A few years ago, a friend told me a story. She and her husband had been staying in a remote area on the western slopes of the Blue Mountains. One day they were driving back to their house when a large animal appeared on the road in front of them. It was getting dark but she said the shape was unmistakable. It wasn’t a dog or some kind of native animal. Instead, the dark form that paused and then jogged across the road in front of them was unambiguously, inarguably feline.
Stories about escaped big cats – especially panthers – have roamed the outlands of the Australian settler-colonial imagination for more than a century. No doubt they have many meanings but it is difficult not to read them as a kind of haunting, another manifestation of the larger disquiet about the silences written into the Australian landscape and its history that animate the gothic underside of our culture.
