The Wider Picture: Parallel Evidence in America and Australia

Abstract

Tracing British magical practices in colonial and post-colonial American and Australian communities provides a valuable means of exploring the migration experience in the past, which in turn helps us to look with a new perspective on the continuation of folk magic in Britain. Which practices continued in settler communities? Which did not? And why? The assumption might be that people took their entire ‘toolkit’ of apotropaic knowledge and practices, just as they continued to maintain other aspects of their former local, regional and national domestic lives. As Malcolm Gaskill puts it in his recent book, How the English became Americans, early migrants determinedly perpetuated their Englishness ‘in homes, possessions, dress, communication, law and culture. Even regional English styles and customs were exported to America. Novice settlers were ready to endanger their lives, but not their sense of themselves.’¹ We know that the fear of witches migrated with American colonialists; the seventeenth-century trial records bear ample witness. The newspapers and folklore records further demonstrate how two hundred years later witchcraft was still widely feared and counter-witchcraft measures continued to be practised amongst long established European-American communities, as well as amongst the millions of new immigrants that poured into the country from across Europe.²