The Devil's Coach House and Skeleton Cave: Colonial Tales, the Medieval Demonic, and the Absence of the Indigenous

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Jenolan Caves, west of Sydney, Australia, first came to the notice of European settlers in the late 1830s. Their “discovery” and exploration was presented as a tale of daring settlers, intrepid travelers, desperate bushrangers, and even a medieval demonic figure drawn from the European Christian imaginary, for whom a large cavern was named the Devil's Coach House. Also evident, however, is a silence regarding the Indigenous history of this area—until the discovery in 1903 of the bones of an Indigenous person calcified into the floor of a cave, consequently named the Skeleton Cave. Yet the history of New South Wales in this period was one of bloody massacres of Indigenous people. This article explores how this history, though repressed, erupts in the naming processes of the Jenolan Caves, and how the Indigenous reappears as a revenant, displaced onto other aliens of settler society—bushrangers, convicts, and the Devil himself.