October 31, 2023
By Ge Tang
With Halloween’s shroud already upon us, are you yearning for some spine-tingling tales to share with family and friends? Many of us are magnetically drawn to ghost stories, not out of any firm belief in the supernatural but because they resonate deeply within our psyche. They captivate us, reflecting our innermost yearnings and laying bare stark realities of the human condition. ‘The Ghostly Digger’ (1880), a piece of Australian goldfield gothic literature by Henry John Congreve (1829-1918), delves into the emotional and mental impacts of mining on prospectors as a way of revealing the harsh and grim aspects of life in the mining fields. Set in 1861, against the backdrop of the gold rush in Inglewood, a bustling gold town in colonial Victoria, the story follows a solitary digger venturing into the depths of an abandoned mine rumoured to be haunted by a ghostly miner (its previous owner), where he struck a large deposit of valuable minerals.
The tale is intimately narrated in the first person by a former gold digger who, despite modestly claiming a lack of learning, used to seek solace in reading during his days of toiling away in the relentless grind of the goldfields. The narrator affirms his reliability by avowing his scepticism about ghosts—‘I’m not a believer in ghosts’—while expressing vexation over an unexplainable ghostly encounter from decades ago, an experience he feels compelled to disclose to his readers as he approaches the twilight years of his life. Nevertheless, the narrator runs the risk of diminishing the authenticity of his tale: ‘I was always a dreamy sort of a chap, and even when a boy used to sit about in the bush, dreaming and dreaming, and fancying I could see all sorts of things. Sometimes all of a sudden I would seem to go off in a kind of sleep, and yet be awake all the time’. As evidence of his capability for imagination, the narrator vividly describes his ethereal, multi-sensory experiences within the supernatural realm, from soaring through the skies and gazing upon breathtaking landscapes, to being serenaded by melodies of exquisite beauty, reminiscent of the Sirens’ allure. As the narrator fashions himself to be ‘a good medium’ between reality and the otherworldly, one is prompted to ask: is the ghostly digger merely the narrator’s hallucination, born of his relentless and despairing quest for riches?
The narrator’s serene and euphoric supernatural experiences, as described above, stand in sharp contrast to the bleak reality of life in Inglewood’s mining fields. ‘It had been a wicked place, too, as most big rushes are’, the narrator describes, continuing, ‘There was vice of all sorts, and some murders—more, I fancy, than were ever found out’. The influx of migrants from other Australian states and beyond, and the resulting multicultural mix brought inevitable conflicts. His penchant for solitude—‘I don’t like crowds’, thus, betrays a feeling of estrangement and a desire to escape the goldfield society.
Intriguingly, the narrator’s ghostly encounter took place after he sought solitude in a gully deserted by miners after its riches were depleted, far from the throngs where he previously worked. He was almost immediately taken with the gully, noting, ‘I liked the look of it, and I liked the quiet more’—further stressing his preference for solitude. He pitched his tent beside a forsaken chimney, relishing the prospect of reading by the fire during the chilly nights. At this solitary encampment, a man often came to chat at nighttime, who was dubbed the ‘walking newspaper’ by locals, renowned for his extensive knowledge of the mining community’s affairs. Yet, beyond his physical appearance, this man’s ethnicity and even age remained a mystery to the reader. He seemed like a ghostly apparition himself, akin to the many miners whose histories fade into the shadows, untold and forgotten. One night, this man, seemingly troubled, disclosed to the narrator that the chimney belonged to a gold digger of the Robbie Burns Reef nearby, who had vanished after a mine collapse—potentially a victim of foul play— and whose restless spirit was rumoured to linger within his very own mining pit. After sharing the grim story, ‘walking newspaper’ asked the narrator to accompany him en route to his dwelling, expressing unease at the prospect of passing by the haunted creek. When the ghostly cadence of ‘tap-tapping’ pierced the air—a metallic clamour of the shovel on stone, interlaced with unsettling laughter and groans—the poor man screamed and bolted in sheer panic. These haunting echoes in the hush of night over Australia’s mining fields wove a narrative of fluctuating hope and despair, a chronicle of fortunes found and forfeited, shaping a unique Australian Gothic tableau.
Just as the narrative gathers its spectral momentum, it levels off, revealing itself to be a tale of the narrator’s despair. Left alone, the narrator approached the source of the sounds—drawing ‘near and near’ to listen to ‘the noise as plainly as possible’—and remained there for an hour, as the phantom labourers seemed to persist in their toil. The narrator exhibited no fear, but it soon became clear that his real concern centres on the prospect of hidden gold. ‘I knew people said that concealed money or gold was often revealed in such ghostly fashion’. Only now that the readers know the narrator had been plagued by the fear of losing Dora, his friend’s daughter, whose hand in marriage was contingent upon a dowry of 500 pounds—a fortune he hoped to amass through a lucky strike one day. Exactly the day before hearing about the ghostly miner, he realised that the old man, weary of Inglewood, had planned to leave, a move his financial situation barred him from following. The delayed revelation of the narrator’s predicament, while enhancing suspense, may also deepen the reader’s scepticism about whether the ghostly miner was merely a manifestation of a desperate prospector seeking good fortune. The spectral miner indeed proved to be the narrator’s salvation from his troubles. Upon returning home and mired in thoughts of losing his beloved, he was startled by a succession of knocking at his chimney, interspersed with eerie laughter and groan. Concluding that the ghost was summoning him to the haunted creek, he set out, following the creek downward to where the distinct knocking persisted. Using his pickaxe to investigate the origin of the sound, he dislodged a chunk of slate, revealing an abundance of gold and quartz.
‘The Ghostly Digger’ was first published in Adelaide Observer, on Christmas, 25 December 1880. While it does not feature a Christmas setting, it aligns with Christmas stories by concluding on a joyful note: the narrator weds Dora. However, the narrator’s act of penning the tale while Dora was asleep raises questions about her actual presence, again suggesting the solitude and loneliness that has marked the digger’s story from the start. Perhaps he never truly had a wife at all, casting a shadow over the supposedly festive Australian goldfield Christmas tales and revealing a darker reality of digger seclusion and fatigue.
Works Cited
Congreve, Henry John. ‘The Ghostly Digger’, Adelaide Observer, 25 December 1880.
IMAGE SOURCES
Arthur Willmore and John Skinner Prout, ‘The Burra Burra copper mines’, c. 1874-76. Courtesy of State Library of Victoria.