1In this paper I wish to sketch some of the features that may impart a distinctive quality to Australian ghost stories and alleged hauntings. These features include the Australian landscape, the foundation of Australia as a European penal colony, and the dispossession of the Aborigines by the European colonisers.

2I do not contend that every Australian ghost narrative bears the imprint of these imperatives; rather, that some historical and more recent ghost stories possess characteristics that can be traced to specifically Australian circumstances. They are local inflections of a more general ghost narrative, recognisable across cultures and across time. When Ludwig Wittgenstein admonished J.G. Frazer for his patronising comments in The Golden Bough concerning a tribal people’s belief in ghosts, it was on the grounds that Frazer had installed a false discontinuity between himself and that group. For Frazer, their ghost-belief was pre-scientific, even pre-religious, hence ‘primitive’ and foreign to the western scientific mind. As Wittgenstein observed, there is no basis for this discontinuity: we are perfectly able to recognise this supernatural belief in cultures radically different to our own: the very existence of a word like ‘ghost’ conveys ‘something in us too that speaks in support of... [tribal] observances.’1

3The core of the belief in ghosts, as it recurs across countless cultural contexts, is the relation to past events. The ghost is a representation of the past as it endures in the present. It can operate as a form of local site-specific history, keeping alive a memory of the shared past. The ghost can function as a marker of territory as well as a memory-preserver, allowing a community to preserve the knowledge of those who once lived in a certain place, or of an event which once happened there. Yet ghost stories do more than this: they can also reflect guilt or shame, as experienced by an individual or a community. Ghosts of the murdered or wrongfully executed externalise the guilt of the living. Ghosts of the unburied or of suicides preserve the memory of unhappy lives. To be haunted by a ghost is to be haunted by the past. Ghosts can, in some cases, manifest the weight of the past, disturbing the complacency of the present in the unsettling manner of a dark or guilty secret: a shameful past.

4If Australian ghost stories display distinctive characteristics, then, it is because Australian history generates local variants on that representation of the past embodied—or rather disembodied—in ghosts. A nation founded as an often brutal penal settlement, a European civilisation imposing itself through violence and dispossession of an ancient culture, will produce no shortage of suffering, injustice, guilt and bad deaths: the universal constituents of ghost stories. The other framing circumstance for Australian ghosts is the nature— often described as ‘haunting’—of the landscape itself.

Landscape

5The Australian landscape has singular qualities that provide a ghostly setting even before human inhabitation is considered. The vegetation is distinctive, as is the fauna; vast deserts occupy much of the continent. The play of the elements over time has created striking rock formations and other natural features. The Australian bush is dry, populated by water-resourceful eucalyptus trees, one variety of which is known as the ‘ghost gum’, a white vertical shaft particularly adept at reflecting moonlight and catching the eye at night. The bush is harsh and unvaried by comparison with European forest. The Australian landscape has been described as eerie, barren, spectral, weird, stark, ethereal. Because these judgements have been made by Europeans, we could add the epithet ‘un-European’. This huge unyielding landscape has captivated the European Australian imagination—which has predominantly been exercised from the coastal fringe—with equal elements of foreboding and distrust. Explorers perished out there in the outback or the desert; innocents disappeared in the bush (the girls of Picnic at Hanging Rock, Azaria Chamberlain, backpacker murder victims). The country, it seems, is frightening in its very nature, without the need of ghosts.

6This enormous terrain bears the marks of the past in geological formations. There are dry lakes, such as Lake George, with their beds exposed to the air, looking like the surface of the moon or of a distant planet; and huge ‘vanished’ lakes, like Lake Mungo, empty for 15,000 years. These empty sites testify to a radically different past; in the drier present they are scarred and eerie palimpsests, maps of an earlier, more bountiful land. Another, Lake Gardiner in South Australia, is reputed to be haunted by the ghost of the failed explorer Ernest Giles2, as if the doomed ambition to chart the land should find fitting memorial in a desiccated lake.

7In the Australian continent, the past has other surprises to play. The Wollemi Pine, a species dated at 90 million years, was considered long extinct, its memory preserved only in fossils and the scientific reconstruction drawn from them. In 1994, a clump of Wollemi Pines was found in a secluded area of bush near the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, healthy and seemingly unchanged from their pre-historic ancestors. These ‘living fossils’, now widely available for domestic cultivation, embody the ancient past in their sheer persistence, the staggering feat of their survival.

