In this episode of The Self Experiment, I sit down with Dr. Waldron. We venture into the rich and often overlooked realm of folklore as a reflection of societal anxieties and historical realities.

The discussion is anchored in Ballarat's historical narrative, particularly during the Gold Rush, an epoch characterized by mass migration and cultural amalgamation. Dr. Waldron delineates how the myriad of stories birthed from this period—ranging from ghostly encounters to cautionary tales—serve as conduits for understanding the collective psyche of the community. He articulates that these narratives are not static; they evolve as they are retold, shaped by contemporary cultural contexts and the ongoing need to grapple with the past.

The episode prompts listeners to consider the implications of folklore, particularly how these stories reveal underlying tensions and traumas that persist in society. Dr. Waldron's insights challenge us to recognize the importance of these narratives as tools for reflection, healing, and, ultimately, understanding our shared human experience.

Takeaways:

1. In this episode, we explored the intricate relationship between folklore and community identity, emphasizing how stories evolve with cultural contexts.
2. The historical significance of Ballarat during the gold rush was discussed, highlighting its multifaceted narratives that intertwine triumph and tragedy.
3. We examined the concept of ghost stories serving as reflections of societal traumas, urging listeners to acknowledge the past's impact on the present.
4. The discussion included the complex nature of heritage versus history, where personal interpretations shape our understanding of cultural narratives over time.
5. The relevance of multicultural influences in shaping Ballarat's folklore was articulated, revealing the rich tapestry of stories arising from diverse communities.
6. Lastly, we emphasized the importance of confronting uncomfortable histories, as they continue to resonate within contemporary social issues.

Foreign.

Welcome back, beautiful listeners, to the Self Experiment podcast.

Today I'm sitting down with a historian, a folklorist, who looks at why certain stories stick with us and what they say about our identity.

Dr. David Waldron.

That's me, yes.

Kia ora.

Welcome and thank you for joining me.

When you get started, I'll tell you how I sort of came about you.

I'm a new transplant into Ballarat, so I live next to Sovereign Hill, so sort of know, like, basic history of Ballarat, but not everything.

And that's how I fell upon the podcast Tales from Rat City, that.

That you were a part of.

Is there something about Ballarat that has.

That.

The reason why it has all these stories attached to it, or is it.

Is there something that.

That drew you to Ballarat in particular?

Well, it's interesting, of course.

You know, I ended up being drawn to Ballarat just through, you know, accident of life and all the rest of it, but it's a deeply fascinating town.

You have massive changes across Europe, throughout most of the world.

You have, of course, the potato famine in Ireland, the massive displacement of huge numbers of people, people displaced from the Industrial Revolution.

Adding into that, these people that are kicked off the land, they're kicked off the land through the Highland Clearances, through the enclosure movement, they're sent into these cities that have no infrastructure for them.

You have the collapse of the old poor laws to care for the poor.

You have, with that, of course, rampant crime, massive deportation.

And they flock to Ballarat, but of course, they flock to San Francisco, they flock to New Zealand, they flock to South Africa, they flock to the United States.

You have, of course, the gold rush in Victoria, but there's a huge amount of interconnection with the gold rush in California at the same time.

So what you have are these people who are fundamentally disconnected from where they came from.

There's this promise of an alleviation to poverty.

There's this freedom of the constrictions of the past.

Right.

And of course we talk about the Irish and the English and more recently we've started to reack knowledge the Chinese background.

But there were a significant population of Indians here.

An honest student of mine doing a project at Narina was finding material saying that there were so many Norwegians living in Narina, which is a little town just out of Ballarat, that they were having trouble collecting mining licenses and doing any work because no one spoke English, they just spoke Norwegian.

There was a substantive French population, German population.

I live in a suburb called Canadian.

Oh yes, yes.

We have Yankee flat.

So you've got this multi ethnic mixing melting pot.

You have people, all different cultures coming together.

But that was already starting to happen due to the Opium wars and the collapse of the Chinese economy and massive floods in Guangdong Province.

So you've got this unique world where people are coming to seek their fortunes, seek their future.

It's a bit of as talking to Jeffrey Blaney once and he had this story of this kid who was 10 years old, he found a fist sized nugget and by the time he was 14, he was running a carting business that employed 10 people at the same time.

People came here and they didn't make it and they lost everything.

The squalor of Ballarat east, the area they called, you know, Arcadia Lane, which is down near Main Road and York street in Ballarat, was rife with brothels and so on.

And then through all this, Nyx, you've got this.

You've got this huge cultural division between Ballarat east and the poor areas, predominantly Irish immigrant communities.

Ballarat west, which you still have today built up with the big 19th century buildings.

Now add to that there's this history we like to talk about.

People coming, striking gold, making their fortune.

We have the stories of people building industry.

Yet underneath that is also a lot of really dark stories which you come across in the papers.

There's rampant poverty, there's mass disease very quickly.

For instance, Yarrowie River Withers talks about.

He said within two weeks the river had turned to thick yellow sludges.

Everyone's sluicing mud through it.

You think about 50,000 people as the town suddenly grows.

They're all just throwing their, literally throwing their crap out the window at their tent every time it rains that gets into their drinking water.

You have outbreaks of typhus, diphtheria and other ailments.

So there's rampant disease.

You have tragedies like the Longmore family out at Leomonth, which is another small satellite town.

They lost eight of nine children in a month.

And then the mother died in childbirth.

The father died of alcohol poisoning shortly afterwards, leaving one son remaining.

It's also this time of transition like that.

In that incident, there was a fist fight in the corridor between two doctors.

One said it was the cause of the ailment was this newfangled idea called germs coming from Britain.

The other doctor said, no, this is my asthma.

