Read the book: «Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Prologue

1. Blood Relatives

2. But for the Sea

3. The Fever Ship

4. The Cattle Station

5. First In, Best Dressed

6. Black War

7. The White Woman

8. Slaughterhouse Gully

9. In Search of Elders

10. Reconciliation

11. Iguana Creek

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Sources

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

Gippsland, Victoria. July 1843

Ronald Macalister was dead. The blacks had killed him.

Angus McMillan’s stablehand found the body at the side of the track a half-mile from Alberton, a mess of blood and gore. They had dragged the lad from his horse. Dragged him flailing and yowling to the dust, dispatched him with their wooden clubs, and later, once he was dead, they had cut him.

Though Angus knew Ronald well – had known him for years, in fact, since he’d worked for the dead man’s uncle – he had barely recognised him. The corpse had been stripped naked, the face disfigured, the insides left spewing out upon the ground. There were slashes in the gut where the Gunai attackers had cut the fat from around his kidneys.

All the settlers were in uproar; this time the blacks had gone too far. Not a sheep, nor a bullock, not even a shepherd or a stockman; this time they had killed the nephew of the big man Lachlan Macalister himself, and a crime of this magnitude could not go unpunished. There must be reprisals. Angus felt the heavy weight of responsibility settling down upon his shoulders.

For who else could lead the men of Gippsland? He was the founding father, the man who had led the way from the withered plains of the colony over the Great Dividing Range. He was the one who had hacked through the snarls of stringybark and tea tree and finally guided them down into these green and fertile pastures. He had gathered his countrymen around him in the new land and shown them the way they must now live. There was no one else.

In the end, retribution was not so difficult to organise. The men were fired up, just waiting for the touchpaper to be lit. It didn’t take much persuasion to amass a hunting party; by the next morning every Scotsman in the district with a gun and a sound horse was assembled, ready for the off, baying like the hounds. Baying for blood. They called themselves the Highland Brigade.

A cry went up and the mob were off. The horses skittered under them, sensing but not understanding the tension in their riders, whose reins were short and faces set as they cursed in their native Gaelic, guttural and emphatic, and struggled for control. And all the time their eyes flitted along the skyline, searching for sign of the Gunai.

Overnight every one of the Aboriginal workers had melted away into the bush, abandoning their posts on the homesteads and the cattle stations. They were as spooked as the horses by the strange charge in the air, the rumbling among their workmates and masters. The murder of Ronald Macalister had set something in motion that they couldn’t yet predict, but they didn’t want to be around to find out what it was.

Word spread amongst the Highlanders that the blacks had been gathering down by the coast, where the sea pummelled its soft fists into the silver sweep of Ninety Mile Beach. Someone had heard that natives had been seen wearing the clothes of poor dead Ronald, clothes they must have stripped from the lifeless body before the blades were drawn. Clothes that would be spattered with the dead man’s blood.

Another said that when the attackers were disturbed they were squatting down beside the body, with the clear intention of eating the man’s flesh. They were inhuman, said someone, and they all agreed. They were dangerous, murderous vermin that needed exterminating.

Later it would never be clear who had said exactly what to whom; at that moment they were of one body and one mind. They looked around and saw only brothers and equals united in pursuit of a common enemy. This was more than revenge: it was about securing the safety of their homes, the virtue of their women and a future for their children. It was white against black, good versus evil, the triumph of civilisation over barbarism.

It would be impossible to identify the culprits of the Macalister killing, for what separated one black from another? Each was as murderous as the next. And was not the life of a Macalister worth ten, or twenty, of the natives? The loss of a Macalister must be answered with whatever punishment was necessary to ensure that no white man would ever find harm at the hands of the blacks again.

The Highlanders were armed, organised and angry. When suddenly they came upon the Aboriginal encampment, on a flat by a waterhole nestled in a wide bend of the creek, no one needed to tell them what to do. They advanced stealthily towards the camp, fanning out in a line until they stretched between the banks of the creek on either side, like the string of a bow. It was a fine trap: when the first shots were fired there was nowhere for the Gunai tribesmen to run to.

Crack. Crack. Rifles fired into the centre of the camp, scattering men, women, children. Some of them clutched infants to their chests, as if their frail bodies could protect them from firepower.

Crack. Crack. Bullets began to rain down upon the Gunai. The screams of shock and fright would soon intermingle with the wails of the wounded.

Crack. Crack. The Scots advanced, bloodlust in their eyes. Those still able to run, ran. They ran blindly from the muzzles of the guns, tumbling down the steep banks and into the waterhole. Others made a desperate break through the line of horsemen, eyes fixed on the cover offered by the scrub beyond.

