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

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.
    Conclusion
    While often derivative, the stories considered here are interesting in the way in which the Gothic form has been transposed to a new, alien environment. The outback, the desert, the bush are imbued with forces that are inimical to European explorers and fossickers. Colonists struggled to cope in the harsh landscape and climate and were frequently claimed by it; most famously the explorers Burke and Wills in 1861, and Ludwig Leichhardt, whose expedition to traverse Australia from east to west disappeared without trace in 1848. The land itself seemed a malignant force that exacted a terrible revenge on those who challenged it or wandered thoughtlessly into it. Thus, in many of the stories described here, characters range across a landscape in which the supernatural can erupt at any time. Characters frequently fall victim to the bush; indeed, often it is children, symbols of innocence and European naïveté, who are claimed.
    Most Australian writers of the supernatural followed the model of the English ghost story, which had reached a standard form by the middle decades of the nineteenth century: a ghost interacts with the living in order to exorcise or ameliorate past sins or unrealised promises. A consequence of this limited dynamic is that the vast majority of ghost stories are conventional and unremarkable, and Australian colonial ghost stories are no exception—most are commercial offerings of little literary merit. However, some writers were able to extend the form and make a genuine contribution to the genuine; Ernest Favenc for example was particularly conscious of the Gothicpossibilities inherent in the Australian landscape and its heritage (Doig, 2012). His interest in and knowledge of Australian history and legend coupled with his first hand experience of the remote outback gave him unique insights into the colonial experience. In stories like “Spirit-Led,” “A Haunt of the Jinkarras,” “The Boundary Rider’s Story,” and “Doomed” he modernised the Australian supernatural tale. This anthology reprints a number of powerful vignettes that he wrote for the Bulletin during the