ection>
BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JAMES DOIG
Australian Gothic: An Anthology of Australian Supernatural Fiction (editor)
Ghost Stories and Mysteries, by Ernest Favenc (edited by James Doig)
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2007, 2013 by James Doig
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
To Douglas A. Anderson, for his kind assistance and support over the years
INTRODUCTION
The chief aim of this anthology is to illustrate the richness and variety of Australian supernatural fiction in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. In Britain and the United States this period is regarded as the “Golden Age” of supernatural fiction—a period that produced Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (1872), Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ (1886), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), and many other great tales that are regarded as masterpieces of the genre. But no Australian stories appear in any of the many anthologies that claim to represent the best supernatural tales of the period. Hugh Lamb wrote in his anthology, Victorian Nightmares (1977), “Australia is a very rare source of Victorian tales of terror, both in location and author nationality”.
The fact is that Australian supernatural fiction has been poorly served by anthologists, researchers and academics. The Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy (1998), published by Melbourne University Press, mentions only one of the writers represented here (Guy Boothby), in a general entry on “Early Science Fiction and Fantasy”, and the Oxford Literary History of Australia (1998) lumps supernatural fiction together with melodrama and gives it short shrift. The entry on Australia in John Clute’s Encyclopaedia of Fantasy (1997) omits supernatural fiction altogether. The only historical anthology of Australian supernatural fiction is Ken Gelder’s excellent Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories (1994), but as the title suggests it focuses narrowly on ghosts. Almost all the stories in Gordon Stewart’s Australian Stories of Horror and Suspense From the Early Days (1978) and Bill Wannan’s Australian Horror Stories (1983) are non-supernatural “grim” stories of the type exemplified by Barbara Baynton’s celebrated collection Bush Studies, published in 1902.
One reason for the neglect of Australian supernatural fiction is the sheer rarity of many of the collections and periodicals in which they appeared, most of which are unobtainable outside of the National and State Libraries. It was in these publications that popular fiction flourished in the days before radio and cinema. Periodicals like the Bulletin (1880-), Australian Journal (1865-1962), Australasian (1864-1946), and Australian Town and Country Journal (1870-1919) published popular British and American authors such as Le Fanu, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, H. Rider Haggard, and Harriet O’Brien Lewis alongside home-grown talent. These periodicals satisfied popular demand for adventure, romance and historical fiction as well as for sensational and supernatural fiction. Fitz-James O’Brien’s famous supernatural tale about an invisible monster, ‘What Was It?’, appeared in the Australian Journal in 1866, while Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People’, regarded by many as the greatest supernatural horror story ever written, was published in the Australian Home Journal in 1904.
In fact, the taste for gothic and supernatural fiction was just as evident in Australia as it was elsewhere, and Australian writers cashed in on the popularity of the genre. Many of these home-grown writers sought literary fame and fortune overseas, such as Guy Boothby and Rosa Praed. A few stayed in Australia and eked out rather precarious writing careers, for example Ernest Favenc and Mary Fortune (who as Waif Wander penned the weekly ‘Detective Album’ in the Australian Journal for over forty years). Both died penniless and forgotten; we don’t even know the year of Mary Fortune’s death. Other writers, such as Hume Nisbet and J. E. P. Muddock, were émigrés who settled in Australia for a time and wrote about their experiences there. Australian publishers like George Robertson and The Bulletin Company regularly produced single author collections of short stories gathered from colonial periodicals. On the other hand, Australian authors who lived in Britain, such as Boothby and Praed, often appeared in more lucrative British periodicals like Chambers, Belgravia, and Pall Mall, and their short story collections were brought out by British publishers. Many of the stories in this collection are taken from these Australian and British collections.
Nevertheless, it took some time for the Australian public to develop a taste for sensational literature. In the early days of settlement, up to about the middle of the nineteenth century, Australia did not produce the mass of gothic stories and “penny dreadfuls” that were such a feature of popular literature in the United States and Europe. Part of the reason for this is because for many Australians there were enough real life horrors to cope with—aggressive natives (which often prompted massacres of aborigines), the unforgiving land, and, of course, the horrors of convict life. In England sixpenny chapbooks and penny broadsides appeared with titles such as The Horrors of Transportation; The Fell Tyrant, or the Suffering Convict; A Complete Exposure of the Convict System, Its Horrors, Hardships and Severities, including an Account of the Dreadful Sufferings of the Unhappy Captives. It may be no coincidence that Australian supernatural tales began to appear in greater numbers after transportation was abolished (in New South Wales this occurred in 1840, the rest of eastern Australia in 1852, and Western Australia in 1868).
Some of the authors represented in this anthology are well known. Marcus Clarke wrote arguably the greatest Australian colonial novel, His Natural Life (1874), while Rosa Praed, G. A. Walstab, Ernest Favenc and Louis Becke were critically acclaimed mainstream writers. J. E. P. Muddock and Guy Boothby were well-known mystery writers, Boothby for his Dr. Nikola series, and Muddock for his Dick Donovan stories. Mary Fortune was one of Australia’s earliest detective story writers; although she was extremely popular and published hundreds of stories, only one collection was published in her lifetime. Others like Dulcie Deamer and A. F. Basset Hull are more obscure and are credited with only one or two short story collections, while Frances Faucett would be completely unknown but for the fortuitous survival of a single story. Lionel Sparrow, who has two stories in this anthology, did not publish a book in his lifetime, and his tales of gothic horror can only be found in the pages of the Australian Journal.
While many of the stories gathered here are set in the colonies, I have also included stories that are set in other places. Louis Becke’s ‘Lupton’s Guest’, J. F. Dwyer’s ‘Cave of the Invisible’, G. A. Walstab’s ‘The House By the River’, and Guy Boothby’s ‘The Death Child’ are set in Asia and the South Pacific. Rosa Praed’s tale ‘The Ghost-Monk’ is set in France, while Dulcie Deamer’s werewolf tale, ‘Hallowe’en’, and Marcus Clarke’s ‘Cannabis Indica’ are set in an imagined Middle Ages. In casting a wide net I have included several different sub-genres in the field, which I hope will indicate something of the range and interests of Australian writers.
The stories set in Australia are particularly interesting for the way in which traditional English elements of the supernatural tale appear in new forms or are moulded afresh to a harsh, new environment—the haunted house is no longer a rambling manor, but an abandoned shanty or rundown homestead; the English wood, shadowy lair of ancient evils and creatures from folklore, becomes the oppressively hot, fly-infested bush; and the wind-swept moor is the empty, endless Australian outback with its blood-red sands and emaciated myall trees. European 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