Crack. Crack. The deep water offered solace, but only temporarily. The terror and chaos were contained in another room. Underwater even the gunfire sounded different: a distant drumroll, more felt than heard, and the strange suction sounds of bullets through water.

Lungs burning, the fleeing Gunai were forced to raise their heads to breathe. As they surfaced, the Highlanders fired again. Again and again, until there was no one left to fire at.

The water was red with blood. Fresh blood, vivid and unreal. Thick and opaque, like the paint in a pot. It swirled and eddied, leaching from the corpses, flecked with a white frothy scum where the water had churned up.

When all was quiet, Angus stepped forward to inspect his men’s work. There were too many dead blacks to count: dozens of them. Warriors, shamans, hunters, gatherers, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, infants, elders, all dead. One of the Scotsmen pulled a young Aboriginal boy from the water. He was around twelve or thirteen, and still living, although he had been hit in one eye with a shotgun slug. Later they would christen him ‘Bung Eye’.

On, ordered Angus. Let’s move on.

They marched Bung Eye ahead, made him lead the way. There must be other camps, they said. Take us to the other camps. They waved their guns in his face. He didn’t have much choice.

They walked on across endless flat land under an endless flat sky, pushing through the starburst heads of kangaroo grass that grew up as high as their stirrup irons. Three miles to the south they found another camp, on another flat by another waterhole. The midden nearby attested to a long residency: layers upon layers of discarded shells. A handful each from every meal, built up over hundreds of years.

Again the Gunai were surrounded. Again the shotguns fired. Crack. Crack. Crack. And on again, Bung Eye! Lead on! Once more they advanced across the plain, to another creek, another waterhole.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

The massacre at Warrigal Creek was one of the bloodiest episodes on the very bloody Australian frontier. In all, somewhere between eighty and two hundred Gunai people were slaughtered that day, wiping out in a single assault a substantial portion of the southern Bratowooloong clan.

The leader of the Highland Brigade, Angus McMillan, was a Scot who had fled the horror of the Highland Clearances, during which thousands of his countrymen were forced from their land to make way for sheep, only to re-enact brutal clearances of his own upon this new land: Gippsland, the south-eastern corner of Australia.

He was a tough man, a pious man, a lonely man. A man who had struggled through miles of unknown territory, built new homes with bare hands, met tribes who had never seen or even known of white skin. He was a man who cut tracks, fought bushfires, felled trees, shot strangers dead.

He was ‘the Butcher of Gippsland’.

He was my great-great-great uncle.

1

Blood Relatives

I’ve spent the last decade of my life scrambling for footholds and handholds, pulling myself ever onward, ever upwards. Shift – move – adjust – and shift again. It was only when my bough began to bend, and creak under my own weight, that it occurred to me to think: How did I get here? Where did I come from? Who is behind me?

The summer I turned twenty-five was the first time I felt the wobble. On paper everything seemed ideal. I had landed my dream job as a reporter on a national newspaper, and since then I spent my days high on adrenaline, making bad-tempered phone calls, arguing with lawyers and scanning the news wires for excitement. My nights were spent blowing off steam in East End bars, nights fuelled by alcohol and enthusiasm that could fire off in any direction at any time, end up anywhere. It was exciting. I felt exciting.

But more and more I was feeling something else as well. Everything seemed very precarious somehow, as if, when I next turned to take hold of all the strands of my life, my hands might slip through space, finding nothing solid to grip onto. I had a mounting sense of dread.

For despite the business cards and the security passes and the smart-casual work wardrobes, it wasn’t working out quite the way I’d planned. Over the past three years I’d seen too many of my contemporaries slipping suddenly from their rungs and sliding down the snakes back to the start. Pumped up by the big talk of the graduate recruiters, we had graduated right into the worst of the financial crisis, and all the overconfidence – ours, theirs, everyone’s – was coming crashing down around us.

The easy, breezy lives we’d been promised at those Magic Circle, Big Four, get-rich-quick corporate-sponsored drinks parties had vanished in a puff of smoke; after all the champagne hysteria the next few years had come on in a flood of disappointment and stifled ambition. One of my university peers spent weeks in the papers as a photo of her, looking dishevelled but fragilely beautiful as she carried a cardboard box of belongings from the Lehman Brothers office, was wheeled out by the picture editors again and again. The face of the recession, of hubris, of financial calamity; we recognised her.

