by James Doig
Exploration
Another common colonial narrative that often had supernatural or fantastic elements concerned explorers and exploration, such as lost race literature, a popular sub-genre of fantasy that developed from the extraordinary popularity of H. Rider Haggard’s novels of African exploration and adventure, King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Allan Quatermain (1887), and She (1887). Like Haggard’s novels, tales of Australian exploration are characterized by masculine heroics and an imaginative vision of the Australian outback that combines both an optimistic view of its limitless potential and an exaggerated fear of the horrors that might lurk there.
The best weird tales of this type came from the pen of Ernest Favenc, himself an explorer of note who wrote a definitive History of Australian Exploration 1788-1888 (1888). In “Spirit-led” (The Bulletin, 1890; Doig 2007) two drovers in a north Queensland settlement run into Maxwell, whom one of them knew years before as a man who had cheated death. Maxwell had apparently died of a cataleptic fit; when he was about to be buried he suddenly awoke, his hair turned completely white from the experience. When one of the drovers saves Maxwell’s life, he tells them the story of his “death”. While he was dead his soul apparently travelled to a remote part of Australia he had never visited before. He found himself with a strange companion who pointed out to him a boulder with an inscription in Dutch, “Hendrick Heermans, hier vangecommen, 1670”; further along they see a rocky outcrop with gold showing through. After this experience, Maxwell felt an irresistible urge to return to his body, which he succeeds in doing after his soul flies through a sort of twilit purgatory. Now Maxwell believes that the land he saw is in this part of Queensland, and he invites the two drovers to join him to search for the gold reef. The three find the boulder with the inscription, much more weathered and overgrown than Maxwell saw it, suggesting that he had gone back in time. They press on and find the gold reef; however, they hear a strange cry back in the direction of the boulder and Maxwell, strangely disturbed by the sound, returns to investigate. A few minutes later the drovers hear a couple of gunshots and they race to see what has happened. They find a skeleton in Maxwell’s clothes; they are horrified when the skeleton implores them to help him—it is Maxwell, his body decayed to a state of decomposition it would be in had he died years before. One of the drovers ends up in an asylum, a raving lunatic, while the other looks after him in the hope that he will recover. This is an interesting story that mixes various ingredients: contemporary spiritualist notions of spirit travel; Dutch exploration in the seventeenth century and traditional stories of European sailors being stranded on the continent through their misdeeds or by misfortune; and the opening up of the interior of the continent through exploration, motivated by the search for gold. The strength of Ernest Favenc’s tales are revealed here—they are based on personal experience, of places he has seen and stories he has heard, enhanced by his interest in Australian history and legend. In this sense Favenc has something in common with the English tradition of the antiquarian ghost story exemplified by M. R. James and the American regional supernaturalists like Sarah Orne Jewett. Favenc weaves his tales from the stuff of Australian history and tradition in much the same way that M.R. James 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 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 Gothic possibilities 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 1890s.
Bibliography
Challis and Young, 2010: Angela Challis and Marty Young, Macabre (Brimstone Press, 2010)
Doig, 2007: James Doig, Australian Gothic: An Anthology of Australian Supernatural Fiction 1867-1939 (Equilibrium Books, 2007; reprinted Borgo Press, 2013)
Doig, 2008: James Doig, Australian Nightmares: More Australian Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Equilibrium Books, 2008; reprinted Borgo Press, 2013)
Doig, 2010: James Doig, Australian Ghost Stories (Wordsworth Editions, 2010)
Doig, 2011: James Doig, Australian Hauntings: A Second Anthology of Australian Colonial Supernatural Fiction (Equilibrium Books, 2011; reprinted Borgo Press, 2013)
Doig, 2012: James Doig. Ghost Stories and Mysteries, by Ernest Favenc (Borgo Press, 2012).
Gelder, 1994: Ken Gelder, The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories (Oxford University Press, 1994)
Gelder, 2007: Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction (Melbourne University Press, 2007)
Stewart, 1978: Neil Stewart, Australian Stories of Horror and Suspense from the Early Days (Australasian Book Society, 1978; reprinted Hale & Iremonger, 1983)
Wannan, 1983: Bill Wannan, Australian Horror Stories (Currey O’Neil, 1983)
[1]. A collection of Favenc’s weird tales, Ghost Stories and Mysteries, is available from Borgo Press (2012).
