ABSTRACT
The nineteenth-century ghost story is, among other things, a sensitive index of the estrangements and preoccupations of colonial and settler cultures. The earliest ghost stories published in Australia borrowed their general shape from Anglo-American precursors while asserting a distinctive Australian character that sometimes acknowledged that “the genus ghost had hardly time to develop it”. A suite of stories published in the late nineteenth century similarly elaborate on the ghost as a means to bring uneasily acknowledged events to an appreciable surface. As Australia modernized and consolidated populations and wealth in urban areas, ghost fiction continued to find its setting on the frontier, or within the sparse network of stations that formed regional settlement. The indigenous ghosts of Mudrooroo’s tale underscore the traumas inflicted by Australia’s colonization. In this way, they occupy a similar role to that given to ghosts in earlier European-styled ghost stories.