London had seemed a shining city of hopes and dreams, but now it had transformed into a dark and terrifying place, where jobs stuttered and vanished but the rents were still rising up in front of us like a drawbridge. I had no security. None of us had any security. And for the first time in my life I was scared. Low-level and not such low-level anxiety buzzed in the background of all my thoughts.

On the one hand, I was lucky. I had a job, and I held it tight. But everyone knew that newspapers were a doomed industry. The internet was rendering us obsolete. It was all we talked about, in hushed voices in the office. ‘Get out now while you can,’ senior reporters told me in harsh whispers. ‘It’s too late for me. I’m too old to retrain. Save yourself.’

After work I wandered through the docks, looking at all the yachts and skyscrapers and cocktail bars, and I couldn’t remember what I was doing there. I picked up my phone. Dialled.

‘Can I come home for a while?’

‘Of course,’ said my mother. ‘Whenever you want.’

Home for me is the Highlands. This is a detail about myself that has always been a disproportionately large source of pride and the basis for a bizarre game of one-upmanship I play secretly, constantly, with everyone else, smiling quietly to myself as others recount with self-deprecating humour the banality of their suburban roots in Luton or Wolverhampton or Wigan.

Never mind that I fled at eighteen, as soon and as fast as education allowed – first to India and later to university in England, both in their own way the most antithetical environments to the Highlands that I could imagine – or that by now I’d lived for so long away from ‘home’ that my accent had slipped so low as to be imperceptible. They say that ex-pats make the best patriots, and I believe them. I can’t help it. I love the place.

My childhood summers were spent paddling with Highland ponies in the biting cold waters of Loch Ness, then charging – kicking their barrel sides and flapping my reins – together up the muddy tracks in the hills above. In the autumn I walked home across the field, gorging on brambles, stumbling through nettles. We swam in the loch behind my house, climbing into a rowing boat at its centre and jumping off again until our fingers turned blue. When we were older my friends and I threw parties in fields, drinking cheap cider amid clouds of midges, lying back on our jackets to watch shooting stars. And in the winter, if we were lucky, the northern lights.

The Highlands are a place where it’s easy to escape and walk out all alone, except for the sheep and the honeysweet aroma of the gorse. It’s a place where you can go entire days, even in the middle of summer, without seeing another soul. To me it seems the only place to be from.

Now it was to the Highlands that I had the urge to return. I was suddenly grateful for the grandeur of the landscape and the reassurance of family, newly appreciative of the importance of knowing and understanding my place in the world. Fed up with being a lone wolf, I was turning tail back to the den.

With two weeks’ leave to play with, I set off with my mother on a jaunt around the island haunts of her youth. From our home on the Black Isle we headed west, through the green pastures of the east coast and up into the bleak stretches of heather moor that characterise the north and west, skirting the lochs that split the country along its weakest fault. Mum’s a nervous passenger, and she clutched the door handle and held her breath on the corners, but between the bends we talked about family, her family – all these vivid characters to whom I am bound inextricably but have never met, the people who define so much of my identity.

When my grandmother was still alive we would make this journey often, rushing to catch the ferry from Kyle and rumbling the car down the concrete slip and onto the diamond plate of the metal ramp. I would peer out at the other cars, crammed together like a herd of cows, and the big metal rivets that held the walls together. Everything that went on and off the island came via that ferry – horses kicking the backs of their boxes, sheep packed two-storey into trailers with their ears poking through the air vents, lorries bearing food and supplies that shifted the balance of the ferry perceptibly as they came on board.

Once aboard we had to leave the car and clamber up the metal ladder to the wet-sprayed deck or the striplit waiting room in case the vehicles started moving around during the voyage. It was just a short jump by Hebridean standards. You could see our destination, Kyleakin, across the water, and the hills of Skye, whose southerly arm, Sleat, loomed up in front of us as the little ferry set off gamely across the waves. After twenty minutes we all trooped back down the ladder and into the cars to drive off up the ramp. It was my favourite part of the trip.

Now the ferry is gone, replaced by a road bridge that skims across the water like a stone, shooting straight out from the mainland and skipping off Eilean Bàn – ‘the White Island’ – barely missing the lighthouse and its keeper’s cottage, the impact sending it arching in a high parabolic path above the sea before alighting on the Skye coast.

Skye is central to my family’s history. It’s where my mother grew up, and where her father’s family was from, and it’s also where my parents met, when my father came to work with my maternal grandfather in the Portree court. We drove north along the edge of the island, stopping at sites of family significance. ‘That was my granny’s house,’ said my mother as we reached Breakish, a scattering of crofthouses set back from the road. She pointed to a whitewashed cottage with a neatly hatched slate roof. Triangular dormer windows poked through the tiles at the front like eyes, in the local vernacular.

