily so intermixed with the results of private travels and adventures.” To some extent Favenc filled out his history in his fictional accounts of explorations into the outback.

The 1890s were Favenc’s most productive period as a writer, and his best tales of mystery and the supernatural were published between 1890 and 1895. By this time he had abandoned the discursive, over-complicated plots of his early short fiction in
The Queenslander
in favour of tightly controlled shorter pieces like “Doomed,” “A Strange Occurrence on Huckey’s Creek,” and “The Red Lagoon.”

The 1890s also saw the separate publication of two novels and a novella.
The Secret of the Australian Desert
was serialised in the Queenslander in 1890 before being published by the London publisher, Blackie & Son, in 1895. Like the best of Favenc’s fiction, the novel weaves fact, fiction and speculation.
The Secret of the Australian Desert
traces the fortunes of an expedition that sets out northward from Central Australia in search of fate of Ludwig Leichhardt’s famous expedition, which disappeared without trace. The novel crosses over into fantasy in its portrayal of a lost tribe of aborigines “wholly unlike any tribes known ever to have existed,” which draws heavily on contemporary interest in the lost land of Lemuria.

Similarly,
Marooned on Australia
(1897) is based on fact. As indicated by its subtitle,
Being the Narrative of Diedrich Buys of His Discoveries and Exploits “In Terra Australia Incognita” About the Year 1630
, the story speculates about the consequences of the wreck of the Dutch ship
Batavia
and the depredations committed by the mutineers. The first person narrator, Diedrich Buys, is one of the two mutineers who escaped execution and were instead marooned in North West Australia. As he battles to survive in a hostile land he comes across the Quadrucos, a
race distinct from the Aborigines because its technology is too advanced and culture too sophisticated.

A novella,
The Moccasins of Silence,
was published by the Australian publisher, George Robertson, in 1896, and featured strange native shoes that were worn to attack enemies by stealth at night. The same shoes appear again in the late story, “The Kaditcha: A Tale of the Northern Territory” (1907).

During the 1890s Favenc worked mainly for
The Bulletin
, which was edited by J. F. Archibald whose preference for the unadorned bush yarn may have influenced Favenc’s style. Known as ‘the bushman’s bible,’
The Bulletin
was an important newspaper that helped shape Australia’s national literature and published important work by Henry Lawson, ‘Banjo’ Patterson, Barbara Baynton, Miles Franklin and the cartoonist Phil May, in whose
Summer
and
Winter Annuals
Favenc would contribute.

A selection of seventeen stories published in The Bulletin between 1890 and 1890 was published in
The Last of Six: Tales of the Austral Tropics
(1863), the third volume of
The Bulletin’s
short story and verse anthologies. In 1894 the London publisher, Osgood, McIlvaine published
Tales of the Austral Tropics
, which dropped six stories from the earlier collection and added two others. A third collection of stories from
The Bulletin
,
My Only Murder and Other Stories
, was published by the Melbourne publisher George Robertson in 1899; this collected twenty four stories published between 1890 and 1895. Of the thirty one stories gathered here, six were published in
The Last of Six: Tales of the Australia Tropics
, and seven appeared in
My Only Murder and Other Stories
. A collection of verse,
Voices of the Desert
, was published in 1905.

Favenc was a part of the acclaimed group of
Bulletin
writers living in Sydney during the 1890s, and was a good friend of Louis Becke who was also a master of the short form, compared in his day with Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1898 Favenc joined the Dawn and Dusk Club, a group of Bohemian writers and artists and it was around this time that his alcoholism began to take a toll on his health again. Certainly, by the end of the 1890s he was less productive and there was a marked decline in the quality of his work, although between 1899 and 1903 he did write six stories for Phil May’s
Summer
and
Winter Annuals
with Gothic and supernatural elements. At that time, the annuals were edited by Harry Thompson, who preferred tales of horror and the supernatural.

By May 1905 Favenc was seriously ill in Royal Prince Albert Hospital, and later in year a bad fall that broke his thigh confined him to St Vincent’s Hospital. He died on 14 November 1908 in Lister Hospital in western Sydney.

Further Reading

Cheryl Frost,
The Last Explorer, the Life and Work of Ernest Favenc
(Townsville: Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1983).

Ernest Favenc,
Tales of the Austral Tropics
, edited by Cheryl Taylor (née Frost) (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, Colonial Texts Series,1997). This book collects the stories in
The Last of Six
and
Tales of the Austral Tropics
with a full scholarly introduction and critical apparatus.

