Ethel Robertson, better known as Henry Handel Richardson (HHR), was born in Melbourne, living briefly in four Victorian towns in 1870, before moving to Europe in her early twenties. Her father's dramatic final illness drove the Richardson family to move around frequently, from Hawthorn to Chiltern, Queenscliff to Koroit, then to Maldon and finally back to Melbourne. These places are renamed yet recognisable in HHR's novel Ultima Thule, the third volume of her Fortunes of Richard Mahony trilogy. Chiltern is perhaps the best known of the HHR sites since her former home Lake View has been preserved in her honour, despite the fact that she lived there for only a few months. In this chapter, I will discuss the potential for imaginative time travel in these four towns through various practices which seek to invoke the spirit of the dead author.

Scholars have identified time travel as a significant element of the practice of visiting literary sites. As Alison Booth argues, ‘preserved sites, testimonials of haunting and encounter, and the practices of re-enactment seem to share the common impulse to deter the decay of time, to shore fragments against our ruin’. Paul Westover observes that pilgrims often describe their experience at literary sites in terms of time travel, ‘as if a ruin or artifact were a portal to a vanished past’. Through their preservation, literary sites allow visitors to apprehend the ‘absent-presence’ of the vanished author, or to imagine the author inhabiting the same space in which they temporarily stand. They may also mentally conjure up the characters and scenes that the author has created. In this way, the author's ‘real life’ and the world he or she has produced may coexist in the mind of the literary tourist.

Helen Garner has spoken about a visit to Lake View in the 1990s, en route from Sydney to Melbourne, with her friend Axel Clark, who was then writing the second volume of his biography of HHR.