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

published that focused on the sensational aspects of life on the gold fields, and a number of these have supernatural or fantastic elements.
    A typical example is “The Ghost from the Sea” (Doig, 2007) by J. E. P. Muddock. James Edward Preston Muddock (1843-1934) was a commercial writer for magazines who was particularly popular in the last decades of the nineteenth century. He wrote many stories and novels under the name Dick Donovan. He spent some time at the Victorian goldfields before travelling extensively in Asia; he returned to Melbourne in 1868, but left soon afterwards for London and a writing career. “The Ghost from the Sea” appeared in his collection Stories Weird and Wonderful (1889), and is set in Melbourne during the gold rush. Muddock makes his theme clear from the opening paragraph:
    This period in the history of our Australian colonies is a startling record of human credulity, human folly, wickedness, despair and death. The [gold] fever was confined to no particular class of people. Clergymen, bankers, landowners, shipowners, merchants, shopkeepers, sailors, labourers, classical scholars and ignoramuses alike fell under the fascination. The worst passions of our nature manifested themselves; hatred, envy, jealousy, greed, uncharitableness. The parsons were no better than paupers; the classical scholars than the ignoramuses. The thin veneering of so-called civilization was rubbed off, and the savage appeared in all his fierceness at the cry of “Gold! Gold!”
    The story is written in a journalistic style as if Muddock is reporting true events. Mr. and Mrs. Harvey are a young couple living at a Melbourne boarding house. Harvey goes to the gold fields and rumour has it that he has struck it rich, which is confirmed by the couples’ profligate lifestyle when he returns. When he returns to the gold fields his wife is brutally murdered and Mrs Harvey’s jewellery and other valuables stolen. The police and unable to trace the killer and when her husband returns he is broken by the news of her death. Some time later, the boarding house owners, Mr and Mrs Jackson, travel on board a clipper to England. Mr Jackson spends his time drinking in his cabin and appeals to the startled captain that a mysterious woman is trying to lure him overboard. The captain and crew see strange lights aboard the ship which they cannot explain. Finally, during a storm while passing Cape Horn, the light is seen again which on this occasion transforms into the apparition of a woman; Jackson rushes from the cabin doorway and the figure beckons him over the side of the ship. Subsequently Mrs Jackson loses her reason and is confined to an asylum in England. The clear explanation is that Mrs Harvey has obtained supernatural revenge on her killer. A very similarly plotted story is Favenc’s “The Haunted Steamer,” which was published in The Town and Country Journal in 1901. Again a man is forced overboard by the spirits of the people he murdered. Both stories appear to owe a good deal to F. Marion Crawford’s classic ghost story, “The Upper Berth” (1886).
    If gold fever led inexorably to greed and murder, the goldfields themselves were places that bred superstition and fear. A. G. Hales’ “The Spectre of Kurnalpi Gold Field” ( Camp Fire Sketches , 1902) is, unusually, set in the Coolgardie gold fields in Western Australia. When a dog takes off with the bone of a dead man whose grave has been disturbed by greedy prospectors, the diggers are suddenly overcome by superstition, especially after they all catch a fever from the rotting corpses they have unearthed in the search for gold: “It was horrible, but the most horrible part of it all was that nearly every man in his madness raved of a spectre fox-terrier hunting him over hill and gully, with a bone in his mouth, by moonlight.” Subsequently the prospectors desert Kurnalpi, which becomes a ghost town. A literal ghost town appears in Guy Boothby’s “A Strange