Review: Australian Stories of Horror & Suspense

STEWART, Gordon Neil, Australian Stories of Horror & Suspense from the early days, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, Australia, 1983.

Octavo; hardcover with gilt spine-titling; 272pp. Light spotting to the top edge of the text block; tail of the spine lightly softened; otherwise near fine in like dustjacket

“So much horror in the

Clear Australian sunlight”

Douglas Stewart, Ned Kelly

I picked up a copy of this book many years ago and was seriously unimpressed. A second look at it though – probably with the perspective of age - has changed that opinion.

In my younger days I was expecting to read a bunch of zippy stories about ghosts of bushrangers and vengeful convicts, bunyips leaping out of the woodwork and so on (and the cheesy, ‘blood-sprayed’ title page certainly didn’t disabuse me of any expectations in this regard). In fact, I was anticipating something along the lines of M.R. James, or Sheridan leFanu, in an antipodean setting. I had seriously missed the point.

(As a side issue, the collection contains a number of tales penned by Henry Lawson. Now, Lawson may be this country’s Shakespearean equivalent, but I’ve always had trouble reading him. As far as I’m concerned, he tends to be sentimental, mawkish and a bit of a whinger. I have re-read the stories selected here – teeth gritted, shoulders tensed – and surprisingly, in the context of this collection, they stand up pretty well.)

Throughout the Nineteenth Century, Australia was considered a wild frontier; those enclaves carved out around the major ports by the first settlers were the fringes of civilisation, and the wilds beyond – that miasmal, featureless terra nullius – simply became the Bush, a place of threat and danger.

Living in the Bush in the early days meant severing connexions with the niceties of city life; one became cut off from social interaction, dependant upon the vagaries of a harsh environment for survival, and subject to random natural disasters that could brush aside years of hard-won settlement in a heartbeat. Those who chose to dwell in this vast lonely landscape became hard-bitten, introspective, somewhat sociopathic, unhinged. That is what this book is about; this is what these tales focus upon.

A resonant example is Lawson’s well-known story “The Bush Undertaker” which I remembered as a soppy tale about a sentimental tramp. In the current context though, the focus shifts, like looking at a familiar picture through a cracked lens. The story is a character sketch of a tramp who finds an old associate dead in a tree. Rather than leave him to the mercy of the elements, he wraps the cadaver in a cylinder of bark stripped from a gum-tree and carries him away to be buried. Along the way, the tramp mutters to himself and his dead friend, whilst taking drags from a bottle of hooch found near the corpse. The tramp questions his own actions as to whether they have any meaning in the context of the unforgiving Bush, wondering if there’s any point in what he’s doing; in the end his actions are slipshod and unsure, as his capabilities in funereal arrangements are unpractised and hampered by the booze. Does the tramp care at all? Would anyone else? Do his actions matter? In the end, there is no answer.

And so the rest of the book continues. There are no ghosts or strange monstrous beings. What we see are the slow disintegration of lives and minds under the severe harshness of the environment; the slow slide into uncivilised behaviour and the relinquishment of the proper forms of social behaviour. In this sense, the book is vastly more interesting.

Not all of these stories are completely polished and clearly some of the writers are punching above their weight; still, the concepts are brave and dynamic, showing clearly through the various imperfections of execution.

The first tale - “How Muster-Master Stoneman Earned his Breakfast” by Price Warung - is a grim narrative involving a Tasmanian convict awaiting execution. Eschewing any shriving by the priest, the murderer is locked away for his final night during which time he kills his guard and escapes. When his absence is discovered at daybreak a search-party is organised, but aborted when the fugitive appears and walks through the prison gate, having fulfilled a wish to spit on the grave of the man whose death landed him in gaol to begin with. He is flogged, salted and hanged and the prison warden, refusing to be weighed down by concerns of whether or not justice was seen to be done in regard to the murdered guard, goes to his breakfast, grimly satisfied.

