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

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