Haunted Earth is Peter Read’s third book in his series on Australian attachments to place. This work began with Returning to Nothing (1996), which explored how Australians feel about ‘lost’ places. Belonging (2000) investigated how non-indigenous Australians claim to belong and how they negotiate issues of cultural difference. It was overtly concerned with the ramifications that the establishment of Aboriginal history has had on national identity.

Haunted Earth is both an individual journey and an account of aspects of Australian culture. This series is at once personal and more broadly orientated. Read, an historian, draws upon both the historical and the autobiographical when considering contemporary Australian experiences of place.

Haunted Earth is focused on the experience of inspirited places. He defines this as a place where there is the ‘presence of a spirit’. This does not depend on sensory perception or conscious belief; places are inspirited whether or not we know it. Yet if we are aware of it, they can offer the possibility of transcendence: ‘through the site, and often with the aid of ritual, the visitor or that site is transformed.’