In Mary Gaunt’s “The Doctor’s Drive”, a woman in labour in the next village over requires the doctor’s assistance; however, a bushfire rages in that direction. The doctor, weighing the odds, convinces the mail-coach driver to attempt the deadly run, to ensure the mail arrives on time and that the woman delivers her child. Their flight is harrowing in the extreme, and they arrive, singed and with a slight majority of the mail unburnt, only to find that the child has arrived safely of its own accord.

In “Grear’s Dam” by Morley Roberts, a farmer tortured by the wholesale deaths of his flocks caused by a drought and denied access over his land-grabbing neighbour’s patch to reach the nearby river, cuts down a fence to lead his flocks to his greedy neighbour’s dam. Refusing to be driven off by the neighbour and his thugs, he lets his shovel do the talking for him, waters his sheep and promises to turn himself in when all’s been set to rights.

If you’re seeing a theme here, then you’ve caught the spirit of this book. Hope fails; justice is rough and often seized by both hands; the environment is pitiless and uncaring. People go mad from the heat and the loneliness and the desolation. And if you think that this sounds like one of HPL’s major themes, you’ve hit the nail right on the head.

There’s another Mythos connexion too, although it’s more than a little tenuous. Albert Dorrington makes a few contributions, one of which is “Castro’s Last Sacrament”, a vicious tale of revenge set in the islands north of Australia. The South Seas? ‘Castro’? I’m drawing a very long bow here since the story was written before HPL was born, but the character sounds like a Mythos mainstay to me. Perhaps one of the antecedents of the namesake witness from “The Call of Cthulhu”?

Another worthy mention is “Fourteen Fathoms by Quetta Rock” by Randolph Bedford, a tale about a lovelorn deep-sea diver exploring a wrecked cargo ship in the waters near Timor. Again there are flaws in the execution, but the preparation and conduct of the dive are fascinating and what he finds upon his arrival at the wreck, fourteen fathoms below, is suitably chilling.

So yes, I had expectations about this tome. Coming to it years later without such baggage made for a hugely enjoyable read.

Three-and-a-half tentacled horrors.

*****

Chapter Listing:

Outsiders In The Land:

"How Muster-Master Stoneman Earned his Breakfast" - Price Warung

"Western Rebellions" - W.H. Suttor

"Governor Ralph Darling's Iron Collar" - Marcus Clarke

"The Liberation of the First Three" - Price Warung

"Vengeance for Ippitha" - W.H. Suttor

"Tracks in the Bush" - John Lang

"The Lost Child" - Tom Collins

The Unforgiving Land:

"Crows" - Dowell O'Reilly

"Chased by Fire" - Nat Gould

"On the Land" - Henry Fletcher

"Grear's Dam" - Morley Roberts

"The Doctor's Drive" - Mary Gaunt

Master and Servants:

"The Trucker's Dream" - Edward Dyson

"Wolf in Snake's Clothes" - Julian Stuart

"A Hot Day at Spats'" - Edward Dyson

"Judas: A Strike Incident" - E.F. Squires

The Law and the Lawless

"A Stripe for Trooper Casey" - Roderic Quinn

"Wanted by the Police" - Henry Lawson

"Black Peter's Last Kiss" - Dowell O'Reilly

Life and Death in the Tropics

"The Revenge of Macy O'Shea" - Louis Becke

"Five-Skull Island" - Alexander Montgomery

"Enderby's Courtship" - Louis Becke

"Castro's Last Sacrament" - Albert Dorrington

"Swamp-swallowed" - Alexander Montgomery

"A Basket of Bread-fruit" - Louis Becke

"Fourteen Fathoms by Quetta Rock" - Randolph Bedford

Love, Hate and Madness in the Bush

"The Tramp" - Barbara Baynton

"The Last of Six" - Ernest Favenc

"A Bush Tanqueray" - Albert Dorrington

"The Selector's Daughter" - Henry Lawson

"Dead Man's Camp" - J.A. Barry

"The Bush Undertaker" - Henry Lawson

"A Bush Singer" - Albert Dorrington

"Scrammy 'And" - Barbara Baynton