And you have these grieving parents dealing with, you know, very, very sick children, grieving the loss of children they've already lost.

And the doctors are having a fistfight in the corridor.

Now.

There's also a rampant sex industry going on in Ballarat as well.

It's quite well documented, including in this things like child exploitation and those sorts of awful stories.

So it makes for a uniquely dynamic history with a lot of power.

And it's also one that we've tended to suppress beneath the legacy of the white Australia policy and the shadow of Eureka, as I call it, where you tend to see Ballarat through a contemporary reconstruction of the Eureka stockade incident that is shown through contemporary politics.

And when you look at Eureka commemorations today, they'll look at it through origins of the labor movement or right wing people who use it as an anti immigration thing, or it'll be seen as a foundation of Australian democracy when it's in quite a different context to all those modern issues.

But of course, that's the way that we engage with heritage.

Real history is messy and complex, but heritage is like looking to the past or the night of the future and tends to be much more narrative driven around how we like to see ourselves in the present.

So I think Ballarat's quite uniquely powerful similar histories, for instance in Bendigo.

But Bendigo sort of kicked off a bit later when things had started to become more organized, industrialized.

The mining had moved from alluvial gold to deep lead mining and was more controlled by heavy industry.

But I think Ballarat in that early stage creates this unique, chaotic and messy history that's filled with triumph and horrible tragedies.

There's also from that podcast, Tales from Rat City.

There's also a lot of obviously, folklore that sort of comes from that time.

And is that because of the wide range or the diversity of the community or.

Yeah, where sort of does that, that folklore sort of sit in the history of Ballarat?

I think so.

And I think, you know, like a particular passion of mine is the ghost story.

And when I say this, I don't mean, you know, running around trying to prove if ghosts are real with gadgets.

I don't mean that kind of thing.

I think in some ways it's a side issue whether they're real or not, but rather the way they connect us to those parts of our past that we don't like to talk about.

One of my favorite little stories in Ballarat I use as an example of this is the ghost of Winifred Crab.

That's meant to be seen in the top four of the Royal Bank Building next to Craig's Hotel, to see her at the windows at night and so on.

And the story there at least is the folklore's derived is of a young woman who is working as a servant for one of the bank manager's sons.

They start having an affair.

She thinks she's got a good.

She's going to marry him and move in, move up social class.

The legend goes that she heard the son talking to his father, saying that he had no intention of marrying her.

She was a bit of fun on the side, and he was going to marry an appropriate lady that his father had selected for him.

And the folklore has it that she took her own life.

And so you see her sad face in the window.

Now, this is like an archetype they call in folklore, the lady in White.

And pretty much every town's got versions of this story.

There's many versions in the UK of this.

There's one story of a woman who's, you know, having an affair with a farmer.

She's former convict, finds a similar thing, takes her own life.

There's a story of a woman who became pregnant to a monk.

He threw her down some stairs.

You know, this, there's versions of this.

There's one's in Etruca, every town's got it.

Now, outside of whether or not there actually is a ghost in that window, you think about the way it connects you to an issue that women have always had to face.

A tragedy of the past that would never really come to grips with and how many other women would have had that experience at that time.

Likewise, you think about the frustration, inequality, also the way it acts as a cautionary tale for women.

You know, when a rich guy hits on you, think about what.

What are his actual intentions?

You know, those sorts of questions.

Now, interestingly, when I'VE been up in there.

And it's been scratched with a nail into the glass.

And I my whimsy imagination imagines a teenage girl waiting for her dad to finish work, is a bit bored, does a bit of graffiti on the window and I bet a teenage girl would love to know 150 years later, you're part of the Ballarat Ghost tour and people tell stories about you and you're in the papers as a ghost sorrowfully haunting the town.

So maybe there wasn't a winner for Crab, but nonetheless, that story represents a truth about the past that we don't like to acknowledge.

That that tragic story that befell so many women in a situation like that, in that era, her future may have essentially been sex industry, poverty, nothing if lucky, working in some awful factory under God forsaken conditions.

But nonetheless the story remains and the story is with us and it forces us to acknowledge the trauma of the past.

Likewise, I've come across stories of indigenous Australian ghosts and again, that forces an acknowledgement of the people there before us.

So that's the key thing for me in the ghost story, thinking about what it is about the past that we don't like to talk about.

Because if you don't confront the difficult stories in the past, they literally come back to haunt us.

Much like if we don't personally confront our own inner demons, they come back to haunt us and have concerns regardless.

Yeah.

Are you able to sort of unpack what like how traumatic events sort of in a community become encoded into.

Into folklore?

Like how does it.

What?

Yeah.

So what typically happens is you have some sort of difficult, dark event that captures the public imagination on a.

Usually on a taboo topic.

Things like sex, murder, violence, populations you don't like to acknowledge anymore.

It stays around.

It's usually associated with particular places and locations or buildings that connect us to the past.

And then as each generation tells the story, it changes.

And something I like to do actually with a ghost story is to trace it through the papers and look at how the story transforms over time.

And then it'll often shift locations, it'll often shift names, the story will twist as the social issues around it change and it will become a story, a story that's connected to particular sites and those sites will connect us to the past and to heritage.

So often a building might be demolished and you'll find the story starts getting associated with another building down the street.

Because these stories don't tend to be sort of recorded and discussed in detail the way, say, Anzac stories are.

Rather, they're told word of mouth.

So in talking about this, we'll talk about, like, folklore.

Folklore doesn't mean something not true.

It means the stories that we tell in a community about the past.

And as such, you know, it becomes something that grows and changes with each generation as we talk about it.

Every time you tell someone the story, it changes a little bit, and so it sort of grows and is organic.

