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

Goldfield” (Doig, 2010) in which a small party of prospectors stumble upon an abandoned mining town. They make camp outside the town where they meet a “hatter” who has evidently lived by himself in the area for years; when they ask if he is lonely he tells he has many friends in the town, which comes alive after dark. The party investigates and find the madman is telling the truth: “…we could distinctly hear the rattling of sluice-boxes and cradles, the groaning of windlasses—in fact, the noise you hear on a goldfield at the busiest hour of the day. We moved a little closer, and, believe me or not, I swear to you I could see, or thought I could see, the shadowy forms of men moving about in the moonlight.” The party break camp, vowing never to return.
    In “Little Liz” ( Shadows on the Snow , 1866; Doig, 2007), B. L. Farjeon also emphasizes the “weirdness” of the Victorian gold rush:
    When the Victorian gold-fever was at its height, people were mad with excitement. Neither more nor less, I was as mad as the others, although I came to the colony from California, which was suffering from the same kind of fever, and which was pretty mad, too, in its way. But Victoria beat it hollow; for one reason, perhaps, because there was more of it. The strange sights I saw and the strange stories I could tell, if I knew how to do it, would fill a dozen books.
    “Little Liz” is the young daughter of an uneducated prospector with a heart of gold, who is consciously modelled after Dickens’ Little Nell, even down to her beloved dog of mixed breed and stout heart. Farjeon lays on the sentimentally in thick strokes and when the inevitable happens and she goes missing on a rich gold field discovered by her father, we expect the worst. Supernatural forces appear to lead her father and his companion to her murdered body, thrown down an abandoned mine. Her father kills the murderer, a villainous and cowardly prospector, but is himself mortally wounded—father and daughter are buried together and a fence is put up around the grave.
    In Ernest Favenc’s “Jerry Boake’s Confession” The Bulletin , 1890; Doig, 2011), a man suspected of murdering a popular mine owner and stealing his gold is taken to the scene of the crime and chained to a tree for the night where he is overcome by superstitious dread:
    And then—well, then, a sight that would never leave him; the moon was young and sickly then, but its light was strong enough to show the dead body of the murdered man, with the bloody smear on his face. Would morning never come? Presently the moon would set, and then the darkness would be horrible. Who knows what hideous thing might not creep on him unawares. The air seemed thick with an awful corpse-like smell; had they buried the body there, where it was found? But this thought was too maddening—he would go frantic if he entertained it. Why did not the bleak shadow shift; the moon was getting low now?
    The man confesses and is hanged.
    If good people often come to a bad end on the lawless and immoral gold fields, othersare rewarded for their good deeds. In William Sylvester Walker’s “A Voice From the Dead” ( From the Land of the Wombat , 1899) a seaman, Tom Trevittick, on board a clipper on its way from England to Melbourne tells Boyd, the narrator, that he has seen a vision of his dead father holding a tin water bottle in his hand, which he takes as an omen of his impending death. He gives Boyd his mother’s address in case he is killed on board the ship. On safely reaching Melbourne Trevittick sets off to the gold fields to seek his fortune. Three months later Boyd himself sets out for a new gold fields in the remote outback about which evil rumours abound. On the way he comes across a dead body and a tin water bottle; scratched on the bottle are words identifying it as Trevittick’s, with instructions for the location of a gold reef. With the help of other prospectors he finds the reef and becomes rich. Later