Australian Hauntings: A Second Anthology of Australian Colonial Supernatural Fiction Read Free

Disturbed Christmas in the Bush,” in which hostile natives threaten a homestead. Another example is Sophie Osmond’s “The Story of the Stain” ( Phil May’s Winter Annual , 1901; Doig, 2011). Osmond, an Australian novelist who is now all but forgotten, wrote three weird tales for Phil May’s annuals between 1901 and 1904. In “The Story of the Stain” a family renovating an old homestead are concerned when a stain appears in the kitchen and cannot be removed. One of the daughters has a vision of three men in the house being attacked by aborigines; one of the men with his dying breath implores her to “Find it! Find it! For God’s sake! Send it to her! She has been waiting all these years.” Upon tearing up the kitchen floor they find a bag containing a bundle of letters from a woman named Mary Elwyn in England. Investigations reveal that her husband, George Elwyn, went missing in Australia years before and the discovery of the letters finally allows her to make closure.
    Rosa Praed’s celebrated tale, “The Bunyip” (Gelder, 1994, 2007; Doig, 2010), first published in the anthology Coo-ee: Tales of Australian Life by Australian Ladies (1891), also involves typical station workers; we can recognise them instantly:
    …there was something striking about the appearance of the men, in their bright Crimean shirts and rough moleskin trousers and broad-trimmed cabbage-tree hats, as they lounged in easy attitudes, smoking their pipes and drinking quart-pot tea, while they waxed communicative under the influence of a nip of grog, which had been served out to them apiece.
    The first half of the story is a meditation on the Bunyip, or Debil-Debil, the legendary Australian monster that haunts remote lagoons and swamps. According to the narrator, “it is the only respectable flesh-curdling horror of which Australia can boast.” The Bunyip is more than just a sea monster, but a supernatural being that lures people to their doom by “a certain magnetic atmosphere” that spreads “a deadly influence for some space around.” It is especially said to haunt a particular lagoon that exerts a particular melancholy fascination on the narrator:
    I liked nothing better than to go with my brother on moonlight nights when he went down there with his gun over his shoulder to get a shot at wild-duck; the creepy feeling which would come over us as we trod along by the black water with dark slimy logs slanting into it, and reeds and moist twigs and fat marsh plants giving way under our footsteps, was quite a luxurious terror.
    Of course, this is the very same “pleasing terror”, to use M. R. James’s phrase, that the weird tale is meant to evoke, and it corresponds with the “weird melancholy” that Marcus Clarke saw as so distinctive about the Australian forest.
    The weird atmosphere is even more pronounced in the second half of the story, when the group hears a strange wailing cry in the swamp. They realize it is a lost child and go in search of her: “It was a dreary, uncanny place, and even through our coo-ees the night that had seemed so silent on the plain was here full of ghostly noises, stifled hissings, and unexpected gurglings and rustlings, and husky croaks, and stealthy glidings and swishings.” They find the girl, but too late—she has been dead several hours. Praed leave us with the question, if the girl was already dead, who, or what, made the strange wailing cry?
    The Gold Rush
    Gold was discovered in New South Wales in April 1851 and in Victoria in July of the same year and sparked a mass movement of people that rivalled the gold rushes in the United States a few years earlier. The gold rushes had wide-spread social and economic effects: new found wealth, an upsurge of republican nationalism, racial suspicion and conflict caused by the migration of people from Europe and Asia to the gold fields, and the threat to law and order caused by the greed and corruption of gold diggers. Many stories and ballads were