So one of the things we have with these yarns today, and this is something I find really fascinating, is you got the focal.

The stories that people tell about the site in the community.

That's also shaped by the pop culture we consume today, all the movies, TV shows, video games we play, which shapes the folklore.

But those video games and things don't capture our imagination unless they reference the folkloric culture that's already there.

So there's this sort of mutually formative process in all these.

So it's a fascinating, complex thing that connects us to our past, but it's dynamic and fluid and evolving in relation to the present.

There's just down the road from us, there's this old church.

It looks like it's been burnt.

Half of it's been burnt.

So the first one, I think.

Another one.

Yeah, yeah.

And every time we drive past, we come up with a different story about what happened there.

And like.

And it's always.

It's always sort of.

Always you do sort of go back to, like, movies you've seen or TV shows.

You're like, oh, that's probably happened there.

And I think it just fell down, to be honest.

But, yeah, it is exciting and.

And thrilling to come up.

Well, I guess come up with stories about history of something that we don't know anything about.

With these sorts of stories, what do they tell us about cultural anxieties and our environment, relationships?

There's this great line, I can't remember the author who said it once, but Richard.

Richard Kearney, he talks about, you look to the past with an eye to the future.

Now, this is a really important distinction to make, the distinction between history and heritage.

History is what actually happened in the past, which is complex and messy, because human beings are complex, messy Ambivalent creatures.

And then there's the way that we shape the past to suit the interests of the present, what it means to us today.

And then when we engage with that, we engage it with an eye to where we think we're headed.

And so we construct the paths of these images that reflect the anxieties that we have in the present.

The issues that drive us in this will be different for different people, different sectors of society, and it'll be designed in such a way as to create, like, a warning or an antidote or an alleviation to the issues that we think are going to confront us in the future.

And so it's.

And then one of the interesting things is people become.

Become really upset when their actual history, you know, the messy process of actual history contradicts their image of heritage, which is a, you know, mental construction.

You'll see it if you critique something that's very precious to people, like, for example, Anzac history, the real history.

50,000.

Let's imagine 50,000 Australian soldiers.

They're going to be all different types of human beings, but we've constructed an image of.

Of them around this idea of Australian identity and the values that we'd like to extol.

And that's done with an idea where we think Australia is headed.

And, of course, the way we think of, say, Anzac, for instance, changes with each successive generation.

Even in my lifetime, when I was a young lad, Anzac was always about, you know, the band played, Waltzing Matilda, the tragedy of war, how horrible war is, et cetera, which is, of course, coming out of the context of Vietnam in the Howard era.

With the rise of more strident nationalism, it became much more focused as this positive statement of the military and positive reconstruction of military identity linked to a particular image of Australian nationalism.

So, you know, these things change over time, and you can trace that through newspapers and popular culture and other forms of representation.

And, of course, people's stories will change.

Is there a story that sort of sits with you, or is there a story that made you want to research or get into folk folklore in particular?

Well, an interesting thing for me, and it's a funny thing, because my undergrad degree was on economic development, and I did a minor in folklore philosophy at the time, and that was my passion at the day, international relations, but.

And I did my honors thesis, it was actually like an economic study of Ghana, South Korea and Mexico in response to the Asian currency crisis back in the 90s.

But the funny thing is, in doing this, I grew up with my father being a minister Grew up in a Christian community, and I had exposure in my adolescence to the more conservative Pentecostal branches of Christianity.

And I became increasingly alienated and disenchanted with it.

And I had this switch and I moved into looking at neopaganism and so on in my 20s, doing the whole, you know, rebellious goth stage people do now.

An interesting thing is I started to find similar patterns of behavior and supernaturalism and also the reconstruction of a supernatural path that just didn't managed the history.

People had constructed these identities of a, you know, grandmother that taught them witchcraft or whatever.

And, you know, meet the grandmother, and she's totally Church of England and conservative and all the rest of it.

Yeah, you'd have these people talking about supernatural events and encounters that simply didn't happen or.

And people would, in a sense, kind of Orientalize their own heritage.

Whether they'd be looking at Norse or Celts or whatever else.

They would construct this image of the past around what they thought was lacking in the present.

And again, the real history is complex, being human beings, what they are.

But they were constructing them into these contemporary archetypes.

And there's a bit of a trajectory here.

When I was doing the Third World Development Studies, I was looking at the work of a guy called Edward Said, who, in his work, Orientalism, talked about the way in which the west has constructed this image of the Arab around a particular ideology that allows for military intervention and so on with impunity, not acknowledging the capacity of people to aspire to democracy and things like that on their own bat in their own way and those sorts of things.

Heck, even the notion of the Orient that includes everything from, like, Japan to Egypt is quite absurd when you think about the cultural differences.

So you'd mentions at one point, if I got a Japanese fellow and stuck him in Cairo, he's probably more alien there than if I'd put him in London.

So I was.

My initial idea was, okay, so are these people Orientalizing their own heritage?

And then I started to find it was something quite different.

So my PhD thesis was sign of the Witch Modernity and the Pagan Revival.

And what I did was I traced through how representations of witchcraft transformed from the period of the trials, particularly in the UK in the 17th century, through to the present.

And a key thing for that was a movement called Romanticism, which developed in response to the industrial revolution, 19th century.

And with that, there were some writers that became really fascinating to me.

There was a fellow I still think is really influential to me personally, a German philosopher called Friedrich Schlegel.

He says, when we talk about traditionalism, he said, the minute we start saying something's traditional, it's not.

It's dead.

If you're actually living in a traditional society, you just live it.

You don't think about what it means or whether this is your heritage or not.

You just do it.