8The long flat plains of the outback bore the tracks of explorers and pioneers from the earliest stages of European settlement; then the trails and paths of nineteenth century horse and coach; finally the roads allowing cars to speed across the endless flat expanse. The land traversed by these roads is said to be haunted in many places, for example on the Monaro Plain in NSW (Bull 2006: 48-49). Ghost tales told as rites of passage by teenagers are enchanted by these lonely, desolate stretches: don’t get out of your car, these stories warn, if you see a figure beside the road. If you look more closely, you’ll see that it is floating off the ground, or has no feet, or is carrying its own head. The ghost presumably died alone out there, and is fated to wander alone and unloved by the side of the road, a citizen of the mournful landscape.

9Ghost tales such as this function as a form of popular fiction, often transmitted orally. The storytellers and their listeners may appreciate these narratives as nothing more than enjoyable fictions; some may actually believe in supernatural activity, despite the complete lack of empirical evidence to validate belief in ghostly encounters. Indeed, the slippage between delicious fiction and alleged fact is one of the characteristics of ghost stories—or, more precisely, of the experience of hearing ghost stories. The ghost appeared here, or out there, the story-teller assures the listeners, inviting them to discard rational judgement and replace it with belief in the reality of apparitions. The ghost in such narrative accounts may be understood as a figure that performs cultural work: as a marker of territory, as a form of popular memory, as a moral warning, or as testament to the persistence of the irrational and mysterious in the ‘disenchanted’ modern, rationalised world.3

10These teenager ghost stories are designed to frighten, and perhaps to foster caution; there have been reports, however, of actual sightings of ghosts of this type. In 1957, seven people, including a journalist, claimed to have seen an apparition on an isolated road near the town of Warrandyte, Victoria. The ghost was described as vapourish, about two metres tall, silvery-yellow, and floating a metre off the ground. When a car passed through it, the spectre was described as exploding above the car, reappearing, then drifting silently away into the bush4. This ghost seemed to have absorbed the desolate silence of the landscape itself. In the absence of any scientific evidence to support the account of these witnesses, their testimony instead joins the ghost tale discourse, adding a descriptive quality to stories told of haunted roads and lonely expanses.

11There are many abandoned settler towns, known of course as ‘ghost towns’. They testify to the fragility of attempts at civilisation in such inhospitable zones, known as ‘the middle of nowhere’, or ‘back of beyond’. They too are often thought to be haunted, perhaps as a remembrance of the failed inhabitation, or perhaps simply to provide these ruined environs with some citizens, someone to live there. One Tree Hotel, near Hay, NSW, was a former staging post for Cobb and Co in the mid-nineteenth century. Named then for its solitary gum tree, the site is now reputed to be haunted by ‘mysterious balls of light’ (Bull 2006: 46-47). Other ‘bouncing balls of unexplained light’ reportedly haunt the Queensland outback town of Boulia (Bull 2006: 87-89). Known as the Min Min light, this phenomenon takes its name from the spirits known as min min in Aboriginal culture; indeed the Min Min Light is an instance of indigenous and European cultures finding common expression: both have believed this site to possess supernatural habitation.

12Unusual rock formations, such as the Devil’s Marbles or Karlukarlu, occur across Australia, imbued with mythical or supernatural significance. In Aboriginal culture, these sites represent nodal points within a complex relationship with the land; in white culture, it is often believed that strange or inexplicable things happen at these places. The most famous rock, holding a special importance in Aboriginal culture, is Uluru, otherwise known as Ayer’s Rock. Over the years, many small pieces of the rock have been taken by tourists as souvenirs—only to be posted back later following a succession of misfortunes befalling the thief. Letters accompanying the returned rocks have referred to a ‘jinx’ cursing the individuals who had been so disrespectful as to steal them. As the act of return clearly represents a plea for forgiveness— from Uluru, its spirit, or its Aboriginal custodians—these returned fractions of Uluru have been labelled ‘sorry rocks’ (Bull 2006: 68-69). The belief that these fragments of rock have brought their bearers misfortune is a contemporary form of superstition; yet their return, meant to lift the curse and to assuage the guilt, perhaps also testifies to a broader guilt concerning injustices perpetrated against Aboriginal peoples. Historical injustice was given official national recognition in February 2008, when the Australian Government issued an apology to the ‘stolen generation’ of Aborigines.

