The Visitor | The Saturday Paper

Rebecca Starford’s The Visitor is an atmospheric and tightly controlled novel that focuses on apparitions and the various shapes of grief, spooling out into fear and chaos. Along with other recent novels such as The Name of the Sister and Jasper Cliff, the book is drawn to the horror and beauty of the Australian outback, a place where people can easily go missing or struggle for survival in the harsh landscape.

Starford started the novel as part of a PhD in creative writing at the University of Queensland on the theme of haunting in Australian literature, and its incorporation of texts such as Patrick White’s Voss and Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock brings a sense of deeply imbued and troubled colonial history – a literature of displacement, alienation and loss, inhabited by strangers who don’t belong to this land.

The novel sets the scene in Britain’s damp and cosy Oxfordshire and moves between the points of view of expat Laura, a writer in her 40s, and her teenage daughter, Tilly. When Laura’s parents are found dead in a remote gorge, their Brisbane home abandoned, Laura returns to Brisbane with her husband, Andrew, and Tilly to inhabit the house. Tilly’s first trip to Australia gives a fresh outsider perspective as Laura struggles to manage her guilt at leaving her parents and a growing sense of disconnection.

A feeling of dread creeps up on the characters and the reader in the unbearably muggy heat, where a storm flood pulls Tilly’s bicycle away from her and photographs reveal blurred and disembodied images. The house seems to take on a life of its own: locking doors and windows, making strange noises at night, shifting and hiding things from Laura.

Starford carefully builds this tension and disturbance by sowing seeds of doubt: are these ghostly events really happening or are they more about Laura’s state of mind? Why does Tilly feel haunted too? In a powerful passage, Laura remembers her experience of postnatal depression and how her mind took flight, and becomes anxious that the numbness is returning: “Back then, Laura began to think she and Tilly had a kind of agreement: mutual indifference.”

Starford’s memoir Bad Behaviour – which became a Stan Original television series – and earlier novel The Imitator reveal a deeply intuitive and classic take on character and suspense. The Visitor plants itself firmly in Australian gothic with a lush sense of the supernatural that lingers beyond the subtropical heat of Brisbane’s suburbs.

Allen & Unwin, 304pp, $32.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
August 23, 2025 as “Rebecca Starford, The Visitor”.

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