My ghost plays FISHER’S GHOST and SHAKING HANDS can now be heard on the Blue Mountains Radio Players Soundcloud page. These are recordings of the live radio performances on March 27, both about half an hour long, happily preserved in cyberspace as spirits of the air.

FISHER’S GHOST: The apparition of Frederick Fisher in 1826 is Australia’s best-known ghost story (except maybe Waltzing Matilda). But did he really did return from the dead to finger his murderer? Did someone really claim to have seen him? The jury’s still out; a little mystery has gone a long way.

Fictional adaptions are legion. The first was The Sprite of the Creek! in 1832, a poem by ex-convict schoolteacher/writer James Riley. Fisher crossed the hemispheres in 1853 when Charles Dickens, always partial to a good ghost tale, ran an imaginative retelling by John Lang in his Household Words magazine. Raymond Longford’s 1924 film Fisher’s Ghost has, like Fisher himself, long-since ghosted away. Douglas Stewart’s play Fisher’s Ghost: An Historical Comedy materialised in 1960, published with illustrations by Norman Lindsay. An operetta about the ghost by John Gordon enjoyed a TV presentation in 1963.

For the latest apparition, simply conjure up BM Radio Players’ Soundcloud… no ouija board required! I’ve stuck close to the known facts with a handful of fictional insertions, including the framing device of lady ghost-hunter Adelaide Swift interviewing the Fisher-haunted ghost witness, John Farley.

SHAKING HANDS: I can’t say too much about it without revealing the twists and turns, but imagine a sceptic and believer meeting in a lonely outback pub in 1877. Unlike Fisher’s Ghost this one is entirely original. A couple of vague inspirations: the discovery of diprotodon (see below) fossils in Wellington Caves in the 1830s, and the contemporaneous visit of Charles Darwin to the Blue Mountains, when he stayed at Gardner’s Inn, Blackheath. My protagonist, scientist Charles Dawkins, is named for the Beagle‘s adventurous genius and also for Richard Dawkins, that most eminent uber-rationalist of our day and age.