Australian Hauntings: A Second Anthology of Australian Colonial Supernatural Fiction (3 page)

In fact, the party reach Hell, literally. Suspicions are first aroused when the drill breaks through to a vast underground chamber from where the professor hears snatches of Hebrew, Sanskrit and Coptic, but their worst fears are realized when they find attached to the retrieved drill a horned tail, severed at the root. The irate Devil appears at the entrance and they make a dash for the surface; fortunately the tunnel caves in and most of the party manages to escape, leaving behind the Muslim labour force, which is left to face the consequences. George Locke, the London book dealer and bibliographer, thought the story “imaginative and a cut above the average” and felt that Edmund would have made an excellent addition to the Lovecraft Circle, but the story reads more like farce, a typical Australian tall story, than genuine cosmicism. Edmund, who edited of
The Bulletin
from 1903-1914, wrote another bizarrely titled mining fantasy, “The Plans and Specifications of the Lost Soul Mine,” about a cursed mine in Goulburn Valley, Victoria, that destroys all who try to work it. Again, the story reads like farce, a meditation on the futility of mining, and the narrator, who ill-advisedly purchases the mine, is grateful when it is taken off his hands by a successful law suit against a previous owner.

Edward Dyson is a notable Australian writer of realist tales of mining and factory communities. In “The Accursed Thing” (Doig, 2010), published in
The Bulletin
in 1922 an old fossicker working an abandoned mine is threatened by what seems to be a remorseless creature of nightmare:

The thing filled the space about the shaft as with the convolutions of a monstrous writhing snake, and was advancing towards him, surging slowly. He lit his candle and retreated the length of the excavation, whimpering like a child in his horror of the oncoming force, which he realised as a living, sentient, passionless brute-thing bent upon his destruction.

Drawing on an indomitable will to survive and fortified by his long-abandoned faith, the fossicker manages to dig through to a parallel shaft where he is saved by other miners. One of the miners explains that the Thing was in fact thick, rubbery mud formed by recent flooding, but the fossicker will not believe him and refuses to return to the mine.

The Bush

In colonial fiction the Australian bush is often presented in a similar way to the woods and forests of English and European folklore and supernatural tales—as a quasi-living entity, often overtly malevolent, in which natural laws are suspended and civilization cannot penetrate. The archetypal example of this sort of story is Edward Dyson’s “The Conquering Bush” (Wannan, 1983) in which a stockman’s wife loses her mind on a remote station: “…she was absorbed in a terrible thought. The bush was peopled with mad things—the wide wilderness of trees, and the dull, dead grass, and the cowering hills instilled into every living thing that came under the influence of their ineffable gloom a madness of melancholy.” She is eventually destroyed, drowning herself and her young child in a nearby waterhole. Perhaps the best known of this type of story is Henry Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife” (1892) in which a woman alone in the bush with her four children must overcome a snake lurking beneath the floorboards of the bush hut. While she waits for the snake to emerge she recalls other threats she has had to overcome in the bush—fire, flood, a mad bullock, a sinister tramp and so on. As morning approaches the snake appears and she is able to kill it, thus saving her children, an unheralded hero. Another acclaimed story in this vein is Barbara Baynton’s “A Dreamer” (1902; Gelder, 1994, 2007) in which a young girl is lost in the bush; she stands in “uncertainty, near-sighted, with all the horror of the unknown, that this infinity could bring.” The natural world—the trees, the wind, the creek—is like a malignant force that obstructs her way home. These are non-supernatural, psychological stories, representative of the literary realism that Australian authors preferred over romance. Nevertheless, they indicate something of the numinous and “weird melancholy” that are features of romantic fiction.

The story of a child lost in the bush is a common one in colonial fiction. We have already examined “The Bunyip” and “Little Liz”, but there are many others. In Hume Nisbet’s “Norah and the Fairies” (
Stories Weird and Wonderful
, 1900; Doig, 2007) a lost girl is supported by her fairy tale imaginings as she gets progressively weaker and delirious; finally, in a scene that outdoes “Little Liz” for syrupy sentimentality, her death is attended by a Snow Queen and fairy court who escort the girl up to heaven in a silver car drawn by white horses. William Hay’s “Where Butterflies Come From” (
An Australian Rip Van Winkle and Other Stories
, 1921; Doig, 2007) explores how the apparent gullibility and naivety of children can reveal a deeper truth. When Isbel Yawkins’ uncle tells her that butterflies come from a magical butterfly tree out in the bush, little Isbel goes in search of it…and finds it. Normally, however, childish fears of the bush conjure up frightening images as in Marcus Clarke’s “Pretty Dick” (1870) who imagines “the shapeless Bunyip lifting its shining sides heavily from the bottomless blackness of some lagoon in the shadow of the hills.” The lost child symbolizes the European colonist helpless against the elemental forces of nature, and in “Pretty Dick” and “Norah and the Fairies” nature proves too strong a force.

