ike any journalist who doesn’t want to waste her time, I know the value of a brief and rebrief (and rebrief and…repeat ad nauseum) and my good old Ed — as ever backed by Sales & Marketing — had made it clear she wanted a spooky spectre over the October issue for Halloween. Between our tablets and pencils, we hashed out an angle and by August I find myself up to my elbows in Google- and Trove-holes but without any rabbits.
On the grounds of Barrengarry House, I have stood, gaze cast to the Gothic gables and windows, enough times to think about its past occupants (never mind its acquisition) but when I go digging, hoping to find a juicy truffle of some suspicious death or disappearance, even strange lights or shapes across the land…not a whiff. A farmer tells me he went swimming there once as a kid. Looked up to find a ghostly girl in white looking out, locking eyes with him from a top bedroom window. But when I research the Osborne family and later inhabitants, no young character jumps forward to tell her part.
On the post office verandah and round the learned tables of the Friendly Inn late on a Thursday, before the marquee and since, I’ve snatched a string or two about that legendary creature who towers much taller than a man and worldwide is said to prefer the forested slopes of a valley. His shy demeanour makes pictorial evidence rare but nonetheless there are those over the years who’ve sworn they’ve seen a sort of yowie or bigfoot round here. But my terrier tenacity comes to naught when I give these yarns a tug, the once-enthusiastic tale-tellers backing away from it with much ‘Yeah, nah’ throat-clearing. Nothing for it but a late-night trawl of the ‘evidence’-sharing groups and websites…but still what you might call a ‘confirmed sighting’ proves elusive. Go to the source, I think: Country. I text a Blakfulla mate. ‘Any ghost stories/spooky stories in culture?’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ his text comes back, ‘but I don’t think I can tell ya.’ He checks. He can’t. Still, it seems there’s something, some forces needing to be kept in balance.
Time travelling at home, I sit amongst archive boxes poring over the handwritten pages of my journals like they’re topo maps, the tide of my single malt rising and falling in the glass. Hope starts to elude me as I learn I once felt kangaroos seemed spookily anachronistic, as if they could time jump between worlds, and am forced to recall I’ve never felt good heading into a gully after 4pm. (A firey told me bunyip stories were told to warn about drowning, but also about the darker spirits that dwelt in corner shadows and could cling on to you as you climbed the bank in the wake of daylight.) One sheaf of scrawl mentions a min-min dancing a seductive weave through trees up the hill paddock, but also my neighbour saying yeah he’d been up there with a torch after a fox. A bloke fond of dry humour, he could have been having a lend of me. I don’t know but I never saw another one. In the finish I’d put it down to fireflies. Resigned to writing an embarrassed email of failure in the morning, I throw it in and put my soggy head to the pillow.
Whether it’s the Scotch or the dive into my former selves and psyche, shadows are dredged and swing spectre-like above me all night. Awake suddenly or slumber-still, I am dragged through sleep like a just-killed carcass in the clay so the longest stretch I have is sometime after the clock radio blinks 3:16. I dream… It’s all darkness at first and then falling. Gradually, there’s a texture to it. I’m getting smaller, the softness getting bigger. I am sliding the fur of my big black Labrador. But it isn’t him: a huge inky face fills my vision, yellow-green eyes of the big cat seemingly lit with radium. Then it gawps its jaw and the scream that bellows out between the fangs is my own fear tearing apart the morning. The panther! My subconscious had been trying to remember.
There are locals who’ve seen it, slinking low to the soil, scanning the scene with a noncholance only afforded the predator. That’s according to the papers. The South Coast Register interviewed the late Doris Blinman, who was in no doubt of the panther’s existence, having seen them several times and even a pair gorging themselves at her grapevine of a night after a smorgasbord of local wildlife. And deceased cryptozoologist Rex Gilroy, remembered for his keen study of the panther, also turns up in print, popping down our way after sightings. Had his own plaster cast of a yowie footprint.
Why had none of the old guard mentioned the legend of the Kangaroo Valley Panther? Turns out some’d figured it was fact, and I was asking for ghost stories. Others didn’t count it since we’re not the only place in Oz with one of these tales of a big black cat – jaguar, panther – released from a circus wagon – or a prank by US servicemen who didn’t exactly follow the ‘7 Ps’.
Imagine it. It’s 1942 and you and your mates are driving your train of vehicles up and down mountain passes, bigger animals in what’s basically a large cage on a trayback. You like another vehicle in-between, eyes-on: performers up front with the caravans; then elephant, the Buick coach, tiger, roadster, panther, the Vulcan with the tents in the rear. It’s slow going at night, and some drop, so you’d rather do it in the day. But the wind was Hell so you’d had to wait to pack down. You’re all dog tired but you gotta bump in in Dubbo come Tuesday. Some joker on a motorbike comes out of the fog and darkness, driving straight at you. You stomp on the break and give him what for with the horn. He speeds up, disappearing fast out of your rearview. You’ve no way to warn those behind – which you’re just thinking when the scraping and twisting of metal comes through your window on the cooling air. You pull on the handbrake, test it, and get out. Your torch picks out the others who’ve heard and done the same. Mae and Jonesey join you, going up together, his big Vanuatuan hair in the headlights making you think of the lion in Wizard of Oz. What you find is awful. A mess of cars and animals and torchbeams streaking across it all madly. Motorbike’s gone under and taken out a wheel somehow; the cage is lurching forward. Empty! Your heart drops to somewhere near your undies and you find yourself bellowing, ‘Where’s the bloody panther?’
Scientific evidence is lacking. The circus remains unidentified, but that’s the story. You can see how you might lose a panther in the dark and forested drop on Berry Mountain. Questions come: wouldn’t you have to lose a breeding pair? Or who can panthers mate with? She-panthers have a litter of 2 to 4 cubs, who need her for about two years. They can run about 55 km/hr so they’d easily be there one minute and…gone. They climb trees, and take prey up trees to dine so spotting one by tracking is complex, to say the least. Do you check every tree for a half-eaten deer or kangaroo, a snack-size possum? But people swear they’ve seen them. Even last year. Do I call them liars? Fantasists? I don’t know that I do. Completely.
That lion attack at the zoo a couple of years back just shows: you can’t rely on a big cat to refuse an opportunity. Logically, could panthers be out there? Maybe… Agh, this is all just spurious conjecture. Who am I to call myself a journalist? I am nothing but a cat, pouncing at shadows.