It must be - what? - almost 40 years ago now. But Ross Gibson still recalls with a small boy's shiver his earliest memories of crossing the Central Queensland badlands: the worthless stretch of scrubby floodplain that separates the cattle country of Rockhampton from the canefields of Mackay. The Horror Stretch.

"I'd have been five, or six years old," says Gibson, a writer, teacher and film-maker, now based at the University of Technology in Sydney. "I'd be sitting, bleary in the back of my father's car, heading up from our home in Brisbane, going on holiday or to see family scattered up and down the coast."

Maybe the family had been travelling too long. Maybe the radio was turned on too loud for the stupefying heat. Maybe he was suffering from what he calls "that low-level delirium of carsickness, boredom and dread that suffused many Australian children's vacations during the 1960s".

But as the boy hung over the back of the rear seat, his head drooping wearily like that of a nodding dog on the shelf of the rear window, he fancied he could see ghosts: man-sized columns of spirit, or steam, or something, caught in the slatted rays of the setting sun, twisting and turning in pursuit of the fleeing car.

Long before his curiosity had been fed by chilling travellers' tales, told from Cape York to Coolangatta, about the evil stalking Capricornia, long before a series of brutal murders brought the Horror Stretch national notoriety, Gibson had somehow realised it was a strange, special place.

"It always seemed to me a very spooky landscape. Even as a child, I'd convinced myself the place was haunted." But by what? By whom? And what - if anything - do these ghosts of "The Badlands" - not just in Queensland, but through every state - have to say to contemporary Australians?

Gibson, now 45, believes he has at least some of the answers after almost a lifetime, intermittently spent criss-crossing the Horror Stretch, excavating its "historical sites", examining its human clues with forensic rigour, pawing though contemporary newspaper records and court reports.

Like other writers, such as David Malouf and Thea Astley, both of whom have written novels based on incidents that occurred there, Gibson became fascinated with the area by crime scenes. "From my teens, investigating them became a sort of hobby. There is much the living can learn from the dead."

As he explains in his book Seven Versions of an Australian Badland - a piece of "creative non-fiction" that has been compared to those of Truman Capote and described as part road movie, part memoir, part murder mystery - the Horror Stretch is an immense historical crime scene. One that, by shocking and disturbing, "offers hard lessons about a society recovering from colonialism".

Gibson's starting point was the Connors River camp, once a popular rest-stop on The Stretch, or the Crystal Highway as it was sardonically dubbed by locals, in celebration not of its sparkling sea-views, but its glistening, glass-splattered surface.

When he revisited the camp recently he found it a still, sinister place. The old petrol station and camping ground had been abandoned and vandalised. The sites were littered with bullet-pocked bowsers, eviscerated car bodies and middens of artefacts, both ancient (Golden Fleece petrol tins) and modern (a T-shirt printed with Cathy Freeman's sunny face).

Splashes of blood - freshly spilled blood - could still be seen on the dusty slab-floor of an abandoned building.

It was here in March 1975, bang in the heart of the brigalow country, among local landmarks such as the Styx River, Charon Point, Grave Gully and the Berserkers Range, that there was committed murder most foul, that there was created the myth of the Badlands.

Noel Weckert, a skydiver driving with his wife to a jumpers' carnival in Rockhampton, was found slumped, still seatbelted, in the front seat of his Toyota Celica. He had been shot dead through the head with a .22 calibre rifle, probably while sleeping.

The bloated, sun-broiled body of his wife, also shot through the head, was found, two weeks later, in a creek, where she had apparently fled from her attackers.

Eventually, two men, itinerant carnival roustabouts, who had been released after being interviewed by police in Gosford, but subsequently arrested, charged and jailed in Goulburn for shoplifting offences, were charged with the Connors River murders.

They were sentenced to life imprisonment - but not before more ghosts, more stories from the Horror Stretch, some real, some imagined, some transposed, perhaps, from elsewhere in Queensland, had emerged.

A couple of English holidaymakers similarly shot at by a sniper. A 14-year-old girl gone missing. A 26-year-old Aboriginal woman sexually assaulted, murdered and dumped in the Fitzroy River. More travellers, two of them from Sydney, shot as they slept in sleeping-bags by the roadside. Disappearing hitchhikers.

But that was just the start. As Gibson investigated further, working downwards through the decades like an archaeologist, he uncovered a landscape hammered by apocalyptic weather, rendered impotent by chemicals, haunted by fear and tragedy, touched, however lightly, by the lives of thousands of Melanesian immigrant workers.

