Based on deep ethnography from central Australia, Musharbash analyses the meanings that flow from the transformation of Jarnpa, a monster that haunted pre-contact Warlpiri people, into Kurdaitcha, who terrorize contemporary Warlpiri people living in settlements across the Tanami Desert. By detailing the dramatic and tumultuous changes experienced as well as embodied by both the monsters and their human victims, Musharbash presents a cross-culturally comparative case of monstrous transformation akin to but different from that argued by Auerbach for vampires. Musharbash concludes by refracting the monster-Warlpiri case material against the third party present in central Australia—non-Indigenous Australians—and situates monstrous transformation squarely within the terrifying realities of neocolonial Australia.
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