Messages From Beyond: Spiritualism and Spiritualists in Melbourne's Golden Age

The Spiritualist movement had its beginnings in the United States in the late 1840s and within a few years had spread to Australia. With its séances, mediums, trances, 'magnetisers', table-tilting and other mysterious psychic phenomena, it attracted media frenzy and public furore, but also many deeply serious converts—often highly intelligent and talented people who rejected orthodox religion in favour of scientific rationalism, but were still vitally concerned with moral debates. One of th...