The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories

Book excerpt: Three phantoms wander the desert; a ghostly lover claims his bride at an outback station; a dead man appears beside a blood-red waterhole; a jackaroo witnesses a ghostly struggle; a frightful monster haunts the Nullarbor Plain. This anthology of Australian ghost stories - from the 1850s to the present - draws together a neglected but striking genre of fiction that works to remind those who recently settled this country how unsettled it actually is. New arrivals stumble across empty houses with ghostly occupants; lonely bushmen fantasise about ghostly women; Aborigines tell of bunyips, bugeens and 'living ghosts'; the bush is full of beckoning spectral images; and Death himself is seen prowling the streets. In these stories Australia becomes the 'down-underworld', a place where the departed will inevitably be resurrected in time, and where the dead continue to make their presence felt.