by James Doig
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 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 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 t
he 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, others are 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 he returns to England where he seeks out Trevittick’s mother, buys her a cottage and provides her an annuity for the rest of her life.
“The Red Cap Spectre of the Robertson” (The North Queensland Register, 1896; Challis and Young, 2010) is interesting as one of the few early stories to feature the ghost of an aborigine. Three prospectors are fossicking for gold in a remote part of Queensland; one of them is startled when he sees the ghost of an aborigine on three occasions. The fossicker, of Irish background, relates the experience to his mates: “His eyes looked loike coals ov fire at the bottom ov a deep hole, and there was a piece ov a broken spear sticking out ov his breast, and his white pants were all red with blood in front, and be the same token, he had a red cap on his head.”
Later the fossickers learn the story of Pat Courbett who was murdered some twenty years early. Courbett was a fossicker who always travelled with a black boy; he struck gold and carried a large amount of it with him in saddlebags. He was found dead with two spears in him, and the black boy had disappeared. Soon afterwards the fossickers find the remains of the black boy in a cave near where the ghost was seen; he too had been speared and had holed up in the cave where he eventually died. The fossickers find Courbett’s gold in the cave; they give the boy a decent burial so he can rest at last. The story is certainly above the average of its kind, and is full of local colour and authentic detail; the author, E. Downs, does not appear in any bibliography or literary history, and he or she does not appear to have published anything else under that name.
Mining
Whereas the gold rush stories described above are about a type of frontier society characterized by lawlessness and a breakdown of civilization, mining stories are about the unknown—the physical act of penetrating to places beyond our knowledge.
In James Edmund’s “The Prophetic Horror of the Great Experiment” (The Lone Hand, 1909; Doig, 2008) a party of adventurers, including a professor of extinct languages, decide to sink a shaft as far into the earth as possible; the narrator sets out their aim:
We were looking for the unknown—for the hidden mysteries of life, and the story of the buried past. We were seeking for the original home of gold and precious stones—the great deposits whose merest fringes have been found by the seekers after treasure; and for the fires which are supposed to burn for ever in the earth’s centre. We wanted to investigate the ancient myths about an interior world in the hollow globe, where subsidiary planets revolve in a toy firmament, and strange races of humanity, or races that are apart from humanity, have their being.
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 tra
mp 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.