Most places are haunted, but the Australian outback has an especially bad ghost problem. People think of it as an empty land, but this is not accurate; it has been inhabited for millennia. What colonists regard as the beginning of Australia, Captain Cook’s arrival in 1770, was actually a violent end. The First Nations population, estimated to number 750,000 when Cook landed in Botany Bay, had fallen to around a hundred thousand by the early 20th century. Cultures, languages and valuable ecological and historical knowledge disappeared along with the people. And while outright murder slowed after federation in 1901, more covert methods of elimination prevailed: children of First Nations peoples were taken from their communities and placed in residential homes and schools. Annihilation was clearly the aim.

Evie Wyld’s latest novel, The Echoes, is informed by this history. The chronology is jumbled, with the various sections representing different times. It begins with the death of Max, the boyfriend of Hannah, the protagonist. Accounts of Hannah’s childhood (‘Then’), her relationship with Max in London (‘Before’) and Max’s ghosthood (‘After’) follow. Other sections take their names from characters, with sometimes confusing effects. On occasion, I wondered if it would have been wiser for Wyld to consolidate the timeline and narrow her focus, especially since the novel is only 240 pages long. But her writing is precise and evocative enough for her to pull it off. The sections narrated by Max’s phantom are particularly enjoyable and lyrical. ‘I exist in a perpetual montage,’ he remarks sadly. He watches Hannah move around their flat with a deep, melancholic tenderness, observing her attempts to carry on with her life and trying as best he can to indicate that he is still there. His yearning for solidity is conjured up in some lovely, paranormal passages: Wyld describes how a water drop changes path to avoid his finger and captures his enmity for her new cat, Cotton. It’s funny and momentously sad. 

At the heart of the narrative is The Echoes, the place where Hannah grew up with her family. Hannah’s childhood paradise, located in the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia, stood on land that a residential school had once occupied. The First Nations children who were forced into that school