Across the road sat the family croft – a narrow strip of land stretching away towards the sea, a traditional island smallholding held under an unusual form of Scots law, whereby tenants rent the land from the local estate, build their own houses on it, and pass on the tenancy when they die. Mum’s brother Myles was still the official tenant, although the grass was quietly being grazed by a neighbour’s bedraggled sheep in his absence. We stopped to look, but I felt odd and underwhelmed. The croft is a ghostly, wordless presence in many of our family’s discussions of Skye, a reference point around which stories and lives rotate. But in reality, there was nothing marking it out as ours.

I had heard that it didn’t have any buildings on it any more, that the house had been sold off separately decades ago, but I hadn’t really processed that. Seeing it in person for the first time in years, this soggy paddock didn’t feel much different from any of the others around it, or the thousands we’d passed on the drive. Still, I felt that it meant something to have gone there, that it existed. There was a link between our family and this rocky patch of earth, something more material than memory alone.

A track led down from the road across a flat expanse of reeds and heather to the Breakish graveyard, where my forebears lay quietly on a rise overlooking the beach, dark kelp drawn up tight over the sand like a blanket.

I remembered this place from my childhood: windswept, the black sea bottomless under a sombre sky. Cattle standing on the track. The large cartoony petals of carnations in their metal colanders and the fabric flowers stabbed into oasis foam, cloth leaves fluttering in the cold wind.

We laid flowers at the graves of my grandparents and of my uncle Niall, who died when I was young. Afterwards we drifted through the kissing gate into the oldest section of the graveyard, behind a low dry-stone wall. Here the gravestones were larger, monumental, almost Gothic. Marble angels crouched with heads bent, in mourning for entire families. Celtic crosses stood proudly; a row of neat matching stones remembered unnamed sailors.

There were family stones here for us too. We browsed, looking for the name.

‘Wait – here.’

It was a neat grey stone, almost as tall as me, the stone left rough along its edges. Engraved ivy climbed up the left side. ‘In loving memory of Myles McMillan, died 14th December 1899 …’ began a roll-call of the deceased. There, at the foot of the list, came ‘… and Angus, Christina, who died in Australia’.

I had a camera in my hand. I lifted it, focused on the stone. Snap.

Portree was a thirty-mile drive north from Breakish along the coast, through the seaside village of Broadford and darting between the feet of the red Cuillins – Beinn na Caillich, ‘the hill of the old woman’, with her grizzled and scree-strewn face, then Marsco and finally the perfect, conical Glamaig. The black Cuillin ridgeline loomed up in the west beyond, jagged and forbidding.

To our right we looked out across the water to the tiny isle of Pabay and her big sister Scalpay, then the south end of Raasay rose out of the water, with the familiar shorn crown of Dun Caan, flat like a tabletop.

Portree is a small town – a big village, really – clasped between the three steep sides of a fishing harbour. We wandered along the water’s edge between stacks of green-stringed lobster creels and the neat cottages that line the quayside; painted baby-blue and rose, sage-green and amber. The evening sun caught the sides of the fishing boats and buoys that speckled the sea loch further out, and burnished the rocky slopes of the isles beyond.

On the way back through the village we passed the butcher’s (‘New recipe!!! Irn Bru sausages: £6.98/kg’, a handwritten sign promised) and then the courthouse where my grandfather – my mother’s father – was the procurator fiscal for many years. Her family lived just outside Portree in a big, chaotic house of brothers and sisters and animals.

Heading north out of town towards the house, we rounded a bend and the Old Man of Storr swung suddenly into view – a startling pinnacle of rock jutting from the hillside so abruptly it seemed almost to stand up.

‘There –’ said Mum, knocking me out of my reverie. She slowed the car and craned her head to look past me out of the passenger window. ‘Our house was just behind those trees.’ But it wasn’t there any more: the line of trees turned out to screen a cul-de-sac of modern bungalows. We stopped the car.

‘Creag an Iolaire,’ I read aloud from the street sign. Craig an yo-lara. Eagle Rock.

‘That was the name of my house,’ she said, and stopped as if to catch her breath. ‘I remember when they planted those trees.’

At the top of the little street, her former driveway, on the site of the family home, was a stubby, white-harled block of flats. A sign outside declared it ‘Macmillan House’, after my mother’s maiden name.