Convicts

13The unjust or unresolved death is the stimulus for countless ghost stories across cultures. In the history of European culture, the protocols of rightful death—a central concern of The Iliad—assert themselves through the medium of ghosts: an improper death will result in a haunting perpetuated by a restless ghost demanding suitable burial.5 In Chinese culture, the hungry ghost, demanding action by its living relatives to rectify its improper death, points to the familial responsibilities that extend to the dead. In many cultures, the sites of cruel suffering such as prisons, fortresses or castles are often considered haunted, preserving the memory of those who suffered and died unjustly there.

14It should occasion no surprise, then, that a nation forged from a penal colony should have its share of convict ghosts and haunted prisons. One of the earliest recorded Australian ghost stories following European settlement concerns a sadistic commandant named Logan, in charge of a prison settlement in Queensland in the 1820s. Logan administered such extreme punishment to one prisoner that the man died. This actuality was then coloured by the ghost narrative which became attached to these protagonists. The convict was reputed to return as a ghost haunting the commandant on his solitary horse rides exploring the bush. According to the ghost narrative, the convict ghost would cling to the commandant and horse, terrifying the otherwise fearless military man. Shortly afterwards, the commandant disappeared in the bush and was found mutilated, beaten to death (Cusack 1967: 24-27). Identified by Frank Cusack as ‘Queensland’s oldest ghost story’ (Cusack 1967: 24), this tale demonstrates the slippage between fact and fiction characteristic of some ghost narratives, evident in several of the early Australian ghost tales. The rough justice incorporated in this early narrative expresses something of the brutality and suffering characteristic of early convict life.

15A narrative of justice, rough or a little more refined, frequently attends those ghosts who come back to avenge the wrongs perpetrated on them—including murder. Fisher’s ghost (a widely known Australian ghost story in the nineteenth century, founded on an actual murder) is of this type. Fisher, an ex-convict and the first man to attempt to make paper in NSW, disappeared in 1826. A settler named Farley claimed that an apparition of the deceased Fisher appeared to him, dressed as when alive, pointing to the spot where, it was then discovered, Fisher lay buried. Once the murderer— who had committed the deed to appropriate Fisher’s assets—was brought to justice, the ghost, it was claimed, disappeared (Cusack 1967: 1-3). Ghost stories such as this draw on the popular belief that official justice is often imperfect, the guilty escaping due punishment, and that sometimes action beyond the law is needed to ensure justice. In these narratives, that action comes from a supernatural source, representing the power of the past to rectify the present. The relation between past and present is reciprocal: the bad or unjust death that has provoked the haunting must be righted in order for the ghost to cease its activity.

16There are many sites of haunting by convicts, however, that do not effect such posthumous justice. They serve more as markers of cruel, often anonymous deaths. Much of the construction in the early years of settlement was built by convict labour, including roads, bridges and walls. Many roads and bridges in the bush have ghost stories attached to them, concerning convicts overworked or tortured to painful deaths. Convicts also built the prisons meant to contain them; these buildings invoke some of the most harrowing ghost stories. St Helena Island in Queensland, a penal colony from the 1860s until 1933, was known as the ‘hell-hole of the Pacific’. It was notorious for its harsh regime, in which prisoners were often strait-jacketed and gagged, locked in isolation. Many convicts died of disease and excessive punishment; the prison island is said to harbour the audible moans of the deceased (Bull 2006: 147-149). The most infamous relic of the penal past, however, is Port Arthur in Tasmania. Built by convicts and designed as a ‘model prison’, Port Arthur became instead a site of brutal treatment and murder. Having opened in the 1830s, ghosts of deceased convicts were first reported to haunt the premises in the 1870s (Bull 2006: 105). The belief that premises such as these are haunted by their former inhabitants may be regarded as a means—expressed in popular culture and folk memory—of preserving a trace of the particular cruelties and injustices suffered inside the buildings.

Buried Country

17The title ‘Buried Country’ originally derives from a song by 1980s Australian rock group Tactics, whose song ‘Buried Country’ described the dispossession of Aborigines through violent and criminal means: ‘baited flour’ resulting in ‘black blood on frozen ground’. This evocative title was used by rock journalist Clinton Walker for a documentary film and book on the subject of Aboriginal country music, examining the particular forms of story-telling and sense of loss expressed by Aboriginal musicians and singers in the country-and-western genre.6

18It is an apt phrase for the aftermath of dispossession. The earliest British colonisers considered Australia not only the southern land, but also a blank land. Finding no evidence of buildings or written documents, the British assumed that the Aborigines lacked sophisticated culture, and that they had left the land without imprint. The extraordinarily sophisticated indigenous relationship to the land— complete with mapping techniques both spiritual and locational— was literally invisible to European eyes. Dispossession of the land— often through violent means—followed. The land became open territory to be claimed, explored and mapped. Any material wealth, such as minerals or fertile land, was claimed by often rapacious prospectors and land-grabbers.