And, darkest of all, bloodstained with the deaths of many indigenous Australians, whose voices - like those of the "great brawl of humanity" which passed through the Horror Stretch - have been forgotten, or deliberately ignored.

Some, such as that of Jemmy at the hands of Native Mounted Police Force officer Frederick Wheeler, were seemingly random killings; others, such as the massacre of an estimated 300 Aborigines in the so-called "Goulbolba dispersal", were the product of genocide in the name of civilisation.

In the intertwining of fact and mythology, past and present, layer upon human layer, down through the ages, the story of the Weckerts' execution came to assume added significance, to become part of a pattern, for Gibson.

"In their story we learn about the following topics," he says boldly. "Rootlessness and poverty-stricken itinerancy; the imposition of imported law; the geography of vastness, deluge, heat and erosion; the rural culture of firearms; the mind-altering pressures of isolation; nervous, nocturnal predation."

And more: "Prejudice and violence visited upon Aborigines; sex grabbed perfunctorily and illicitly; regionalist resentments; migrations impelled by the shove of hopelessness and bitterness, rather than the allure of optimism."

Gibson concedes that, paradoxically, his book may increase the number of visitors to the Horror Stretch, but it is scarcely the stuff of Queensland tourism slogans. Rather: Queensland. Beautiful one day, grisly badlands the next.

Well, almost, says Brisbane-born Gibson, who decided to write about the Horror Stretch only after trying unsuccessfully for several years to raise funding for a film. "What I know about Queensland is that it is an astonishingly paradoxical place.

"I think everyone walks round there with a sense that a very violent frontier existed not so far away, not such a long time ago. But in order to keep walking round and going about one's business, most people push that feeling well to the back of their mind.

"Of course, if you're black it can't be put to the back of your mind. But it's not as if I'm saying all these white people are self-deluding rednecks. This is not meant to be a piece of condemnatory local history. What I'm saying is that this piece of country is just one of many that helps us to see broader national habits in stark relief."

Gibson argues that because they are essentially a creation of fact and mythology, that constantly feed upon one another, "badlands" are to be found everywhere.

They can be sparcely populated areas such as the Horror Stretch, or "frontier places", such as Coober Pedy, or Lightning Ridge, or Darwin, where gruesome tales of disappearing people, violent death and unsolved mysteries are told.

An internet search reveals several "Horror Stretch" stories, or myths, some of them transposed elsewhere. A motorcyclist, for example, relates how he was warned of "a mad killer on this stretch of road who killed a guy who lay in a swag next to his bike". The location? Just out of Mt Isa.

They can be whole suburbs, like Bankstown, for example, which in recent months has, undeservedly, assumed a badlands reputation of mythic proportions. Or they can be "portions of local suburbs, sports ovals, shopping centre car parks, etc - the areas American author James Ellroy calls 'drop zones'."

Indeed, these badlands need not even be located in contemporary space. They can also be staked out in the past, or in the minds of men and women.

For badlands, Gibson argues, are a convenient construct: they offer a no-go area, a dumping ground for those voices, thoughts, memories, grim realities that contemporary, "civilised" Australia would prefer to forget as it seeks accommodation, a sense of belonging, of "wellness" in what remains for many an alien landscape.

It is important to keep badness in proportion, says Gibson. "I'd say we have small cysts of badness within a larger body politic that is in pretty good shape.

"But Australians do tend to obsess over edges, insides, outsides, boundaries." It's a form of denial, of what Gibson calls psychic border protection, used to capture and cordon off badness. To keep it out. To ignore it. In the case of the treatment of the Aborigines, in the badlands and elsewhere, to pretend it never existed.

"Newcomers have always known that that history was there, but they have either wished it away - got into a pattern of denying - or they've simply not been able to access it.

"If you like, there's been a failure in transmission."

Gibson, who sees his present role as professor of new media and digital culture as an extension of his lifelong interest in cross-cultural studies, believes that Australia must "own up to the numerical facts of massive war casualties involved in grabbing land" in Central Queensland, and elsewhere.

"At an administrative level there is obviously great unwillingness to own up because of the legal ramifications. But if individuals are ever to feel a sense of rightness in living in this land, moral, psychological and personal reparations must be made."

Formally saying "sorry" would be a starting point for opening a dialogue with people both from the present and the past, especially those about whom we feel ashamed or guilty. Our "advisory ancestors".

As Gibson discovered looking out the back window of his father's car, the ghosts are still out there in the badlands, they still have something to say to contemporary Australia.