Kelly Rimmer’s novel grounds its fictional horrors in the real history of Australia’s Frontier Wars, a period of violent conflict between European colonists and Indigenous peoples from 1788 to the 1930s. In the novel, the dark past of Wurimbirra estate is rooted in a massacre committed by Trevor Fowler, who “took some strychnine from the general store and poisoned the waterhole” used by a local Wiradjuri group (204). This act reflects a documented tactic used by settlers to displace and exterminate Aboriginal populations: Colonists across 19th-century Australia used “poison—strychnine, arsenic and plaster of paris” (Ryan, Lyndall, et al. “Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788-1930.” The Centre for 21st Century Humanities, 2024), most often mixed into the flour Aboriginal communities used to make damper (Australian soda bread). The University of Newcastle’s ongoing Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788-1930 project has documented at least 438 such massacre sites nationwide, with an estimated 10,657 or more deaths, though the research team cautions these figures are conservative, since many killings were actively covered up and never recorded (Ryan et al.). 

This historical context illuminates the source of the local legends about Wurimbirra being haunted by “unfathomable injustice and unresolved pain” (6). By connecting the estate’s supernatural reputation to a verifiable atrocity, Rimmer critiques the violent foundations of colonial settlement and explores how they resonate in the present. The story of Trevor Fowler is a representation of a brutal aspect of Australian history, transforming the novel’s gothic elements into a commentary on the lingering trauma of the nation’s past.