More than a decade after their unfortunate disbandment, perhaps the most interesting of Australia’s late neo-Gothic acts has re-emerged, and The Paradise Motel still have that blood-red clarity and eeriness intact. They couldn’t have chosen a more apt idea to return with either: a concept record billed as one of “reflections on the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain on August 17, 1980”. This year is, quite fittingly, the 30th anniversary of the event, which is among the most haunting occurrences to have emerged from our country’s dark and ghostly history; a landscape riddled with murmurs, spirits and vanishings.

Recorded live on the banks of Melbourne’s Yarra River, Australian Ghost Story promises to be a very special – and poetic – record if this song, introducing the album and the events themselves, is anything to go by. Told from the perspective of Michael Chamberlain, the baby’s father, ‘The Witnesses’ is a song wracked by space. A soft-building violence sits underneath its lush yet stark arrangement, itself an exercise in placement and timing. Merida Sussex’s vocals are as cool and fragile as ever, her tone fully inhabiting the protagonist’s anguish. “My wife tracked her footsteps,” she sings, “we found her guilty.” It’s not only in lyric that we are taken back to that dark, uncertain night, however. By the song’s coda, we come to feel the haunted outback in the strangled, ringing guitar that echoes out along with the strings. Unsettling but beautiful, it’s The Paradise Motel’s trademark.

by Lawson Fletcher