ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the distinctive characteristics of Australian ghost stories, as representations of the Australian past. The study of Australian ghosts is conducted within the historical context of the dispossession – and attempted erasure – of Indigenous people by European settlers from 1788. Alongside this act of colonial displacement, the establishment of the European settlement as a harsh penal colony ensured the prevalence of suffering and ‘bad deaths’ within settler society. Early Australian ghost stories reflect the dispossession and brutality of settler society in narratives of displacement, trauma and injustice. Australian ghost narratives emerged from a context of European guilt, unease and estrangement within a vast, dry and forbidding continent. The surrounding landscape was described by Europeans in the eighteenth century as eerie and weird – un-European – with distinctive flora including the variety of eucalyptus tree known as the ‘ghost gum’. The prevalence of displacement and dispossession in Australian ghost stories suggests an undercurrent of guilt or shame in Australian culture since European settlement, mixed with a legacy of anxiety and unease.