Exploration

Another common colonial narrative that often had supernatural or fantastic elements concerned explorers and exploration, such as lost race literature, a popular sub-genre of fantasy that developed from the extraordinary popularity of H. Rider Haggard’s novels of African exploration and adventure,
King Solomon’s Mines
(1885),
Allan Quatermain
(1887), and
She
(1887). Like Haggard’s novels, tales of Australian exploration are characterized by masculine heroics and an imaginative vision of the Australian outback that combines both an optimistic view of its limitless potential and an exaggerated fear of the horrors that might lurk there.

The best weird tales of this type came from the pen of Ernest Favenc, himself an explorer of note who wrote a definitive
History of Australian Exploration 1788-1888
(1888). In “Spirit-led” (
The Bulletin
, 1890; Doig 2007) two drovers in a north Queensland settlement run into Maxwell, whom one of them knew years before as a man who had cheated death. Maxwell had apparently died of a cataleptic fit; when he was about to be buried he suddenly awoke, his hair turned completely white from the experience. When one of the drovers saves Maxwell’s life, he tells them the story of his “death”. While he was dead his soul apparently travelled to a remote part of Australia he had never visited before. He found himself with a strange companion who pointed out to him a boulder with an inscription in Dutch, “Hendrick Heermans, hier vangecommen, 1670”; further along they see a rocky outcrop with gold showing through. After this experience, Maxwell felt an irresistible urge to return to his body, which he succeeds in doing after his soul flies through a sort of twilit purgatory. Now Maxwell believes that the land he saw is in this part of Queensland, and he invites the two drovers to join him to search for the gold reef. The three find the boulder with the inscription, much more weathered and overgrown than Maxwell saw it, suggesting that he had gone back in time. They press on and find the gold reef; however, they hear a strange cry back in the direction of the boulder and Maxwell, strangely disturbed by the sound, returns to investigate. A few minutes later the drovers hear a couple of gunshots and they race to see what has happened. They find a skeleton in Maxwell’s clothes; they are horrified when the skeleton implores them to help him—it is Maxwell, his body decayed to a state of decomposition it would be in had he died years before. One of the drovers ends up in an asylum, a raving lunatic, while the other looks after him in the hope that he will recover. This is an interesting story that mixes various ingredients: contemporary spiritualist notions of spirit travel; Dutch exploration in the seventeenth century and traditional stories of European sailors being stranded on the continent through their misdeeds or by misfortune; and the opening up of the interior of the continent through exploration, motivated by the search for gold. The strength of Ernest Favenc’s tales are revealed here—they are based on personal experience, of places he has seen and stories he has heard, enhanced by his interest in Australian history and legend. In this sense Favenc has something in common with the English tradition of the antiquarian ghost story exemplified by M. R. James and the American regional supernaturalists like Sarah Orne Jewett. Favenc weaves his tales from the stuff of Australian history and tradition in much the same way that M.R. James drew from his knowledge of British antiquity, or Jewett from the landscapes and traditions of New England.

Similarly, in Guy Boothby’s “With Three Phantoms” (1897; Gelder, 1994, 2007) it is the desert that claims a team looking for traces of Ludwig Leichhardt’s ill-fated expedition. After four years in which they were presumed dead the leader of the team arrives at a north Queensland settlement on Christmas Eve; he tells the assembled company how he was saved from certain death in the desert by the ghosts of his three companions who led him out of the desert. The long ordeal proves too much for him and he dies of exhaustion on Christmas day.