You often hear about people who return after long absences to their childhood homes and knock on the door to ask if they can have a look around. They try to remember what it looked like under the coats of paint, the new wallpaper, before the extension was built. The house is the same, but not the same, as if one day you had miscounted the steps and walked into a neighbour’s home: in the image of your own, but the colours all wrong, and everything in the wrong place. What a curious sense of loss this is, when we know that things cannot stay the same.

We drove on glumly, past the Storr and along the coast road, echoing the curve of the ridge, until Portree and the cul-de-sac were long behind us. The land there is stark and bleak, grass holding to the slopes where it can, wrinkles in the hillside where the earth has slipped and settled again, peaty water settled in the clefts levelling the uneven pitch of the ground. Further out on the headland, white cottages cling on to the rocks like limpets.

We spent the night in a B&B that sat out alone on the heather near Staffin. The scale of the place unsettled me – the great malevolent forces that shaped the earth writ large across the land. And the colours too: the vegetation was not green, but crimson and orange and gold. ‘Like the surface of Mars,’ said Mum.

It was late by the time we arrived, the sky the strange dusky twilight it will stay all night this far north in the summer, and we realised we hadn’t brought anything for dinner. There was not a shop or pub for miles around. Too embarrassed to beg for food from the landlady, we pooled our resources and split a pack of breath mints and a cellophane gift bag of tablet between us in a bedspread picnic. All that was missing were the plastic cups and the cuddly toys.

I noticed with relief that I had no signal on my phone. For the first time in months I felt safe.

Back in Portree, we found ourselves drawn in by an A4 poster promising an exhibition on the Skye diaspora in the new archive centre, in the old boys’ boarding house at the high school.

The exhibition was small – photocopied documents pinned up on blue felt display boards, black-and-white photos of kilted Highlanders in their brave new worlds: America, Canada, Africa, India – and the archive smelt of carpet tiles and the chlorine from the school swimming pool across the carpark, but we dallied, reading each label slowly, waiting for the rain to die down outside.

There were aged, curling registers in glass cases that recalled in long lists the names of those who sailed from the west coast of Scotland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in search of a new life. They were the refugees from the Highland Clearances, an agricultural revolution that saw the removal of thousands upon thousands of Highlanders from their traditional land by their clan chiefs. In Gaelic they call this time Fuadaich nan Gàidheal: the expulsion of the Gael.

From Skye, most left for Nova Scotia, Canada, where even now one can still hear the lilt of Gaelic song and the beat of the bodhran – almost a third of its population still self-identify as ethnically ‘Scottish’, as opposed to Canadian. But not all. The emigrants fired off in every direction, and the displays in front of me charted how the thin tendrils of kinship stretched out from this island across the world.

I was enchanted by a copy of an old, hand-drawn map, a segment of coastline blown up on the photocopier to cover an A3 sheet. Seas and rivers had been delicately shaded blue by some devoted archivist with a pencil. A mountain range stretched across the top of the page, coloured purple, and a set of unknown straight-edged boundaries upon the land had been rendered in green.

The 1845 map of Gippsland on display at the Portree exhibition. (National Library of Australia)

There was something fantastical about it, like a real-life treasure map, with names straight out of J.M. Barrie’s imagination: ‘Snake Island’, ‘Shoal Lagoon’, ‘Mount Useful’, ‘Sealer’s Cove’. But there were names I recognised too: one peak was labelled ‘Ben Cruachan’, like a mountain in Argyllshire; a settlement called ‘Glengarry’, like the Lochaber village; another called ‘Tarradale’ – wasn’t that in Ross-shire? The green squares too bore names I knew: Campbell, Macalister, Cunningham.

I couldn’t identify the country by its coastline. In thick copperplate, carefully traced and filled in with a pink coloured pencil, the words SOUTH PACIFIC OCEAN rose out of the empty space of the sea.

I gave up, let myself check the information tag: ‘Robert Dixon’s map of Gippsland, Australia, showing the stations occupied by the squatters, 1845 … The detailed insert shows the Macalister River, named by explorer Angus McMillan after Captain Lachlan Macalister (1797–1858), a grandson of Alexander of Strathaird. Angus McMillan was born in Glenbrittle, Skye in 1810.’ There was a monochrome portrait of the explorer stapled to the board alongside: a sober, severe-looking man with strong features and a white chinstrap beard. He wore a tweed three-piece and cravat, and looked off into the middle distance from under heavy brows.

I smiled, watching the rain lash against the windowpane. I tried to imagine sailing all the way from Skye to the South Pacific. Landing on Snake Island.

‘Angus McMillan,’ came Mum’s voice from behind me. ‘He’s a relative of ours.’