Debates descending into whether the subject is “real” or not, become associated with various ideologies and experience has led me to believe that the reason people choose one side of the skeptic/believer debate is about social desirability and cultural self fashioning than any rational argument.  In the end I think this kind of approach is a dead end.  The empirical veracity of an event means little in terms of the kinds of cultural interpretations and historical impact of a subject matter.  Similarly, even the most obvious examples of fraud can have an enormous cultural legacy that is itself a worthy area of study.  It is this kind of approach that I like to propagate in my own research and publishing.  I try to eschew the question of “is it real?” and instead focus on the folklore, the history and the cultural legacy of these kinds of phenomena and beliefs, which I ultimately feel is the richer and more fertile field of study.   

The social vehicles people use to make sense of these beliefs and their cultural contexts can be quite telling.  After my work on the Black Dog of Bungay I decided to begin work on a forthcoming publication on the folklore and mythology surrounding Big Cats living in the Australian wilderness.  All kinds of theories, stories and experiences are prevalent in Australian culture and many of them go back to the time of the gold fields in the 19^th century.  That being said, intense interest in a crypto- zoological sense seems, at this stage, to date from the late 1960s linked to parallel movements in Britain and the United States.  What surprises me is the level of anxiety the stories seem to engender.  Researchers can become panicked at the association with the stories, previous academic studies become tied into knots trying to formulate questions that personally disassociate themselves with the reasons for beginning the study and I find that whilst many people (even perhaps most) have a story or experience to relate they are rather nervous about coming forward.  This is interesting as, on the face of it, there is nothing absurd about the idea of yet another introduced animal in the Australian Bush or any of the origin stories ranging from escaped animals from circuses, the acclimatization society to the releasing of US mascots from WWII particularly out of the ordinary.  Indeed I can easily point to several documented occurrences this century of escaped exotic animals being later captured or shot.  So if we move past specific analysis of any particular origin story, why the anxiety.  Even the eye witness accounts and stories seem, in relation to the atmospheric ghost stories of Black Dogs, rather prosaic.  For example one such story was of a group of runners in a football team running up the mountain seeing a Wallaby chased by what looked like a puma.  The area is deemed culturally fringe and marginalised yet pervasive in culture and thus becomes the focal point of, what I am calling, an epistemological anxiety.

So why is it that Black Dogs and ghosts can have a certain historical respectability while something, on the face of it, far less uncanny like potential introduced big cats do not?  (I can anecdotally note that when I tell scholars I am a folklorist and historian tracing the history they are happy to work with me and talk on topics but if they think it is about whether Big Cats are “real” people can get a trapped rabbit look in their eye.  This in part explains my own cultural positioning as it goes but its quite true in this case as my interest is historical and cultural rather than scientific).  At this point my loose hypothesis is that it is about the cultural role folklore plays in British society as a way of preserving and reaffirming identity.  In my research in Britain, folklore linked to historicity, place and identity, acts as a vehicle which legitimates and gives an appropriate context for experiences of the uncanny, psychological projections and other anxieties so long as they are constructed in historical terms.  This is particularly pertinent given the extent to which contemporary English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh identity is traced back to the mythic origins of a pre-industrial and pre-scientific past.  In a sense people can take on a story like that of the Black Dog of Bungay essentially by saying whether or not its true these stories are part of our heritage and have an important role to play.  Time and time again when I interviewed people I would get a lot of “you have to watch people here they are very superstitious etc” followed by their own supernatural tale ending with “but people are very superstitious”.  In part I thought it related to the way in which people were brought up in a culture rich in folklore and myth yet educated in an enlightenment system of reasoning and science so there was a kind of duality between emotional connections to culture and heritage and intellectual scepticism.  That being said myths and folklore were readily appropriated and taken on board if given an historical context.  I find ghost stories in the UK are often extraordinarily detailed with names, dates places etc linked to traumatic events in communities’ past.  In a way they act to emotionally connect people to these formative events through story telling and atmosphere which, to some extent, sacralise the landscape.   (Cynical examples of tourist exploitation notwithstanding though I had a great example of friends of my parents who ran a B&B increasingly making stories up for tourists because “they just looked so forlorn when we said the old house wasn’t haunted”.)

So to cut to the chase of the matter in Australia we do not have the vehicle of folklore linked to history to deal with the uncanny and sites of anxiety in the same way as in Britain.  I would argue this both in terms of rural popular culture and in academic culture.  The white history of Australia is post-industrial revolution and there is a concerted effort to distance white culture from the indigenous inhabitants (and I would say this comes from both whites and Australian Aboriginals demarcating their culture as well as white condescension).  Indeed, it is very hard to give a historical vehicle to deal with Big Cat folklore in Australia as they are, like White Australia, post-industrial and foreign to the landscape.  This is much like the literature on British Big Cat myths I’ve come across they remain sites of anxiety and not easily historicised.  In a sense this parallels more the distinctions I found in my book between Bungayan responses to the Black Dog of Bungay which link it to history and those which are more contemporary.  If it can be historicised and translated through the vehicle of heritage and folklore it is acceptable and categorized safely away if it can’t then it remains a site of anxiety and tied to the perennial skeptic/believer debate.