The Min Min Lights: The impossible mystery of the Australian outback
Being an Englishman talking about Australia, I may be treading on thin ice here, but the only living beings in Australia not trying to kill you are people.
Some cultural stereotypes are there for a reason, and Australia is stuffed to the brim with things that can kill a man by looking at them. Spiders. Snakes. Scorpions. Drop Bears. In typical Australian fashion, even the absence of anything can kill you, which is the reason that so much Australian noir storytelling prominently features the outback.
The Aussie outback has miles and miles and miles and miles of nothing, which is frightful. Of arid, uninhabitable nothing that only vanishingly few organisms can actually live in, and they’re all a lot hardier than we fleshy humans. If, by some quirk of fate, you find yourself stuck in the outback without any way of communicating with anyone else, you’ve got much the same fate to look forward to as being stuck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. At the very least, the ocean’s fate comes quicker.
It’s the reason why there is so much mythology surrounding it. There’s almost something Lovecraftian about a space that huge and unforgiving. It’s not difficult to make it even more frightening than it already is, but if you’re in the outback, then you look up and see a set of mysterious lights blinking in the distance, you’ll find that the sons of bitches actually went and did it. Creating an urban legend that remains a genuine mystery to this day.
After all, when not even the people telling the story can say for sure when the phenomenon first started, you know it’s a good one.
What are the Min Min Lights of Australia?
In terms of recorded stories about the Min Min Lights, the most commonly cited of them is connected to the town of the same name in Queensland. While it’s a ghost town today, it was once the sight of a hotel, or at least, so the story goes. It also had a tough reputation for fighting and crime, so much so that many a corpse had to be chucked into a mass grave near the hotel. Time went on, the hotel closed, but still, these spirits wouldn’t stay rested for long.
The victims of the Min Min Hotel rise up at night. Not like the spirits of stories, though, instead, they sparkle like so many stars in the sky. However, these do not comfort and guide lost souls the way that the night sky has done for centuries, but spark a panic within all those who see them. Probably akin to how the souls at the hotel felt just before their lives were cut short. No doubt brutally. It’s a good story. One that does explain the seemingly very real phenomenon of lights in the sky in the Queensland outback.
The issue here is that stories of lights in the sky in this part of Australia go back centuries longer than any hotel put there by colonisers. Stories from Aboriginal Australian cultures also talk of the same lights, adding further credence to the legend. Nevertheless, the idea that these are souls that go back only hundreds of years is patently absurd. Whatever the source of these lights is, this is a tradition not measured in generations or even centuries; try millennia instead.
Vast, unfeeling, and impossibly old. Australia really is terrifying.