A medieval mystery in modern Ballarat
- Authors: Waldron, David
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Agora (Melbourne, Vic.) Vol. 52, no. 1 (2017), p. 4-9
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Why does the 1870s bluestone work under Bridge Street in the regional Victorian city of Ballarat feature the masons' marks common to medieval British architecture, which had been obsolete since the seventeenth century?
Goldfields and the gothic : A hidden heritage & folklore
- Authors: Waldron, David
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Book
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Generations of Australians have grown up with the legend of Eureka and the familiar images of the gold rush in central Victoria. However, underneath these commonly known stories lies a stranger and darker past. As well as colonists, pioneers, soldiers and rebal miners, the colonial goldfields were home to spiritualists, secret societies, ghost-hoxers, bunyip legends and murderers. There are also the stories of those often forgotten in the goldfield histories - Indigenous peoples, immigrant communities, homosexuals, and the mentally ill. 'Goldfields and the gothic' is an anthology by local historians of the long buried legends, histories and folklore of the Victorian goldfields and their legacy today. Every historian has a collection of strange, buried pieces of history; this work begins the task of bringing them into the light.
Homosexuality on the goldfields
- Authors: Pola, Brian , Waldron, David , Waldron, Gabriel
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Goldfields and the gothic : A hidden heritage & folklore p. 87-101
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: There has been significant new literature on the experience of women and lesbians on the Goldfields but very little has been published on the experience of homosexual men. However, despite being a capital offence until 1864 and a criminal act until the 1980s, records from the mid-ninteenth-century indicate there was a well-established, perhaps even flourishing, culture of male homosexuality on Victoria's Goldfields. This culture had its origins in the long established and distinct underground 'gay' subculture of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century of Great Britain, 'Molly houses'. These illegal bars and taverns, essentially served a function as the gay bars of their day.
Australian animal folklore collection
- Authors: Waldron, David
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Dataset
- Full Text: false
- Description: The Australian Animal Folklore Collection is held in the Geoffrey Blainey Research Centre (University of Ballarat E.J. Barker Library), and can be accessed by researchers in the Centre’s supervised reading room. The collection includes objects such as plaster paw prints, images, documents, reports, and newspaper articles relating to big cat scares that have become legendary over a number of generations. Themes within the collection relate to cryptozoology; big cats and dogs in the Australian bush, such as pumas, panthers, mountain lions, thylacines (Tasmanian Tigers); and legends such as the Tantanoola Tiger, the Black Dog of Bungay, the Grampians Puma, and the Gippsland Panther. The collection was used by Dr David Waldron during his research into Australian big cat mythology and the book ‘Snarls from the Tea-tree: Big Cat Folklore’ co-authored by David Waldron and Simon Townsend. The Australian Animal Folklore collection has been supplemented with donations by other interested researchers such as David Pepper-Edwards. Aspects of the collection can be viewed online via www.victoriancollections.net.au with the search term “Australian Animal Folklore Collection”.
- Description: The Australian Animal Folklore Collection is held in the Geoffrey Blainey Research Centre (University of Ballarat E.J. Barker Library), and can be accessed by researchers in the Centre’s supervised reading room. The collection includes objects such as plaster paw prints, images, documents, reports, and newspaper articles relating to big cat scares that have become legendary over a number of generations. Themes within the collection relate to cryptozoology; big cats and dogs in the Australian bush, such as pumas, panthers, mountain lions, thylacines (Tasmanian Tigers); and legends such as the Tantanoola Tiger, the Black Dog of Bungay, the Grampians Puma, and the Gippsland Panther. The collection was used by Dr David Waldron during his research into Australian big cat mythology and the book ‘Snarls from the Tea-tree: Big Cat Folklore’ co-authored by David Waldron and Simon Townsend. The Australian Animal Folklore collection has been supplemented with donations by other interested researchers such as David Pepper-Edwards. Aspects of the collection can be viewed online via www.victoriancollection.net.au with the search term “Australian Animal Folklore Collection”.
Invented traditions and regional identity: The case of the black dog of bungay
- Authors: Waldron, David
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: CFZ Year Book 2011 p.
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
Myth, folklore and kitsch : The case of the Black Dog of Bungay
- Authors: Waldron, David
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Paper presented at Ownership and Appropriation: A joint international conference of the ASA, the ASAANZ and the AAS, Auckland : 8th-12th December 2008
- Full Text: false
- Description: The attack on St Mary’s Church in Bungay on August 4 1577 has become a centre piece of community identity and regional East Anglian folklore. The mythology surrounding the attack of the ghost dog Black Shuck have become an integral part of the community’s sense of English local identity in the face of the pressures posed by globalization, economic development and rapidly changing ethnic and generational demographics. The mythology has also attracted international attention from ghost hunters, crypto-zoologists, folklorists and novelists leading to an integration of indigenous folklore and globalised popular culture. This paper is based on archival research of the development of the local folklore surrounding Black Shuck in relation to major social and demographic challenges. In particular, this paper will focus on the use of the Black Shuck folklore to create a sense of eternal transcendent English ethnicity tied to the landscape and the use of supernaturalism to legitimate a folkloric construction of ethnic identity.