JERRY BOAKE’S CONFESSION, by Ernest Favenc
The Bulletin, 8 March 1890
Ernest Favenc was born on 21 October 1845 at 5 Saville Row, Walworth, Surrey, the son of Abraham George Favenc, and his wife, Emma, née Jones. His father was a merchant by trade and his occupation appears to have sent him to different locations, as Favenc was educated at Temple College, Cowley, in Oxfordshire, and in Berlin. With his two sisters, Edith and Ella, and his brother, Jack, Favenc came to Australia in 1863. After a few months working in Sydney, Favenc moved to a cattle station owned by his uncle in north Queensland where he worked as a drover. He spent the next sixteen years in north and central Queensland working on stations, usually as a superintendent. By 1871 he was writing fiction and poetry for the Queenslander, and in 1878 Favenc was placed in charge of an expedition, financed by Gresley Lukin, the proprietor and literary editor of the periodical. The expedition, which became known as the Queenslander Transcontinental Expedition, was tasked with surveying a route for a railway line from Brisbane to Port Darwin.
Favenc’s journalism and his successful land speculations in the Northern Territory in the early 1880s allowed him to marry and settle down in Sydney. On 15 November 1880, Ernest Favenc married Bessie Mathews, whom he had first met in Brisbane in the mid-1870s, at St John’s Baptist Church, Ashfield, Sydney. The 1890s were Favenc’s most productive period as a writer, and his best tales of mystery and the supernatural were published between 1890 and 1895, five of which are printed here. By this time he was working mainly for The Bulletin, which was edited by J. F. Archibald whose preference for the short, unadorned bush yarn influenced Favenc’s style. Favenc continued writing into the new century, but his alcoholism affected his productivity and the quality of his work. By May 1905 Favenc was seriously ill in Royal Prince Albert Hospital, and later in the year a bad fall that broke his thigh confined him to St Vincent’s Hospital. He died on 14 November 1908 in Lister Hospital in western Sydney.
Perhaps one of the most popular fellows on the then newly-opened H— Goldfield, in Far North Queensland, was Jack Walters. Everybody knew him, and everybody liked him, and there was great chaff and much popping of corks ’ere he started down to C— with the avowed intention of getting married. Walters had shares in one or two good mines, and had a tidy sum of money with him when he left the field amidst the congratulations of ‘the boys’ on his approaching nuptials. Jack was a friend of mine; when he was temporarily crippled by a blasting accident I used to write his love-letters for him.
Three days after he left, Inspector Frost and his black troopers, who all knew Walters, rode into the township. Naturally, the first question asked was, had they met Jack, and how far he’d got on the road?
“Never saw or heard of him,” was the unexpected reply, “perhaps he was off the road.”
“No, he said he was going down easy and expected to meet you.”
“Hum!” said the inspector, “I’m going back tomorrow, and I’ll keep a sharp lookout for him.”
Fifty miles from H— was a creek with permanent water and a good feed, a favourite camping-place. Frost, who had told the troopers to watch for signs of Jack, had almost forgotten the matter, to which, after all, he did not attach much importance, when a shrill whistle from one of his boys a short distance off the road to the right attracted his attention. The boy had dismounted, and was standing gazing at something on the ground. Frost rode up, and had almost anticipated what it was before he reached the spot. Screened by a few bushes from any chance traveller lay the body of a dead man—Jack Walters. His head was pillowed on his riding-saddle, his blanket was thrown over the lower part of his body, and his packsaddle and bags were close by, where they had evidently been put overnight. He had been shot through the temple, and in his hand he still held a revolver. To all appearances it was one of those motiveless cases of suicide that now and again puzzle everybody.
A careful examination was made, but nothing seemed
to have been disturbed; no money save some loose silver was found. Frost collected all the camp paraphernalia, took careful notes of the position of the body and all the surroundings; then, leaving one trooper to guard the remains, despatched a boy back to H— with the news, and instruction to the police there to come out and take the body—he himself had to proceed on his journey. Casting one more glance around, he noticed a newspaper lying some distance away. Such things were commonly found on old camping grounds, but he walked over and picked it up. It was the H— Express, the journal of the mining township he had left. He looked at it idly for some time, thinking more of the sight he had just witnessed than of the paper in his hand, when he instinctively noticed the date, which suggested a train of thought. Walters had left the field three days before Frost’s arrival there. The Inspector remembered that fact well, because there had been some debate as to the spot where they should have passed each other. Three days would make it Monday, and this paper was issued on Tuesday. How had it come into the dead man’s camp?
Frost went back and looked at the corpse before the troopers had covered it up with boughs. The revolver taken from the stiffened fingers, he remembered, was but loosely held—it was not in the iron grasp of a dead man’s hand, clutched hard at the moment of death. No doubt remained that the case was not one of suicide, but cowardly, cold-blooded murder. Somebody had left the diggings the next morning, had ridden hard and overtaken Walters at the creek, had shared the hospitality of his camp, and had shot him for the sake of the money he had with him. Where was the murderer now?
