Peter Read’s Haunted Earth begins with the scholar in Gore Hill cemetery, settling down with a thermos of coffee for a nocturnal vigil. Read, an oral historian, chooses this Sydney graveyard, in all its physicality of weed-entwined marble and distant traffic noise, as the point of departure for his investigation of the ‘enspiriting’ of land. His book is based on interviews with a diversity of Australians: traditionally religious, New Agers and secularised, rural, urban, Indigenous, descendants of European settlers, recent immigrants. He sees no spirits at Gore Hill, but his meditation introduces a sensitive study of contemporary religious experience in relation to land in Australia.
This graveyard caper is sensational, but passionate scholars do go to extremes. The biologist in my household rises at 4.30am to record the dawn chorus of tiny birds, and I know another who lowered himself into unexplored limestone caves looking for blind crayfish. Yet these projects are deemed more acceptable, more rigorous, than an exploration of spiritual experience.
As scientist David Hay wrote in Exploring Inner Space, a major British study of religious experience in the 1970s, ‘We … confine ourselves to those parts of reality which are clear, distinct, measurable and therefore examinable by the methods of empirical science.’ Hay notes a ‘pressure to conform that is now not simply a matter of fitting one’s deeper experience into a predetermined religious mould, but to deny utterly its validity or its existence’. Spiritual experience in contemporary Australia verges on a suppressed or even a shamed discourse.
Haunted Earth is the third in Peter Read’s trilogy of studies on Australians’ attachment to place. The first, Returning to Nothing, examined the experiences of people who had lost their ‘place’—home, farm or suburban street. Belonging investigated relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the context of Indigenous dispossession. Haunted Earth probes still more deeply into the spiritual dimensions of attachment to place.
Read’s harvest of stories is rich and many-layered. A farmer recalls visions of 19th-century cottage-dwellers on her property; an Anglican priest describes the exorcism of a country church defiled by Satanists; a Wiccan draws energy from the land for healing animals; Cape Barren Island people express lives immersed in ‘storied country’; non-Indigenous Australians speak of localised hauntings by Aboriginal spirit presences; Benedictines discuss belonging at the New Norcia monastery; Indian Australians combine Hindu and Australian rituals of death to secure the spiritual future of a deceased relative; Asian Australians