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y separately published work icon The Haunted Station single work   short story   horror   mystery  
Issue Details: First known date: 1894... 1894 The Haunted Station
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

"The narrator of his ghost story, a medical practitioner, becomes a convict after he is wrongly accused of his wife’s murder and transported to the Australian colonies to work in Fremantle building roads. After landing in Australia he seeks his liberty by fleeing into the bush with two fellow convicts. Taking advantage of the capture and shooting of his accomplices, the narrator makes his escape into the wilderness—travelling to a “far off and as yet unnamed portion of Western Australia” (Nisbet 116). Wandering delirious in a hostile environment, Nisbet’s narrator, who is “expectant of something ghoulish and unnatural” to come upon him from “the sepulchral gloom and mystery” (110), suddenly comes upon “a house of two storeys”.

Source: "National Hauntings: The Architecture of Australian Ghost Stories" by David Crouch. 

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Haunted Station and Other Stories Hume Nisbet , London : F. V. White , 1894 Z1011869 1894 selected work short story London : F. V. White , 1894
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Perturbed Spirits R. C. Bull (editor), London : Arthur Barker , 1954 Z1926069 1954 anthology short story horror London : Arthur Barker , 1954 pg. 233-254
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Tales of Horror Charles Higham , Melbourne London : Horwitz , 1962 Z1728748 1962 anthology short story horror Melbourne London : Horwitz , 1962 pg. 61-85
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Tales from a Gas-Lit Graveyard Hugh Lamb (editor), London : W. H. Allen , 1979 Z1926102 1979 anthology short story horror London : W. H. Allen , 1979 pg. 9-28
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Tales From Beyond The Grave London : Octopus Publishing Group , 1982 Z1926113 1982 anthology short story fantasy horror

    Twenty-seven tales of horror and the fantastic from some of speculative fiction's leading authors, including: Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Graves, Ray Bradbury, H. G. Wells, Hume Nisbett, J. R. R. Tolkien, Guy de Maupassant, Nikolai Gogol, Artrhur Conan Doyle, Robert Bloch, Mark Twain, Elizabeth Gaskell, E. M. Forster, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde.

    London : Octopus Publishing Group , 1982
    pg. 33-48
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Dead Witness : Best Australian Mystery Stories Stephen Knight (editor), Ringwood : Penguin , 1989 Z100512 1989 anthology short story crime mystery Ringwood : Penguin , 1989 pg. 61-82
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Impressions : West Coast Fiction 1829-1988 Peter Cowan (editor), Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 1989 Z178100 1989 anthology short story extract humour Short stories and extracts from novels by Western Australian writers (visitors and residents) representing a wide range of changing responses to place over time. Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 1989 pg. 43-58
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories Ken Gelder (editor), Melbourne : Oxford University Press , 1994 Z356827 1994 anthology short story crime young adult 'Did Australian ghosts suffer from a cultural cringe? Dr Ken Gelder indicates in the introduction to another fascinating OUP anthology that early ghost stories were essentially a "transported genre" that looked back to England as their source. Thus John Lang's well-known story "The Ghost upon the Rail" is based upon a case of murder for post-convict wealth. Gelder argues that Australian ghost stories possess their own ironical flavour, but the gothic tradition has to be resolved in outback locations or deserted mining towns, as in David Rowbotham's "A Schoolie and the Ghost".'

    'Gelder relies heavily on Victorian and Edwardian writers, such as Marcus Clarke, Barbara Baynton and Hume Nisbet, as if unsure as to the nature of contemporary ghosts. It is interesting to see that Australia's science fiction writers, such as Lucy Sussex and Terry Dowling, provide the link between the past and the present. Dowling's "The Daeman Street Ghost-Trap" effectively uses traditional settings to link ghosts with a current horror, namely cancer. Several bunyip stories remind us of a particular Antipodean creature to stand against the assorted European manifestations.'

    (Colin Steele, SF Commentary No 77, p.55).


    Melbourne : Oxford University Press , 1994
    pg. 110-126
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction Ken Gelder (editor), Rachael Weaver (editor), Carlton : Melbourne University Press , 2007 Z1415120 2007 anthology short story extract horror mystery science fiction historical fiction children's (taught in 7 units)

    'This anthology collects the best examples of Australian gothic short stories from colonial times. Demonic bird cries, grisly corpses, ghostly women and psychotic station-owners populate a colonial landscape which is the stuff of nightmares.

    'In stories by Marcus Clarke, Mary Fortune and Henry Lawson, the colonial homestead is wracked by haunted images of murder and revenge. Settlers are disoriented and traumatised as they stumble into forbidden places and explorers disappear, only to return as ghostly figures with terrible tales to tell. These compelling stories are the dark underside to the usual story of colonial progress, promise and nation-building, and reveal just how vivid the gothic imagination is at the heart of Australian fiction.' (Publication summary)

    Carlton : Melbourne University Press , 2007
    pg. 173-192

Other Formats

Works about this Work

National Hauntings: The Architecture of Australian Ghost Stories David Crouch , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2007; (p. 94-105)

Echoing Judith Wright, David Crouch identifies two twisted strands in the Australian postcolonial condition - a love of the land and an invader's guilt. This 'non-indigenous desire to belong to a stolen land' gives the Australian ghost story 'a particular resonance ... In this country the presence of ghosts can be read as traces of historical traumas, fears which are often exposed in expressions of apprehensive (un)settlement.' Crouch aims to draw out some reflections on this perturbance in the Australian consciousness 'by reading Hume Nisbet's mobilisation of a phantasmic topology in his story "The Haunted Station" alongside the unsettling ghosts of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet.

Crouch concludes, in part, that both stories 'seem concerned with the continuity and legitimacy of settlement'. The haunted houses in both tales 'navigate the tensions surrounding the occupation of place in Australia' and both are 'undercut by the awareness of displaced indigenous habitation and suggest a moral disturbance in the non-indigenous Australian relationship with place'. It is conceivable, Crouch argues, that 'the ghost story itself is a way of silencing an indigenous presence within a discursive structure that asserts the legitimacy of non-indigenous occupation.'

National Hauntings: The Architecture of Australian Ghost Stories David Crouch , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2007; (p. 94-105)

Echoing Judith Wright, David Crouch identifies two twisted strands in the Australian postcolonial condition - a love of the land and an invader's guilt. This 'non-indigenous desire to belong to a stolen land' gives the Australian ghost story 'a particular resonance ... In this country the presence of ghosts can be read as traces of historical traumas, fears which are often exposed in expressions of apprehensive (un)settlement.' Crouch aims to draw out some reflections on this perturbance in the Australian consciousness 'by reading Hume Nisbet's mobilisation of a phantasmic topology in his story "The Haunted Station" alongside the unsettling ghosts of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet.

Crouch concludes, in part, that both stories 'seem concerned with the continuity and legitimacy of settlement'. The haunted houses in both tales 'navigate the tensions surrounding the occupation of place in Australia' and both are 'undercut by the awareness of displaced indigenous habitation and suggest a moral disturbance in the non-indigenous Australian relationship with place'. It is conceivable, Crouch argues, that 'the ghost story itself is a way of silencing an indigenous presence within a discursive structure that asserts the legitimacy of non-indigenous occupation.'

Last amended 19 Sep 2022 11:12:18
Settings:
  • c
    England,
    c
    c
    United Kingdom (UK),
    c
    Western Europe, Europe,
  • Fremantle, Fremantle area, South West Perth, Perth, Western Australia,
  • Bush,
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