The nineteenth-century ghost story is, among other things, a sensitive index of the estrangements and preoccupations of colonial and settler cultures. These are stories where the spectre can be heard to speak—sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly—to the traumas of colonial dispossession suffered by the indigenous peoples of Australia. 1 They also register modernity’s insecure footing in Australian soil, and in a landscape that is not yet, and may never be, home.