19Frank Cusack records a ghost story from the 1840s—‘The Black Wraith of Yarralumla’—commemorating the death of a young Aboriginal man, accompanying a white man as tracker, killed by bushrangers for protecting his master over the possession of a valuable diamond. The so-called ‘black wraith’, it was claimed, later appeared at the site of the murder (Cusack 1967: 37-38). Cusack traces the provenance of this ghost story to an anonymous document from 1881, inscribed ‘Written near Yarralumla’, found when the Commonwealth Government took possession of a property near Canberra. The unsigned document purports to report the factual episode resulting in the tracker’s death; the ghost tale itself emerged later as folklore. The document claimed that the murdered Aboriginal man was buried under a large deodar tree; according to Cusack, the ‘sombre wraith’ has been sighted at the tree, ‘seeking the lost diamond.’ Cusack sources this belief to ‘legend and some observers’: the tale of the ‘black wraith’ therefore has no authorial attribution, but is rather based on an anonymous document, enhanced by the oral telling of a ghost narrative anchored at a specific site (the deodar tree) at which murder is thought to have transpired.

20While this ghost narrative memorialises the murder of an Aborigine, other stories represent the intersection of indigenous culture and the colonial experience, rendered in territorial terms. Some of the late nineteenth century Australian ghost stories collected by Ken Gelder turn on the interaction of European interlopers—explorers, prospectors—with Aboriginal sacred sites, including burial sites commemorating massacres or violent conflict. One from 1899, ‘The Red Lagoon’ by Ernest Favenc, has a bullock driver disturbed in his sleep at a tranquil lagoon by a bloody vision of a massacre and retribution at that site7. Another from the same year, ‘The Evil of Yelcomorn Creek’ by William Sylvester Walker, has an opal prospector and an Aboriginal guide rest at a site named ‘Ghost’s Glen’, where a spectral cry of ‘Coo-ee’—a despairing sound—is heard in the night. The white man realises he has stumbled on an Aboriginal burial site—which he encounters as a taboo, frightening place—and leaves, regardless of the opals (Gelder 1994: 142-151).

21‘The Evil of Yelcomorn Creek’ incorporates, in its fiction, several of the features that afford Australian ghost narratives—and belief in haunted sites—a distinctive character. The narrator of this story finds the landscape itself eerie and troubling: ‘every white-waisted gum’ at Ghost’s Glen, he recounts, ‘shot its shadow straight down until it looked as if there was a whole army of ghosts watching the pool.’ The ghostly call of ‘Coo-ee’ is perceived as a ‘dreadful cry ... moaning and writhing away through the air.’ (Gelder 1994: 150) The narrator is unnerved by his glimpse of the Aboriginal ancestral dead, realises he is ‘meddling with things beyond my knowledge’, and flees the site. (Gelder 1994: 151)

22This and similar stories, as Gelder comments, replay the colonial experience, except here the land is revealed as far from blank. The white protagonists of the stories discover that territory considered empty, for the taking, has in fact had prior occupation. The spiritual charge invested in sites such as ‘Ghost’s Glen’ does more than simply mark territory: its spiritual force, understood—in European terms—as a haunting, repels the coloniser’s interest, often a pecuniary, material interest. Gelder and Jacobs observe that many Australian ghost stories of this type demonstrate the ways in which particular sites ‘work to influence or impress people who are always passing through, people who take the effects of those sites elsewhere when they leave’8. The narrators of such stories recount their experience of haunted sites—with the implication of their trespassing onto haunted sites—to their listeners. These ghost stories set moral limits on the rapacity of European settlement. They also disclose the previously hidden, the buried, beneath country otherwise considered uninhabited.

23These stories, told from the perspective of the colonisers, externalise the guilt and anxiety of the trespasser. They tell stories of displacement and dispossession, revealing white settlement to be ‘fundamentally unsettled’ (Gelder 1994: xi). But they also demonstrate the falsity of the principle of the ‘blank land’: these ghostly sites reveal a relationship to land previously unseen through colonisers’ eyes. In this context of colonisation in Australia, they perform the function of all ghost narratives: of keeping alive in the present some aspects of the past. In their depiction of ‘buried country’— eerie landscape revealing prior violent experience—they convey those aspects of the past with a particular emotional charge.