List of Titles

The children of the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate : An anthology of their reminiscences

- Clark, Ian, Cahir, David (Fred)

Authors: Clark, Ian , Cahir, David (Fred)
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Book
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Description: During the life of the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate from 1839 until late 1849 some 35 children of the Protectors were associated with the Protectorate. These children have been largely neglected by scholars and rendered historically invisible. Six of them have however left 28 distinct records of their experiences. In this work we hear the voice of Protectorate children - the authors bring them out of the shadows of their fathers and allow them to appear as influential actors in their own right, with their own motivations, goals, ideas, and relationships with Aboriginal people. Detailed biographical entries, where possible, are included on every protectorate child and on their spouses. For the first time, the reminiscences of William Jackson Thomas and Albert Le Souef are published in their entirety, and all of the writings of the Protectorate's children are brought together so that their contribution to our understanding of the Protectorate may be acknowledged and interpreted.

Goldfields and the gothic : A hidden heritage & folklore

- Waldron, David

Authors: Waldron, David
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Book
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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.

Banshees

- Blee, Jillian

Authors: Blee, Jillian
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Book chapter
Relation: Goldfields and the gothic : A hidden heritage & folklore p. 43-54
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Description: The word Banshee is derived from the Gaelic 'bean si' or 'sidhe' meaning woman of the faeries. According to legend they appointed from the faery world to forewarn the members of the families who claim direct descent from the mythical Milesians, the fifth and last of the population waves to sweep Ireland during pre-historical times. Although originally the pre-serve of the clans of O'Neill, O'Brien, O'Grady, O'Connor and Kavanagh, with intermarraige down through the centuries they have become attached to many other Irish families including several with distinctly Norman heritage.

William Bailey and his haunted mansion

- Beggs-Sunter, Anne

Authors: Beggs-Sunter, Anne
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Book chapter
Relation: Goldfields and the gothic : A hidden heritage & folklore p. 31-42
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Description: The discovery of gold at Ballarat in 1851 conferred incredible wealth on the community, the colony and the British Empire. Ballarat was literally a city 'built on gold'. However, the immigrants who made their fortunes from gold rarely indulged in conspicuous private displays of consumption. The exception was William Bailey. His Italianate mansion, completed in 1883, reflected his great success in speculative mining ventures in the Ballarat area.

The night Dixie came to town : The Shenandoah and the American Civil War in Ballarat

- Moll, Nicholas

Authors: Moll, Nicholas
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Book chapter
Relation: Goldfields and the gothic : A hidden heritage & folklore p. 116-129
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Description: That the American Civil War occurred exclusively within North America and affected specifically United States affair is a common misconception. Whilst the majority of the infantry conflict occured within and between the United and then Confederate States of America, the clash was such that it and its effects spread accross the globe. Also engaged in the American Civil War were Prussian military observers; political entanglements with the United Kingdom and Russia; Canadian volunteers within the Union army; smuggling and blockade running from the Bahamas into the Confederate States; cotton shortages in French industries that were heavily reliant on raw materials imported from the southern states; merchant raiding in the Pacific and Atlantic; along with countless other entanglements to Europe and their colonies into the conflict through one means or another. The tyranny of distance notwithstanding, Australia was no exception to the overflow of conflicts and consequences that resulted from the American Civil War.

Homosexuality on the goldfields

- Pola, Brian, Waldron, David, Waldron, Gabriel

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
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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.

The mystery of the Moranghurk sculptures

- Cahir, David (Fred)

Authors: Cahir, David (Fred)
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Book chapter
Relation: Goldfields and the gothic : A hidden heritage & folklore p. 143-150
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Description: Since the earliest colonial days in Australia there have been a large number of reports of what have variously been described as stone carving, rock sculptures, earthen sculptures and rock engravings by Aboriginal people. The most prominent of these has been on the wooden sculptures emanating from northern Australia. Few anthropologists have minutely reported on what McCarthy described as examples of Aboriginal 'plastic art'. Aboriginal sculptures 'crudely fashioned' from beeswax, some of them 'made to represent human figures' but more generally 'modelled' to represent 'kangaroos, turtles, goannas, crocodiles and birds'. One of the most widely reported earthen carvings in what is now known as Victoria was described as the Challicum Bunyip. This was reputed to be an outline of a creature known as a bunyip, which was gouged into the ground. Other accounts of life-sized Aboriginal sculpture in Victoria are not numerous but certainly extant.