You only start getting worked up about your tradition and your heritage because it's lost and you feel disconnected from it and what he says people do.

And he said, you know, the industrial revolution killed it.

The, you know, Napoleonic conquest of Europe did it.

In his particular context in Germany and Austria, they were very worried about losing their culture and heritage to French rule, that their culture would just become French culture under Napoleon's reign.

So he said, what we do, he said, is we construct this kind of fake ancestry, a hovering totality is what he calls it.

And we just grab bag bits from popular culture that evoke emotional feelings of pastness to make this past.

And he said, he called it the romantic irony.

Because he said, the more you grab onto this, the more it starts to crumble and the more desperate you become to try and make it real.

And so you grab and you hold on and you desperately try and preserve it.

But the irony is it's already dead.

The very fact that you're grabbing from pop culture to recreate it means it's dead.

You know, it's long since passed.

And so the irony of it is the more you grab it, the more it starts to fracture.

And.

And this can lead to really strange types of social neurosis and violence and all the rest of it as people desperately cling to this fictional past.

And in the end, I came to see that as being the kind of process at work, both there and in romantic nationalism.

You think about people today will jump onto sayanshistory.com and will go, oh, my God, I'm 5% Norwegian.

I'm a Viking.

And they'll start taking on all these heirs.

And when they mean Viking, what they're meaning.

I mean, Viking itself is an absurd term.

It's a job, not an ancestry.

But they mean Viking from pop culture.

So they'll be copying things from movies, from fictional works, from books.

And even if it's past sources, it'll be like, you know, the original.

Original sources are long gone.

You're reading medieval translations of older texts that are being put through several layers of interpretation.

So it's A fiction.

But they're clinging to it as a form of identity.

There's a little meme I really love with this.

It's has a.

When a Norwegian person goes to ancestry.com and finds out they're 99% Norwegian, it's just a dude in a T shirt looking disappointed.

When an American looks in a letter box.

Sorry.

When an American receives their ancestry.com and it says they're 5% Norwegian, it's like a dude on the throne with a big crown.

It's this kind of thing where, yeah, it's disconnected.

And so we become desperate and there's this kind of neurosis around this that shapes that path.

So that's what sort of led me to folklore.

Now when I was doing that, it was a very broad sort of Britain and the colonies wide approach in that thesis.

And I started to became aware when I was looking at which trials that like, even when we talk about witch trials, it's not like the one thing every little town would have its own stories.

There was this great book I read by a guy called Gustav Henningsen.

Early Modern European Witchcraft centers and Peripheries.

He said, let's actually look at court records in individual towns and compare notes.

And they found, yeah, every town was completely different.

Different things were going on, local politics, all sorts of things.

And I thought, okay, what I want to do here is there's a danger when we start looking at a nationwide approach to this, to skip the details, to construct these narratives.

So I wrote this next book called Shock the Black Dog of Bungay, which was a particular legend of a ghostly black dog.

They're all over the uk, these ghostly black dog legends.

But this one, I just wanted to look at a specific town and look at how this legend became created, how it became developed, how come today it's dominates the town identity.

If you go to Bungay today, every there's black dog stuff everywhere and half the shops call themselves black dog this or that.

It's like if you do look for something called Eureka and Ballarat.

So that led me there to do these sort of narrow specific town based studies.

And then when you start looking at that, it starts becoming about individual people telling their stories like in Bungay.

A key driver of this folklore was the town's industry collapsed in the Great Depression.

They were looking for a way to employ these returned soldiers.

And the town reeve, that's the mayor of the town there, hit on the idea of using heritage money to clear the ruins of the castle, redo all the old medieval buildings and stuff to create employment and to do support this, he started throwing out all these stories about the Black Dog everywhere.

And that moved the dog to the front of public consciousness.

It took over the town identity.

And now everyone's seen the black Dog.

Everywhere you go, there's black dog stuff.

And then it was interesting, too, for the castle.

You look, the castle is actually built through all these old houses and things all through it.

It looks quite picturesque.

The horror writer Elizabeth Bonnet had this castle between.

Sorry, a house between these two turrets of the castle.

And just recently, you know, they were doing a big fundraiser for $5,000 to keep this castle looking the way it looked at the time they happened to preserve it.

And, heck, I love ruins.

I love the aesthetics of ruins.

But nonetheless, I sit there and think, you're trying to preserve it the way it looked at the time you wanted to preserve it and look like that because everyone was yoinking it for free bricks.

So it's got the right tear, the bit of blue tack stuff here.

The brakes don't work exactly right.

I've neither restored it to operating condition nor have I taken it apart for parts.

I've restored it to this particular point of being damaged, and there's a certain absurdity to it.

And actually, if you go around Ballarat, you'll see that all the time.

Yeah, we're going to restore it to the way it looks like when we decided we wanted to restore it.

Yeah, yeah.

With all these stories, has there ever been a story that you've come across that you didn't want to tell just because of its impact to the community or.

It's interesting.

Some of the indigenous stories, ghost stories there, some of them are really powerful, tied to stories of massacres and conflicts and things, particularly out Western Victoria around Portland.

And I just can't tell them because I can't, because they're, you know, Gundmara stories, Watterang stories.

And I.

It's interesting, too, because I think they're quite important stories to come out, not least of which because it shows that people well aware of what had been going on.

But.

Today it sort of sits behind this veil of taboo and it's sort of not coming out.

And you know, those stories and some of those are quite powerful and very challenging.

But again, one of the other funny things too, and I see this a lot in ghost tours.

We can talk about torture, we can talk about lobotomies, we could talk about murder and all the rest of it.

