Generations of Australians have grown up with the legend of Eureka and the familiar images of the gold rush in central Victoria. However, underneath these commonly known stories lies a stranger and darker past. As well as colonists, pioneers, soldiers and rebel miners, the colonial goldfields were home to spiritualists, secret societies, ghost-hoaxers, bunyip legends and murderers. There are also the stories of those often forgotten in the goldfield histories, including Indigenous peoples, the mentally ill, homosexuals and immigrant communities. Goldfields and the Gothic is an anthology by local historians of the long buried legends, histories and folklore of the Victorian goldfields and their legacy today. Every historian has a collection of strange, buried pieces of history; this work begins the task of bringing them into the light. --Back cover.

Contents:

Ghosts and bogeymen of the goldfields:
Spiritualism in nineteenth-century Ballarat / Greg Young
Playing the ghost : ghost hoaxing and supernaturalism in nineteenth-century Victoria / Dr. David Waldron
William Bailey and his haunted mansion / Dr. Anne Beggs-Sunter
Banshees / Dr. Jill Blee
The Ballarat Gaol Ballarat's most haunted building? / Nathaniel Buchanan
Things that go bump in the night : ghost hoaxing on the Victorian goldfields, a Jungian exploration / Sharn Waldron --

Those forgotten and hidden:
Homosexuality on the goldfields / Brian Pola, David Waldron and Gabriel Waldron
Goldfields freemasonry : decoding the past / Dorothy Wickham
The night Dixie came to town : the Shenandoah and the American Civil War in Ballarat / Nicholas Moll
Aradale Asylum : the goldfield's boogieman / Nathaniel Buchanan

Storylines : Indigenous folklore:
The mystery of the Moranghurk sculptures / Dr. Fred Cahir
Indigenous folklore of the northern Wathawurrung peoples / Dr. Ian D. Clark
Mullawallah : spirit of times past, present and future /Janice Newton
Buckley's Bunyip / Paul Michael Donovan

About the essayists.