William Sylvester Walker was another author of talent who depicted the fantastic nature of the Australian outback. His best known weird tale is “The Evil of Yelcomorn Creek” (Gelder, 1994, 2007), which was collected in
When the Mopoke Calls
(1898). It first appeared in a slightly shorter version in the
Centennial Magazine
in March 1890 as “The Mystery of Yelcomorn Creek.” In this story an old shepherd named Baines recounts how, in his younger days, he explored outback Queensland, prospecting for opal with an aboriginal guide named Bobbie. They find a tunnel in a rocky outcrop that leads to a lost valley, “like the garden of Eden.” In the valley Baines hears a faint “coo-ee”, a ghostly cry of “quivering despair,” that heralds his discovery of an aboriginal grave site. The grave contains hundreds of graves with exposed bones, and stone tomahawks and boomerangs scattered about, clearly the scene of a massacre many years before. As Baines explores the valley he hears the ghostly “coo-ee” more frequently, and when he returns to the campsite he finds that Bobbie has died of fright. That night Baines sees “the skeleton-painted wraiths, tall and weird, of those warriors who fought and fell in the dim long ago.” He faints at the sight of the ghosts, and when he recovers the following day he buries Bobby, seals up the tunnels entrance, and leaves that country forever. Baines withdraws from the world and becomes a shepherd, retreating from his ambition to become a successful opal prospector for a life of solitude and introspection.

In these stories the interior is a taboo area, the preserve of ghosts, madmen, and monsters. By travelling willingly into the interior, explorers are taking on more than the conventional dangers of the desert, but a cursed landscape that holds the promise of a fate worse than death. This contrasts with the more positive vision in lost race romances, in which the interior is seen as a land of opportunity.

Australian Fauna

European artists, too, had difficulty coming to terms with the Australian landscape and native fauna: the strange, diffuse light of the bush, the blinding glare of the outback, the bizarre animals that seemed travesties of the natural world (when Bernard Shaw saw a platypus for the first time he looked for the tell-tale marks where duck and mole had been sewn together) were beyond the experience and skill of colonial artists and it was many years before they were accurately portrayed. Ernest Favenc effectively exploits this notion of Australia as a country of evolutionary and natural oddities in his “Haunt of the Jinkarras” (
The Bulletin
, 1890; Gelder, 2007; Doig, 2007, 2010). In this story aboriginal tales of the Jinkarra, a native bogeyman invoked by parents to frighten wayward children, turns out to be real—a race of subterranean troglodytes. With its low brow, shaggy pelt, rank odour and tail, the Jinkarra is an evolutionary throwback, a scientific oddity. The story is cast as the diary of an overland telegraph worker, who with another man, the only survivor of an expedition in which he had been found and kept alive by blacks, go in search of a ruby-field in northern Australia. In an outback mountain range they find a cave complex in which the Jinkarras live. However, it is not the Jinkarras that pose a threat to the ill-fated explorers, but the land itself. The bushman falls down a cliff in the cave, while the narrator, after surviving rising floodwaters in the cave, is claimed by the desert while trying to return to civilization.

Most stories of this type involve a monstrous specimen of an existing creature. Arthur Bayldon’s “Benson’s Flutter for a Fortune” (
The Tragedy Behind the Curtain and Other Stories
, 1910) involves huge stone fish that menace divers searching for treasure; again the scientific unnaturalness of the creatures is emphasized:

The bravest man would have quailed at the sight of that heaving, misshapen abortion of crab and fish. First a mouth like that of a filthy sewer, then a scaly incarnation of everything abominable and evil, weaponed with spikes, that are slowly erected as the dull, loathsome eyes fastened on me…God! The whole gallery is full of the monsters. Everywhere they are crawling—down the walls, over the shell—the very floor is beginning to lift. The water is curdling beneath myriads of threshing tentacles.

In “Worse than a Shark”, which appeared in the
North Queensland Register
in December 1897, the monster is a giant octopus, while in Alex Montgomery’s “The Deicides” a giant man-eating archer fish dislodges unwary natives from the rocks by spitting sea water at them and then consumes them whole. More satirical are Saul Spring’s “The Passing of the Colossal Kangaroo” (
The Lone Hand
, 1920) and Phil Robinson’s “The Gladstone-Bag Kangaroo” (
Phil May’s Annual
, 1892) about a hunter who stumbles across a race of super intelligent kangaroos. More in the tall story vein is J. A. Barry’s “Steve Brown’s Bunyip” (
Steve Brown’s Bunyip
, 1893) in which the legendary monster of the title turns out to be an escaped circus elephant.