But if you look at say the ghost stories that have, that have come up around a site like the Arab mental hospital, there's this huge history of sexual assault there and there's ghost stories around it, but you can't talk about them because, you know, we can talk about killing people and torture and things, but you can't talk about.

The sexual.

Exploitation and sexual assault.

But nonetheless they're taboo.

Is there?

From your perspective, what's the most misunderstood piece of Australian folklore?

I say the Bunyip and I'd also say the Yowie.

And a guy comes up to them with a megafauna bone.

And of course, this is pre Charles Darwin.

So as far as they know, the animal that makes this skull is still about.

Hang on a second.

I think I've lost.

Sorry, I thought I just dropped out for a moment.

Okay, so the, this, this guy rocks up to these Waturang who were fishing on the banks of the Barwon with this skull.

And he asked them what's this?

And, and I'll use their terminology.

There's a.

This is not me, this is terminology.

He said the most intelligent of the blacks spoke to him and said that's a bunyip.

What's a bunyip?

And he tells them this story here.

They said of a creature that lives in the water.

He says it hides with only its eyes poking out.

It can leap out of the water 7 or 8ft in the air when it's hungry or threatened.

It said it was covered in feathers or scales.

They weren't quite sure because of translation issues.

They said it lays its eggs on the bank, but they're no Good for eating.

And then this guy pops up, one of the other Watarang guys and he shows these scars in his chest which I think from the description are referring to initiation scars and said, oh yeah, this was from a bunyip that attacked me.

And another guy goes, yeah, yeah, my wife got eaten by a bunyip.

So this is the original story.

Now also around the same time you have of course Buckley.

And Buckley has a story of encountering a, a strange hairy back of something in the swamps around that area and the Wadarang Hills.

We've called it a bunyip.

Now from there people start going, cool, let's go hunting bunyips.

And they all go with their guns hunting bunyips.

And they approach all these other indigenous people asking about a bunyip.

And it starts reaching places like Queensland where they speak a completely different language.

And as Malcolm Smith comments, the people, the indigenous people in Queensland think they're using a white word and the white people think they're using an indigenous word.

And essentially every water based creature starts getting shoehorned into this word bunyip, even though you're talking about totally different cultures, rivers and legends.

Now bunyip itself is tricky because when Burke and Wills come through with their camels, the Wadurang people call those bunyips as well.

So does bunyip mean something like monster?

What does it mean?

Further afield there's the Chalakam Bunyip where there's this, where it was, it was destroyed by a farmer.

But there was this carved stone petroglyph in the ground and that was used for ritual activities.

And they had this whole story of two brothers who went out into the swamps and had an altercation with a bunion that killed one of them and the other brother slayed the creek, slew the creature.

And so they have this story.

Now the surviving pictures of that petroglyph look a lot like a big leopard seal or something, but it looks like a seal.

Does it mean out of place animal?

We don't really know.

What we do know is you've got this word bunyip.

Indigenous people around Victoria use variations of it.

There's town in Gippsland called Bunyip which came off the Bunny River.

There's a farmer there who said he was told not to go into an area because bunyips had attack him.

And he was told these sounds came from a bunyip.

But it was actually, when he tracked down the sounds, it was actually an Australian bitter.

And he started thinking it was being used to keep him away from certain areas they didn't want him in.

So there's this.

All these complex meanings around this word which sort of gets shoehorned all together from all across the country, across diverse cultures and language groups, into this bunyip.

And the bunyip as it's framed in contemporary culture is essentially like an Australian version of a British legend, the kelpie, or the water horse.

You know, a creature lives in the water and there's all sorts of versions of that all over the uk.

You know, the Ivanka Vombar frog, Loch Ness monster.

Lots of versions, yeah.

So when we talk about, say, Toorudin, which is a creature that was meant to live between Phillip island and the shore, that eats people, is that a bunyip or is that actually Tooru Din?

What is it?

So the complex indigenous meanings get shoehorned into this Anglo meaning and then appropriated across the country.

And then here's another thing to consider at this time, when Geelong and that whole region is covered in thick swamps, an unknown animal living there is fairly reasonable.

But today, of course, it's absurd when you have this nice controlled Barwon River.

And then I can add into that, too, there's pranks.

There was a biologist, sir, his name escapes me, but he wrote a paper in this Tasmanian Journal of Natural Sciences of the Bunyip and what it ate and so on, and it turned out the indigenous people had given him a deformed foal's head and it wrecked his career.

And these debates in the paper of the pharmacist.

Well, because actually, my horse delivered a deformed foal that died.

And he said the indigenous people ran off with it.

And he said, I thought they were going to eat it, but instead they chopped off its head, boiled down the skull and gave it to this naturalist.

And they're like, oh, were they too stupid to know the difference or were they playing a prank?

And I think the last prank that wrecked this guy's career, because an American, I think it was American scientists looked and it goes, yeah, that's a deformed horse's head.

And there's a few of these franks.

Ballarat had a story like this, the Bunyip, and it ended up being a seal mixed with calf bones and it was on display in Bridge Street.

So there's this whole Bessie history around this.

And then underneath all this is, what.

What did the Watarang mean when they're approached with a long extinct megafauna head and skull and ask, what the hell is this?

I guess around the.

Around the world, there's a lot of, like you were saying before, romanticized stories about folklore.

You got.

I was listening to a podcast this morning about Bigfoot, like you said, Loch Ness, the witch trials.

And then you go into culturally.

Because I'm from New Zealand, so we got, like, the Tanifa and all those sorts of stories.

Because it's.

I guess my question is, because it's worldwide, Is it still.

Do you predominantly think it's still based off unprocessed trauma?

When it comes.

Yeah.

And this is where it's at.

What I say to people, when you hear a story, think about what.

