AustLit

'In 1984, after a somewhat acrimonious move out of the National Library of Australia, the newly minted National Film and Sound Archive took up residence in the old Institute of Anatomy in Canberra. From the first day, it seems, living archivists were not the only occupants of the building. The place had a colourful history associated with human and other animal remains, including racehorse Phar Lap's heart and what was thought to be Ned Kelly's skull. The fine art deco Institute building mostly cleared of soft tissue war-wounds floating in jars of preservative, as well as articulated skeletons, standing tall in elegant display cases. Within a year or two, as the beginner-archivists settled in, struggling with issues of identity and management, limited funding to preserve the nation's sound and moving image heritage, workers began to see and to hear things. An accusation persisted that film and sound had been 'deceitfully' ripped out of the National Library. Also, sound and moving image seemed incompatible bed-fellows. Could that have been a cause of disturbances at the Archive? People saw pestering spirits on balconies and in shady corridors. Incomprehensible voices hung in the air. There was nothing in the Occupational Health and Safety Manual that covered accepted behaviour and best practice in haunted buildings. But the author found Shakespeare helped. The Bard's works provided, perhaps, the largest catalogue of paranormal occurrences to compare and contrast with the encounters archivists described. Before long the National Film and Sound Archive was being touted as Australia's most haunted building. This book presents stories from that haunting. Investigating likely causes, it offers a tentative explanation as to why ghosts seemed to arise to bother the living.'   (Publication summary)

' In 1979, the then eminence grise of Australian folk music, John Meredith, with his co-researcher Rex Whalan, published what they claimed were the extant literary remains of 'Frank the Poet'. They gathered seventeen items of verse which they attributed to an Irish convict, Francis MacNamara, adding what appears to be a quite thorough investigation of surviving convict records to create a brief biography. Invited to write the foreword, the celebrated historian, Professor Russel Ward, offered a prediction.' (Introduction)

' In 1873, the Presbyterian clergyman, John Dunmore Lang, selected and published a collection of his own poetry, the earliest dating from the 1820s when he was establishing a place for himself in New South Wales (NSW). Coming from the same part of Scotland as Robert Burns (Lang was born in 1799 in Greenock, Burns in 1759 some fifty kilometres south in Alloway, near Ayr), Lang might be expected to demonstrate an approach to writing verse and a way of looking at the world similar to his distinguished, internationally renowned countryman, who was so deeply affected by the region in which he was born and lived. Admittedly they were of different generations, and whereas Burns, the son of a poor tenant farmer, was largely self-educated, Lang excelled at the University of Glasgow. But by Lang's time, Burns had posthumously become iconic. Yet as Burns' star continued to rise, with annual suppers conducted in the colonies to celebrate his 'immortal memory', Lang was lambasted in Sydney newspapers, journalists sometimes expecting that their readers would recognise the source of inspiration for their humour in an implied comparison such as the one in the epigraph above.'  (Publication abstract)