Mullawallah : spririt of times past, present and future

- Newton, Janice

Authors: Newton, Janice
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Book chapter
Relation: Goldfields and the gothic : A hidden heritage & folklore p. 165-180
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Description: When Mullawallah (also known as King Billy, Frank or William Wilson) died of exposure/exhaustion on 23 September 1896, many of the Ballarat community took a somewhat ghoulish interest in viewing the corpse at the Ballarat and District Hospital morgue. Mullawallah was laid in a black and gold open coffin, decorated with golden representations of Aboriginal weapons. The hospital gardener made a special boomerang-shaped wreath of wattle blossom which was placed on his chest. A few days later, on 26 September, hundreds of residents, including local Members of Parliament, assembled for the beginning of the funeral procession at the hospital. They wished to be part of what they believed was the historic occasion of the passing of the 'last of the Ballarat tribe'. Key local churches and institutions had jostled to organise this burial. Ultimately, it was the Anglican Archedeacon who presided over the service and the Methodists who donated the grave plot.

Indigenous folklore of the northern Wathawurrung peoples

- Clark, Ian

Authors: Clark, Ian
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Book chapter
Relation: Goldfields and the gothic : A hidden heritage & folklore p. 151-164
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Description: This paper examines four northern Wathawurrung legends and beliefs that were associated with five landmarks within their country - Lal Lal Falls, Black Hill (Kirrit Barreet, near Gordon), Lake Burrumbeet, and Mt Buninyong and Mt Elephant (Derrinallum). The first two sites are associated with Bundjil, the creator spirit. Lake Burrumbeet concerns a 'witch-like' creature, and the final two sites were involved in major conflict that explaines their unique topographical characteristics. The northern Wathawurrung country is bounded by the Werribee River in the east; the Fiery Creek in the west; and the Great Dividing Range in the north.

Playing the ghost : ghost hoaxing and supernaturalism in nineteenth-century Victoria

- Waldron, David

Authors: Waldron, David
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Book chapter
Relation: Goldfields and the gothic : A hidden heritage & folklore p. 19-30
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Description: Ghosts have long been a popular subject in central Victoria. Even in the late Goldfields era, belief in ghosts, ghost stories and hauntings were popular subjects for entertainment and attracted significant attention in the printed press and public gatherings and lectures. In a sense Ballarat was a 'haunted' city from very early in its coloniel history. With such a demand and popular interest in ghosts, Ballarat also became a hot bed of spiritualism and ghost hoaxing. This paper examines the history and context of ghost hoaxing in nineteenth-century colonial Victoria with a focus on Ballarat and the central Victorian region.

Goldfields freemasonry : Decoding the past

- Wickham, Dorothy

Authors: Wickham, Dorothy
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Book chapter
Relation: Goldfields and the gothic : A hidden heritage & folklore p. 102-115
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Description: In a period of global tension, the establishment of Freemasonry in Australia was tenuous. As a penal colony, political prisoners as well as a criminal element settled in the new colony. So, on 14 May 1803, when Irish convict Henry Browne Hayes attempted to hold a Freemasonic Lodge meeting in Port Jackson (Sydney), all Masons present were arrested and Hayes sentenced to 'hard labour at the New Settlement to formed at Van Diemen's Land'.

Buckley's Bunyip

- Donovan, Paul

Authors: Donovan, Paul
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Book chapter
Relation: Goldfields and the gothic : A hidden heritage & folklore p. 181-191
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Description: Australia's folklore has developed over two and a half centries of cultural diversity. It is influenced by stories, songs, traditions, rituals, and ideologies from every corner of the globe. Despite the attempted genocide of Australian Indigenous peoples and their languages and cultures, certain aspects of their mythology and folklore have been powerful enough, interesting enough, or pertinent enough to have survived and been translated, adapted or appropriated holus-bolus into the wider mainstream Australian mythology.

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