What are they trying to communicate to you?

What's the message behind it?

An analogy often used for this, for a ghost story.

There's a friend of my wife's, and she has this story of seeing her mother's ghost the night she died and saying her mother appeared at the end of her bed and saying, I don't want to go.

I miss you.

That kind of thing.

Little thing, that's okay, Mum, you can go, et cetera.

And then waking up, finding a mum and dad.

Now, if I go in there trying to prove whether or not the ghost of her mother was in the end of the bed, I've missed what that story's about.

Yeah.

What is the meaning?

And a little.

Carl Jung has a great line about UFOs for this.

He says, you know, I'll paraphrase the quote, because I probably would get it wrong if I'm trying to remember it with the barter.

But he says every day people look in the sky and see things.

You know, you see.

You might see bright lights or whatever it is.

He said, some people look and think it's an angel.

Some people will see an astronomical body.

Some people will think it's an airplane.

Some people will think it's aliens.

Some people will go and make a cult.

He says what people do with these experiences, he says, in a sense, is more important than what the objective reality of what they're actually experiencing is.

What meaning do we give it?

What interpretation do we give it?

When is something a random event?

When is it a symbol of fate?

Ben Radford, when he talks about hauntings in houses, he's an American skeptic, and he says, okay, what is it that makes a cold room a cold room or the cold is representative of a haunting?

There's all these different little symbolic signifiers that come together to create the haunting experience.

And it might be feeling cold.

A story about the house.

Strange sounds, etc.

And on their own, they don't mean anything, but we collectively construct them into a haunting experience as opposed to that sounds odd or I happen to feel cold in this room.

What's driving that experience?

If you hear a story, do you think you are able to decipher what it means?

Or.

You need to talk to people for a while and get a sense of where they're going and what they're interpreting it from it.

I also think you don't talk to one person.

You talk to a lot of people and get a sense of the patterns.

And typically when we talk about things like hoarding experiences, they'll come in archetypes.

There's recognized patterns.

We see, like I mentioned before, the lady in white that turns up everywhere.

There was one of a beach up in Newcastle I was asked to look into for.

It was like a Channel 7 radio TV interview years back.

And it was a story of a woman who'd been sexually assaulted and murdered on the beach there.

And, you know, she.

It's a mixture of the lady in white sitting on the side of the road, vanishing hitch, also vanishing hitchhiker, that she'll be in the car and then she'll tell a story and then she'll vanish.

And I went, okay.

I started looking at the story.

It goes back a long way.

Initially, I was finding it back to the 70s.

And then I went, okay, is there any particular big assault from murder like this in the 70s around that beach?

And I actually found lots.

It's like there wasn't one.

There was actually heaps.

And I'm thinking, okay, so we have an underlying story here of you go away to the beach for schoolies or whatever.

And the reality is, for many women, that it can actually be quite horrific.

And then when I looked further, I found.

So you got this area of beach that has this long history, and we've changed who the story's about over time.

You know, from a convict to some shipwreck to eventually in the 70s, a teenage girl who's finished high school going off to party with her friends, who's met a horrible end.

But you think about that.

There's the cautionary tale, but there's also the grappling with the reality that we all know this stuff happens, but we don't like to talk about this stuff happening.

But this story forces acknowledgement that things like schoolies and so on can have a dark side.

We love to celebrate and commemorate the off to the beach, partying with your mates, all that.

But there is a dark reality that comes through that kind of experience.

Have you ever researched sort of a ghost or spirit or anything like that, and you've gone to a location and you thought there's something off about this place or.

How do I put it?

Definitely places have a vibe to me, but I don't know if that's just my own psychological reading and awareness of it or that I'm prime because of the type of site that it is, the cultural associations I have, or if there's anything else.

And I can't critically evaluate this.

It's a funny thing though.

I keep going to these places, hoping that I do, but I don't have a modding experience.

I'd actually love to.

It's something funny because people sometimes see me as a skeptic like that and it's like, no, I'd actually love to.

It's like the same thing.

A ufo.

If I saw an actual ufo, be like, oh, hell, I'm right there.

I want to see it.

Yeah, yeah.

But, you know, the very fact that I feel that means I need to be extra skeptical and cautionary of my own experiences.

But, you know, places do feel like they have vibes to me and that kind of thing.

That being said, we are so culturally primed for certain types of experiences.

You know, we have an await of many, many generations of folklore around topics like, you know, ghosts and strange things in the sky and all the rest of it.

Yeah.

UFO sightings as we think of them today, go back to the 19th century, you know, the origins of airtrap.

And there's a weight, there's a cultural weight to that.

Yeah.

Coming from New Zealand, it's a very spiritual country, I believe.

And when you do go to certain maraes and stuff, you can feel the weight of the ancestors now.

Yeah.

And I've met a lot of people that say that they have seen their ancestors at Mirais and have spoken to them.

And again, like you're saying, I'm not sure if that's actually what they've experienced or whether they have that's what they've wanted to experience.

So that's what sort of happened.

And I also don't think is too.

People can legitimately have an experience, even if it's not something you can scientifically validate as this is objectively what happened.

You know, the haunting experience still happens through your perception and experience and cultural identity, even if it's not something I can measure with a gadget and there's a.

An author had a significant influence on me called George Ewart Evans.

He wrote Pattern under the Plough, looking at folklore in Norfolk and Suffolk in the uk.

And he talks about this sort of problem you have when you're raised in an Enlightenment education system where you can only accept something as real to you if you can validate it as a scientifically verifiable experience.

And there's sort of an irony to that where it means, you know, that sort of thinking's already sort of wonderful, but nonetheless the experiences are real.

