Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir. Cal Flyn
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what they christened Mount Disappointment, before finally forcing their way over and down to the coast at Port Phillip.
From the Monaro plains of New South Wales, McKILLOP 1835 shortly came tripping down in a line of tiny cross-stitches, coming to a halt at Lake Omeo. Then HUTTON 1838, represented as the noughts to McKillop’s crosses, edged in along the coast from the east, reaching the golden shore of Lake King before turning back. Despite these incursions, an enormous stretch of land between these lakes and Port Phillip Bay remained – to the Western colonists – entirely unknown and unexplored.
At last, the name I was looking for: McMILLAN 1839–41. In dense black dashes he was shown tumbling down the Snowy River gorge to Mount Macleod, where he was pulled up short by the hard going and the threat of hostile tribes, turning north to McKillop’s outpost at Omeo, then immediately south again along the banks of the Tambo River. Finally successful, he headed west, fording rivers as he went, then south across flat plains to hit the coast at Port Albert. He did not know it then, but this fertile country would become his adopted home, where he would shoot from obscurity to high society.
A final set of marks – circles separated by lines – shows STRZELECKI 1840 piggybacking along McMillan’s tracks to the Macalister River, before striking off towards Western Port Bay. The so-called Polish ‘Count’ Paweł Strzelecki’s overlapping journey and rival claim to the title of ‘discoverer of Gippsland’ would come to trouble my relation greatly in his latter years.
I devoured the book in a couple of days, a fanciful portrait of a daring hero that even I found overblown, and turned back to the internet for more. My appetite for information was limitless. But there was plenty to find: photos of cairns built in his memory, a panoramic painting of the view from his homestead (lush grassland, blue-tinged mountains far behind, Aboriginal children playing on a fallen tree) by the Austrian-born artist Eugene von Guérard, and facts, facts, facts, each sending me spinning off on another internet spiral.
But one too many searches brought me finally to an uncomfortable discovery. It started with a single, sobering sentence in a news report dated 2005.
A Scottish pioneer revered as one of Australia’s foremost explorers faces being erased from maps amid accusations that he was responsible for the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of aborigines.
I skimmed it quickly, expecting more praise, more admiration, and didn’t digest the words completely until an odd dropping sensation alerted me to the new discovery. I recognised the feeling at once, an uncomfortable, visceral reaction I’ve had sometimes while working on investigations – a new scrap of incriminating evidence, perhaps a footnote in a company’s accounts or an unexpected name on a title deed, will set my nervous system clanging like the sounding of a gong before I’ve even realised what I’ve found.
‘Wait, what?’ I thought, sending my eyes spinning back up the way they came.
I read the sentence again, and felt a gradual unspooling inside me. The next paragraph hammered the point home:
The aborigines are calling for the electoral district of McMillan in the southern state of Victoria to be renamed out of respect for the men, women and children they say were slaughtered by Angus McMillan and his ‘Highland Brigade’ in the massacre of Warrigal Creek. The 1843 massacre was one of several attributed to McMillan, originally from Glenbrittle, Skye, and his band of Scottish settlers, who … are accused of carrying out a genocidal campaign against the aborigines for a decade.
‘Oh,’ I thought. Just: ‘Oh’. Not sadness or disappointment or the trundling, wondering, what-does-this-mean? All of that came later. I was simply stopped short. I opened up the search bar again and began to type. ‘Angus McMillan’, I started, then paused to assemble my thoughts. As I hesitated, a list of suggestions popped up unbidden:
Angus McMillan Gippsland
Angus McMillan explorer
Angus McMillan massacres
I clicked the third option, with a thrill of anxiety. Soon I had drawn up a list of dates and places and sketchy details of what, I learned, have become known as ‘the Gippsland Massacres’. The placenames alone invoked a chill.
1840–41, Nuntin: Angus McMillan and his men kill unknown numbers of Gunai people in skirmishes during ‘the defence of Bushy Park’
1840, Boney Point: During one such skirmish, ‘a large number’ of blacks pursued and shot down at confluence of Perry and Avon rivers by McMillan’s men
1841, Butchers Creek: McMillan’s stockmen chase and shoot down ‘a party of blacks’ at a headland to the north of Bancroft Bay
1842, Skull Creek: Unknown number shot down west of Lindenow in reprisal for death of two white shepherds
1843, Warrigal Creek: More than 80 (as many as 200) shot down by Angus McMillan and his men following the death of Ronald Macalister
1844, Maffra: Unknown number killed in rumoured skirmish
1846–47, central Gippsland: ‘At least 50’ shot during the search for a white woman supposedly held captive by Gunai people
1850, Slaughterhouse Gully: 16 thought to have been shot down near the ‘Pyramids’ rock formation by the McLeod family and their men
1850, Brodribb River: Unknown number shot down during ‘hunt’ along riverside
I realised that I had stumbled upon a dark secret. Far from the romance of our family folklore, Angus McMillan appeared to be a dark character responsible for some truly terrible deeds. And more than that: over recent years, his name has come to symbolise some of the very worst excesses of Australia’s violent colonial past.
It is easy, as a Scot, to assume a certain martyr complex. Historically speaking, we have been cast as the plucky victims who struggled bravely on in a fight that was weighted against us from the start. And without thinking, I had absorbed the national story as my own.
Every past injustice is hammered home in history lessons at school: wars upon wars in which our plaid-wrapped men ran fearlessly to their deaths, armed only with claymores and shields, their throaty war cries harmonising with the skirl of the bagpipes and the shrieks of the bloody and bruised in the great symphony of battle.
We remember the sacrifices of our people en masse at every football match, every rugby match, at the end of concerts and parties, with voices raised and quavering with emotion:
O Flower of Scotland
when will we see
your like again,
That fought and died for
that wee bit Hill and Glen
and stood against him.
We remember our scorn for the colonising English, who took our land, stole our freedom and stamped on our culture as well, suppressing traditional music, our national dress, the Gaelic language. But, we tell ourselves, we have not been cowed. Our national pride, our hunger for freedom, for self-determination, remains:
But we can still rise now,
and be the nation again
that stood against him.
The belief in our nationhood is as strong as ever, our indignation still bubbling. We are proud still, and angry, and self-righteous. And quite right too.
But, as in everything, the full story of the Scots is complex. It is full of threads that will not tie neatly together, and details that do not always flatter that sense of self-righteousness. Even the Battle of Culloden – the great slaughter that finally crushed the Jacobite rising in 1746, so often invoked as a symbol of the triumph of the ammunition of the English over the courage of the Scots – was the culmination of what was as much a civil war as a war between nations, as clan turned against clan, seduced by the sophisticated south or the desire to settle old scores.
Many of the most enthusiastic proponents of the British Empire would emerge from