Happy to serve.
From Róisín, 17 October 2019 Disqus comments:
"I’ve met a few places like that. There is one out in the desert near Lake Christopher, and another near Copper Hills. And one cave near the Breakaways. That last one was truly strange. I was actually out there for a reason, making a side trip on my way back from a job in the desert.
Several years before I took that job, an old Aboriginal friend had died in a nursing home in Adelaide, in extreme old age, and had asked me, when I went back to the desert, to take back a small kangaroo-skin bag containing some of his stuff which needed to go back to the land his family had come from. Which I did, having found the cave he had described quite easily. It was freezing cold in there, in the middle of a hot day, and felt quite hostile until I explained what I was doing, whereupon it went back to a feeling of alert waiting, and when I put the bag on a ledge in the back of the cave and backed away without touching any of the other things there it felt as if the whole area just relaxed.
After that several interesting things happened to me before I left the area. The first was that night, when I had set up my camp stretcher by the cliff edge to sleep outside in the air (while my two friends with whom I was returning to Adelaide slept in the truck we were using, which was warmer but very stuffy), I was woken in the small hours of the morning by something snuffling near my face and tugging at my hair. I stayed very still, opened my eyes slowly, and saw that I was surrounded by a small herd of brumbies, who were investigating me with great interest. It’s a strange sensation to wake with a mob of wild horses nibbling your hair.
The next day we stopped to investigate a dry wash that just felt really odd. As we wandered about the area, I noticed, firstly, that it was an area where ochre had been mined (and probably still was, some of the marks looked quite recent). And also, something among the rocks really drew me. I couldn’t see what it might be, there was nothing there but the weathered pebbles normally found in such washes, so eventually I closed my eyes and let my fingertips find it. It turned out to be a nondescript pebble with a sandblasted matt surface. When I held it up to the light it was translucent. I was puzzled. I don’t usually take stones from the desert unless I am doing something like opal or sapphire prospecting, but this little rock was insistent. Years later, I polished one end and discovered it to be an unusually clear quartz crystal. I still carry it.
Then there was a place near Walhalla in Gippsland, back when I was living there. At that time the population was seventeen, and the place was considered a ghost town, but back in the day it had been very big for a bush town, big enough to have three breweries and a larger number of pubs and shops. I was living there because a mate and I were mining gold. He lived there because he had been born and lived a long life in the town, and his mother had built one of the first houses there. My side interest was poking about in the ruins where thousands of people had once lived, and which the bush had taken back, looking for the remains of their old gardens. I found some fascinating things - old heritage apple and plum trees and roses, pæonies and old garden vegetables among them.
But there was one patch of land where it looked as if a building had burned to the ground, which always gave me the cold creeps. I’m normally fairly hardy about such things, being psychically as thick as the proverbial three short planks, and more given to endurance than to running away. But this place really creeped me out. Eventually one of the old locals told me about the history of the place. Back in the early days of the gold rush a family with several small children moved in there, not knowing that they had come up from Melbourne already infected with smallpox. The local doctor quarantined them in the house, and did make an effort to treat them, but caught the smallpox himself. After which the locals burned the house down, without checking that everybody inside was dead, little say whether all the kids were infected.
Kitty Kane, a local character who had been taking food in to the kids despite the quarantine, was most indignant and berated people at length. She didn’t catch the smallpox, it probably didn’t dare.
Kitty’s own grave is not far from there on the track up to the cemetery rather than in the cemetery itself, and that is a whole nother story, but the area around that one feels fine. I think her ghost remains in the town because she loved the place and wanted to protect it rather than for any bad reason. When I heard the story of the burned house, though, I could quite understand why the area felt that way."