And he says there's this kind of tension you get between I can't accept my spiritual experience is real unless I can validate it with the rhetoric of science.

But nonetheless the experience can be a real, lived, personal experience, even if it's not necessarily objectively, verifiably through the scientific method, something that's happened, but, you know, you still feel it.

The impact is still real.

The emotional impact is still real.

The trauma or the sense of the numinous or connection to divine still feels real to you.

And it's funny thing in the UK because I found so often these people would have a very powerful connection to their folklore and country, yet at the same time be sort of critically undermining it with the Enlightenment approach to reason they're brought up with.

So they both sort of believe it and not believe it at the same time.

It had this story, it'd be very powerful stories, they'd be really into it and then they go, oh yeah, but that's all superstitious nonsense.

After they've just told you this very powerful story or something that happened to them with the Fae or something.

And it was.

Probably more of like a social, a social thing.

Most people don't want to be seen to believe in that.

But then it's funny things like Uncle Andy, you know, he works for British Aerospace, he designs missiles and things like that.

And he's an atheist, yet he gets antsy about.

He would.

When he was alive, he'd get antsy about the faith, you know, and, you know, disturbing old, you know, disturbing old stone circles and things be, oh, you'll get traffic accidents and things.

And it was both believing it and not believing at the same time.

It was an interesting dynamic at work.

And, you know, people are, in a sense, you know, we're not.

We like to think of ourselves as logically consistent, but you know, we're constantly holding different value systems and things in place at the same time depending on what context we're in.

Who we speak into and where we are socially.

Yeah, correct.

There is one story from my family that's been spoken about a lot.

Well, and I'll go through it.

I haven't really told anyone outside the family, so I don't know how good my storytelling is going to be, but.

So my dad was adopted and the people that.

So he was in a foster care system ended up with two parents and the father passed away.

Now, from what I've been told, my father took some things of his dad's that he wasn't supposed to take after he passed away.

And so the story goes, my mum brought me home one day.

She's gone inside with the shopping, the door's shut behind her and I was still in the car and she couldn't get out.

She had to get someone to come over and let her out so she could get in the car.

And then a few days later, I've gotten really, really sick.

We had a, I guess a preacher family friend who came over, did some prayers on me, then I got better and then he got sick and then passed away.

Yeah.

So that's the story.

And the story is that my dad's foster father.

Yeah.

Made me sick and did all these things because my father took.

Took the stuff away from.

Well, took the stuff that he wasn't supposed to.

And that's a story that keeps getting told.

And again, I remember being sick, but I don't.

Yeah, I don't remember the rest of it.

So it's something that I. I do believe, but I don't believe, like you were saying.

Yeah, my dad has one of these with my sister.

When she was born, she had a hold on heart and a few other issues wrong with her.

And he talked about having this huge crisis of faith and really deep sort of prayer and cathartic realization and then the doctors were able to come through.

And it's like he both attributes divine significance to it and it's an important part of his faith as preacher and so on.

Yet at the same time he's also fully aware of doctors working damn hard and the clock doing hard work.

And it's this interesting thing, you know, Jung calls it synchronicity.

You know, what, what's a meaningful coincidence when is someone just happens to be sick?

When does that sickness get associated with other cultural correlates that makes it a meaningful experience?

Because of course, you know, people get sick all the time or kids are born with, you know, medical issues wrong with them all the time.

But when does it become something that we have Broader metaphysical associations with.

And, you know, that's a deeply held cultural and deeply held emotional experience as well.

Yeah, I'm completely fascinated by all this topic.

And I could.

Yeah, especially if my wife was here, we could talk for hours about it because she loves the witches.

She loves that story.

She loves all the ghost stories.

And.

Yeah, I think I got right into it, strangely enough, by watching the TV show Supernatural.

Oh, yeah, Another one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they had all the stories about the.

The woman in white.

That was her chaiking.

They had all those stories at the beginning.

And then it started getting into the God stuff, which sort of tuned me out.

But, yeah, I could talk about this.

For hours, remembering what I did around New Zealand, except I've just had a mental blank on the name of the tunnel.

But there's a tunnel where people honk their horns through.

And Mount messenger as well.

Yeah, yeah, Mount Messenger.

Yeah.

And people complain about the noise of the honking tunnels.

And then I was having a look, and they had this death of this young woman there.

And that's actually there in the historic record associated with the construction of the site and her body found there.

And it's like.

It's one way to look at it, you know, the honk or the superstition or the game.

On the other hand, every time people go through honking, you're remembering that young woman who was murdered by her partner.

And that, of course, draws attention to how many women are murdered by their partner still today.

You know, that issue is still with us.

And a line I often have is, you know, the ghost story remains so long as the issue that gave it birth is still with us today.

Some stories disappear and fade because those issues are no longer pertinent or we've moved past them, whatever.

And then there's others that are just tenacious because the issues that gave birth to them are tenacious.

Yeah, that mount has a lot of significance in our area.

So I'm from the area just from Tadanaki, so just south of that.

Gotta go through it to get to Auckland and Hamilton.

But, yeah, that mountain holds a lot of significance.

We always stop there to say karakiya.

Like a prayer, like a Mori prayer.

It's just one of those points.

And, like, I never knew why, you know, like, you don't know why when you're growing up and you just carry on with it.

And when you get older, like, you don't.

You don't know.

You just carry on the tradition.

You don't ask questions.

It just is what it is.

Yeah.

And this has been the talk about actually having a traditional society.

You just do it.

It's just this is what we do.

This is part of daily life and probably imagining, too, because, like, I looked at it in relation to the death of that young woman.

Being in New Zealand, being a place that's been invaded and colonized, there will be meaning associated with that going a lot further back as well.