Index of Stories in Ernest Favenc’s Short Story Collections

The Last of Six: Tales of the Austral Tropics
(Sydney: Bulletin Newspaper, 1893)

The Last of Six

A Cup of Cold Water

A Haunt of the Jinkarras

The Rumford Plains Tragedy

Spirit-Led

Trantor’s Shot

The Spell of the Mas-Hantoo

The Track of the Dead

The Mystery of Baines’ Dog

Pompey

Malchook’s Doom: A Nicholson River Story

The Cook and the Cattle Stealer

The Parson’s Blackboy

A Lucky Meeting

The Story of a Big Pearl

The Missing Super

That Other Fellow

Tales of the Austral Tropics
(London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1894)

A Cup of Cold Water

The Rumford Plains Tragedy

A Haunt of the Jinkarras

Trantor’s Shot

Spirit-Led

The Mystery of Baines’ Dog

The Hut-Keeper and the Cattle-Stealer

The Parson’s Blackboy

A Lucky Meeting

That Other Fellow

Stolen Colours

Bunthorpe’s Decease

The Story of a Big Pearl

My Only Murder and Other Tales
(Melbourne: George Robertson & Co, 1899)

My Only Murder

A Tale of Vanderlin Island

Blood for Blood

The Other Mrs Brewer

The Burial of Owen

The Red Lagoon

Tommy’s Ghost

The New Super of Oakley Downs

An Unquiet Spirit

George Catinnun

Bill Somers

Jerry Boake’s Confession

What Puzzled Balladune

The Story of a Long Watch

The Ghost’s Victory

The Sea Gave up its Dead

Mrs Stapleton No. 2

The Boundary Rider’s Story

The Eight-Mile Tragedy

The Belle of Sagamodu

Not Retributive Justice

A Victim to Gratitude

A North Queensland Temperance Story

A Gum-Tree in the Desert

A
Note on the Texts

The texts of the stories in this collection are taken from their book appearance, for which they were often substantially revised, apart from those that saw their first and only publication in periodicals. The stories are arranged in order of their first publication.

MY STORY

(1875)

I have tried to relate the following adventure as plainly and truthfully as possible. That it appears simply wild and impossible, I well know; but I have herein related nothing but the facts.

It was in the year 1871 that three of us left the Cloncurry diggings, intending to push through to Port Darwin, prospecting as we went. We reached to within one hundred miles of the Roper River, when the strange event occurred which altered all our plans.

My two companions were named, respectively, Owen Davy and Charles Morton Hawthorne; my name is James Drummond. Davy was an old friend; Hawthorne a comparative stranger, a well made, handsome fellow, middle aged, with dark eyes of peculiar force and brilliancy. He had a habit of looking intently into your eyes when speaking, with a weird stern look that would, without doubt, confuse any man of nervous temperament. His face was marked with a scar extending in a diagonal direction across his upper lip; his mustache partly covered it, but you could trace the course of the seam by the unequal growth of the hair.

Davy and I had made his acquaintance by accident, about a fortnight before leaving the Cloncurry. He had expressed a great wish to join us when our proposed expedition was spoken of, and it ended in his accompanying us.

For the first few weeks we agreed together capitally; our new mate made himself an agreeable companion, and proved to be a good bush man. After a time, however, the novelty wore away, and he showed decided symptoms of laziness, besides assuming an authoritative, dictatorial tone, when any of our movements were under discussion. At last, beyond saddling his own horse in the morning, and perhaps making a languid attempt to light a fire, he fairly shirked all his share of the necessary work of the camp. Davy, a hot-tempered little Welshman, had had several quarrels with him; and one evening but for my interference they would have come to blows. The conviction was forced upon me that night that Hawthorne, in spite of his lordly airs and stern looking, black eyes, was at bottom but a coward. I could see the look of relief come upon his face when I stepped between and insisted upon the dispute ending; and many times afterwards I saw gleams of hatred in his eyes that showed the tiger cruelty he harbored within him. An older man than Davy, I had my temper more under control, and though I knew that Hawthorne disliked me, we managed to continue our intercourse with one another upon the terms of ordinary civility. In the days of good friendship, Hawthorne had contributed greatly to relieve the monotony of our journey by his brilliant and to a certain extent fascinating conversation; he evidently knew a good deal of the world, and of fast if not good society. He had often spoken mysteriously of being in possession of a wonderful secret, but his hints were always so vague, that Davy and I thought but little about the matter until after the strange event occurred that I am going to relate.

Davy and Hawthorne had ceased to speak to each other; the day’s journey was generally performed in a moody, discontented manner; and I was thinking of proposing to abandon all prospecting and make straight for Port Darwin, when the whole aspect of affairs was suddenly changed. We had been out between four and five weeks, our horses were still in capital condition, and our supply of rations good. Since leaving Bourketown we had not seen the face of a white man, we had met with but slight difficulties with the blacks, and were now we thought within about one hundred miles of the Roper River, without having found the slightest indication of payable gold. This was the state of affairs on the 31st of November, 1871, when we unsaddled for our midday camp on the bank of a small creek.