Ghost Stories and Mysteries. Ernest Favenc
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2012 by James Doig.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Ewa, Cass, and Nick
INTRODUCTION, by James Doig
Ernest Favenc (1845-1908) is arguably the most important Australian colonial writer of Gothic and supernatural fiction. The thirty one stories assembled here were first published in some of the most popular and important periodicals of the day and were read and enjoyed by a large audience. In his day Favenc was a prolific author of short stories and he wrote under several pseudonyms, most frequently Dramingo and Delcomyn.
Favenc is often described as a ‘romantic,’ in contrast to the literary realism of his better known Australian contemporaries such as Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton and Edward Dyson. While it is true that he wrote many tales of mystery and the supernatural and his two adventure novels were certainly influenced by the popular romances of H. Rider Haggard, the strength of his work is drawn from his own experiences as a station hand and explorer in remote regions of Australia.
In his best stories, which were published in the first half of the 1890s, Favenc celebrates the mystery of the Australian outback. His characters—drovers and fossickers and explorers—range across an ancient landscape in which the supernatural can erupt at any time. These stories are written in a spare and uncomplicated style and Favenc attains an imaginative power that is unusual in the popular fiction of the time.
His tales are based on personal experience, of places he has seen and stories he has heard, enhanced by his interest in Australian history and legend. Thus, in “A Haunt of the Jinkarras” he adapts Aboriginal myth to his literary purpose, while “Spirit-Led” is based on the notion that seventeenth century Dutch sailors may have explored northern Australia. In this sense Favenc has something in common with the English tradition of the antiquarian ghost story exemplified by M. R. James and the American regional supernaturalists like Sarah Orne Jewett. Favenc weaves his tales from the stuff of Australian history and tradition in much the same way that M. R. James drew from his knowledge of British antiquity, or Jewett from the landscapes and traditions of New England.
This fictive naturalism sets Favenc apart from other colonial writers who dabbled in Gothic forms. Most Australian writers of the supernatural followed the model of the English ghost story, which had reached a standard form by the middle decades of the nineteenth century: a ghost interacts with the living in order to exorcise or ameliorate past sins or unrealised promises. A consequence of this limited dynamic is that the vast majority of ghost stories are conventional and unremarkable, and Australian colonial ghost stories are no exception—most are commercial offerings of little literary merit. Favenc, however, was able to extend the form mainly because he was conscious of the Gothic possibilities inherent in the Australian landscape and heritage. His interest in and knowledge of Australian history and legend coupled with his first hand experience of the remote outback gave him unique insights into the colonial experience. In stories like “Spirit-Led,” “A Haunt of the Jinkarras,” “The Boundary Rider’s Story,” and “Doomed” he modernised the Australian supernatural tale.
Part of this modernising is Favenc’s awareness of the interaction between the supernatural and the psychological. In several stories, madness, physical extremity and guilt are just as likely explanations for the events that transpire as the supernatural. In stories like “Jerry Boake’s Confession” and “In the Night” we are never quite sure whether we have passed that tenebrous boundary into the realm of the supernatural. This marks a maturity of conception, where the boundaries between realism and romanticism are not clear cut.
Perhaps Favenc’s greatest strength as a writer is his ability to create a feeling for the unknown. In his best stories there are no plot twists or convoluted explanations of events; the purpose of these stories is to tell us that strange things are out there and the lasting impression is that the outback has infinite possibilities and forms. This sense of the unknown is grounded in Favenc’s feel for the Australian landscape.
Favenc was a versatile writer who dabbled in a number of different genres: adventure, romance, humour, crime and the supernatural. His aim was to entertain and thrill, and he was attune to sensational plot devices and Gothic props that would entertain his readers: animated corpses, decaying bodies, madness, cannibalism, starvation, and so on.
He appears to have had a genuine interest in the occult, and some of his stories draw on occult themes and ideas, most notably “My Story,” “The Dead Hand,” “The Unholy Experiment of Martin Shenwick, and What Came of It,” and “Spirit-Led.” His adventure novels also reveal an interest in contemporary views about the lost continent of Lemuria and its association with theosophy.
A number of Favenc’s stories can be described as proto-science fiction. “What the Rats brought” is set fifteen years in the future when Australia is decimated by a plague and overrun by monstrous vampire bats from Asia. In “The Land of the Unseen” the invention of a machine allows people to see the invisible monsters lurking around them, while “A Haunt of the Jinkarras” involves the discovery of a race of primordial creatures.
Favenc was also adept at the humorous tall story, and his comic yarns still hold up well today; “The Ghost’s Triumph” is a good example. His early tale, “The Lady Ermetta; or, The Sleeping Secret,” is an amusing, if somewhat exhausting, parody of the type of convoluted tale that appeared in the Christmas number of the popular Penny Dreadfuls of the day.
Although he is an important writer who should be better known, Favenc was a professional who was paid by the word and some of his stories show the weaknesses that plague much popular writing. Many of his longer stories have overcomplicated and convoluted plots, clearly designed to fill a quota of words, and lack the precision of his most accomplished stories. Sometimes his plots are derivative and hackneyed; stories like “The Island of Shadows” and “The Haunted Steamer” conform to the standard mechanics of the contemporary ghost story.
Another negative aspect of his writing is the casual racism that permeates his work. This was a common enough attitude for the time, and in some respects Favenc was uncommonly sensitive to the plight of indigenous Australians; however, Aboriginal violence, especially in stories like “In the Night” is an ever-present reality for colonial Europeans and Aborigines and other perceived subordinate races like the Chinese are often disparaged.
Regardless of his shortcomings it is hoped that this collection will demonstrate that Favenc deserves to be regarded as a pioneer of Australian speculative fiction.
Favenc’s Life and Work
Ernest Favenc was born on 21 October 1845 at 5 Saville Row, Walworth, Surrey, the son of Abraham George Favenc, and his wife, Emma, née Jones. His father was a merchant by trade and his occupation appears to have sent him to different locations as Favenc was educated at Temple College, Cowley, in Oxfordshire, and in Berlin.
With his two sisters, Edith and Ella, and his bother, Jack, Favenc came to Australia while still a teenager in 1863. After a few months working in Sydney, Favenc moved to a cattle station owned by his uncle in north Queensland where he worked as a drover. He spent the next sixteen years in north and central Queensland working on stations, usually as a superintendent. His experiences as a drover in the outback provided the backdrop for a number of the stories in this volume, including “An Unquiet Spirit,” “The Boundary-Rider’s Story,” “The Ghostly Bullock-Bell,” and “The Red Lagoon.”
By 1871 he was writing fiction and poetry for the Queenslander, and in 1878, Gresley Lukin, the proprietor and literary editor of the Queenslander placed Favenc in charge of an expedition to survey a route for a railway line from Brisbane to Port Darwin. After travelling from Brisbane to Blackall in central-western Queensland, the small party set off northwest into the Northern Territory, discovering and naming natural features like creeks, lagoons and lakes as they went. Near disaster occurred in November 1878 when they were stranded on Creswell Creek due to water shortage, and they were forced to wait until rain