indeed, often it is children, symbols of innocence and European naiveté, who are claimed.
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’. Writers, no less than explorers, artists and settlers, were challenged by the environment, and this is reflected in many of the following stories. Australia, indeed, is a gothic landscape.
One final point: most of the research for this book was carried out at the National Library of Australia, an unparalleled resource for rare periodicals and collections. I have endeavoured to choose stories that are rare and have not been reprinted since their first publication. In this way the book is offered not only as an entertaining read—a “pleasing terror” as M. R. James put it—but also as a contribution to a neglected area of both supernatural fiction and Australian literary history.1
—James Doig
Palmerston, Australian Capital Territory
1. Note that I have retained original spelling and punctuation in these stories.
THE SPIRITS OF THE TOWER
by Mary Fortune
Between 1865 and 1908 Mary Fortune (1833-1910?), under her pseudonym Waif Wander, wrote more than 500 crime stories in her column of detective stories, the ‘Detective’s Album’, in the Australian Journal. Born in Belfast, Ireland, she followed her father to the Victorian goldfields in 1855. Her life was punctuated by several crises, including the birth of an illegitimate son, the death of her first child, and two failed marriages.
After her death she fell into obscurity until the Australian writer/researcher Lucy Sussex rediscovered her and established her contribution to Australian crime fiction. Mary Fortune also wrote an excessive gothic serial novel, Clyzia the Dwarf, and a number of supernatural and horror stories. ‘The Spirits of the Tower’, a ghost story from the ‘Detective’s Album’, was published in the Australian Journal in March 1883.
It is fully twenty years ago, that I was stationed at a miserable up-country camp on the borders of a river to which I need not give a name, but the name of the few houses about two miles off was Calandra, and it had once been a digging that had stretched promisingly toward the spot where the police station had been built, and then died out as suddenly as it had arisen, leaving us poor troopers in a wild spot all by ourselves and with scarcely a habitation within sight.
I never was in a duller station than that of Calandra. Of all the wretched sights a man can picture I think a deserted diggings is one of the most depressing, and I had nothing to do but go to the door to see one in all its misery of decay. Deep, treacherous shafts, with their mouths wreathed and half-hidden by wild green growth, through which the glimmer of unwholesome water could be seen when the sun shone into the depths, and great holes where paddocking had been done and left the heaped-up stuff to be filtered slowly back at each fall of rain during many months, were there in that gully by hundreds, with the rotting windlass props and slant, and decaying posts of some long-ago tent creaking when the wind blows like the wailing cries of some dead digger who had lost his soul for gold.
“If I am not removed I’ll resign,” I had said to myself over and over as days and weeks went by, and there was nothing but feigned duty to be done; and I said it again on the very evening that the first page of the story I am going to tell was opened in my hand.
It was an unusually wretched evening, even for Calandra. There was thunder in the air, and heavy, gloomy clouds in the sky. A damp wind was floating up from the dark river, and the long branches of the yellow box-trees were swaying to and fro in it with a sad monotony. Along the river, low down where the sedges were thick and rustling lonely, a curlew was crying out his awful “Murder!” while along the bush track, so faintly lined to and from the miserable township, not a living speck could be discerned.
“There are places in which any sane man would become mad, and Calandra is one of them,” I muttered to myself. “No wonder that black pile remains empty and almost ownerless, for who would live, if he could choose his residence, with such a dreary desolate hillock as that tower must command?”
I was looking at the only wall within view from the door of the station; a three-storied tower that formed part of a building of some pretensions called by the unusual title of “The Moat”. The property belonging to it had been originally a pre-emptive right affair, but the diggers had rushed it in search of the precious metal, and there only remained belonging to and surrounding it about a hundred acres of purchased land. The house was on a rise near the river and hemmed almost in by timber; a gloomy stone building it was, with its nailed up windows and dark walls streaked with the green slimy damp of broken spouting, and there was nothing to be wondered at in the few neighbours avoiding it, as there was nothing pleasant to see or steal, entirely outside the report of its being (as all empty houses most certainly are) haunted.
“Ugh!” I said with a shudder, “I hate to look at that place!” and I looked no more just then, for a black moving spot became visible on the distant track, and very soon also the sound of horse’s feet preceded my recognition of the rider, who was no other than my friend Tom Mason.
“This is a doleful sort of a country,” he said as he dismounted; “and I don’t wonder that your face is as long a fiddle.”
“Don’t you?” I growled. “I hope they’ve sent you to relieve me, for I’m sick of the blessed place.”
“No relief for you, me boy; I’m only going on to Carryl’s with despatches.”
“A-hem the despatches! Talk of wasting the country’s money! I’d like to know what else it is to keep a police station in a place like this.”
“Resign,” Mason said philosophically, as he unstrapped his rug and prepared to make his horse comfortable for the night. “Resign, by all manner of means, me boy.”
“I’m going to when I’m ready. What news have you?”
“None. Oh, I forgot I have. You’re going to have a new neighbour to-morrow.”
“A new neighbour? In the name of goodness how can that be? There isn’t a place to live in within ten miles.”
“There is a gentleman coming to live in some place called the Moat. He’s driving a trap and baited at York’s, but one of the horses wanted shoeing, or something, so he decided on stopping all night.”
“Well, I wish him joy of the place—you can see it over there—and if of his own free choice he comes to live there he quite deserves being eaten up by rats, or frightened out of what small remains of sense he may be possessed of by the spirits that haunt the Moat.”
“Is it haunted? By George, but that’s jolly, Mark! I’ll call and ask him for a night’s lodging as I come back, for I have an awful craving to see a ghost.”
“Stuff! What kind of chap is this Moat man?”
He gave me a card.
“There