That will be part of the layered history that every site has.

You know, there's layers and layers and layers of meaning and experience and culture and habitation and storytelling on any piece of land.

Yeah, yeah.

There's.

There's some places from where I'm from where the locals know not to go to.

Yeah.

Because.

Because it's just, like, bad news.

And you always see, like, the.

The tourists and stuff will come and go there and get lost, and then you have, like, hundreds of people going out to try and find them.

Yeah.

And then that's just history coming up from.

From way back and being taught to us and knowing the history of the land and stuff like that.

Yeah.

And I can think of, like, in Australia, you'll often have places named Waterloo, and it is often called that because it's a reference to defeating the indigenous people there, but linking it to the defeat of Napoleon.

And there's like a Waterloo Creek near where one of these indigenous ghost stories are.

And, you know, I have gone there with indigenous people and have them getting really upset and stressed and not knowing why.

And it's just been a really interesting, that layered experience.

There's ghost stories in the paper around the site of seeing an indigenous man standing on the bridge and that kind of thing, which actually leads to this sending map, big posses from MacArthur Station.

And they capture this guy, a woodcutter named Robert Downey, and they beat him up and they dunk him in the dam till he confesses to hoaxing the ghost.

But I put to you 70 people beating you up and throwing you a jam.

You'd confess kinds of crazy, but nonetheless, what I find interesting, the story in the papers, they say there's a spot where black fellas and white fellas met and black fellows ended up worse off.

And then there's a ghost story about the site, and then that's still with us today.

So, you know, there's this really interesting layered history of the story that people don't like to talk about because people would usually say with those indigenous sites that, oh, no one knew, no one remembered, but of course they did.

You just don't talk about it.

But it stays there.

Yeah, yeah.

Before we wrap this whole thing up, we normally end with like, if you've got one sort of experiment or anything that you could put the hands of our listeners or something they could try or.

Or a quote that they could sit with overnight or something, what would it be?

Above all else, ghosts demand acknowledgement.

Acknowledgement of the traumas of the past.

So the next time you hear a ghost story, don't think about, is it true?

Think instead, what's the trauma of the past that's demanding your acknowledgement?

What is that rupture that demands your acknowledgement of what's happened in the past?

Yep.

I'd love to have you on again so we could talk about specific incidences or stories because, yeah, like I said, I find this very fascinating.

So you've written some books, is that right?

Yes.

So I have five books out and people are interested.

I also have started up the past couple of years a bit of a side gig writing role playing adventures for a game called Golo Cthulhu.

So William Bailey's Haunted Mansion, for instance, won Victorian Community History Award, won an any award in the United States and a few others, which I'm quite proud of.

That tells.

That's actually a ghost story from Ballarat, William Bailey's Haunted Match, and it's one I've threaded very closely to the historical record and my books.

Sign of the Witch Fraternity and the Pagan Revival Shocked the Black Dog of Bungay Aridel.

The Making of a Haunted Asylum, Snarls from the Tea Tree, which is about Victoria's big cat Legends.

You read, listeners probably have heard the stories of big cats lost in the bush.

They wrote a history of that.

Goldfields and the Gothic, which is an anthology of dark stories from Ballarat's Gold Rush.

Oh, nice.

And if you check me out on Call of Cthulhu stuff, William Bailey's Haunted Mansion, the Last Dance of Lola Montez, Demon of the Deep Leads Chaos and Chiappas, a few others.

I'm actually about to release one on the Indian experience in the Gold Rush because no one ever talks about them.

But, you know, there was a community of people, mostly Sikh, living in Ballarat from the Gold rush, from India.

So what's his role playing.

So.

Role playing.

You're probably familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, but it's where you have a storyteller who runs a group of characters through Call of Cthulhu like a mystery, and they look for clues.

They may have violent altercations with people to try and solve what is the cause of the mystery.

And to my ones, I try and make them fairly closely linked to the historical record with a bit of a twist at the end.

Yeah.

Nice.

And where can we find that?

You can find those on DriveThruRPG or have a look at the Call of Cthulhu.

Also check out my podcast, Tales from Rat City.

Yes, I can recommend that.

It's very good.

Do you recommend listening to them in order?

Because I am definitely not.

I think look for stories that capture your imagination, because there's all sorts of different types of stories there.

Yeah.

Because I just listened to the one about Arkoon.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

One of the first ones, just because of where we're at in Golden Point, which I believe is like the.

The main area where they sort of lived.

It's actually one of the ones I'm most proud of and that I'm.

It's one of those times as a historian, you think it made a difference.

You know, of course, the story there, it's a very tragic story of what happened to Rachel.

We were contacted after that episode about a year later where a descendant of Rachel's twin sister got in touch with us because the family had never known what happened to her.

You're right.

She disappeared after she was released from the benevolent asylum.

And they'd never known.

And they'd never known why she suddenly disappeared off the records after the acune business.

So we're able to put them in touch with all the records we'd found at public records office, Victoria.

And, you know, it's even got some of those records we've got on my computer, scanned them.

You know, it's got her handwriting on it and all that.

And were able to, you know, fill that gap for that family.

And again, that ruptured trauma of a girl taken from her mother against her will and sold to a child abuser, which is, you know, particular horror of that story.

And what happened to her was quite graphic, of course.

But, you know, we were able to do some way to help heal the family legacy, which, you know, know, nice moment as a historian, where you feel like you can make a difference.

Yeah.

Especially through podcasting.

Yeah.

You never know who's listening.

You never know who you're helping.

Exactly.

So, yes.

Thank you again.

Hold on.

After the intro, I'll have a chat to you.

Sorry?

The outro to the listeners.

Look after yourself and look after your people.

Thank you.