Читать книгу Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir - Cal Flyn - Страница 13

A month passed. Time moved slowly.

The Minerva was making heavy work of the voyage, and McMillan grew bored with watching sails appear on the horizon behind them only to speed by with demoralising ease, leaving the Minerva in their wake. He wished he had gone in another ship.

Daily he stared out at the sea, calculating their progress, growing impatient in his impotence: Wind is fair this day, also E by S, steering SW, going about 5½ miles an hour. Lat 20 59 Long 22½º. Very warm. They were surrounded by ocean on all sides, with nothing but their own company as they chased the horizon across its infinite expanse. McMillan’s eyes raked the skyline as a man walking out at night casts around the circle of light given out by his lantern; he was watching for the coasts of new lands, the masts of strange ships that dipped in and out of sight on their unknown courses.

Four days before, they’d seen the Canary Islands, specks of rock in the far distance, but they hadn’t sighted land since. Shoals of flying fish skimmed the surface of the waves, driving themselves into the air with slashing tails, then smoothly soaring on stained-glass wings. The heavily laden Minerva sat low in the water, and as the fish glided unseeingly forward they grazed the tops of the rails and came in to land, gasping, on the deck. They tasted like mullet, fat and sweet.

The shores of Cape Verde lay still a few days to the south, somewhere over the horizon, unseen. The passengers were listless, settling heavy as sand into the rhythm of life on board: biscuit and salt pork, lime juice, the strictly rationed water grown stale in its barrels, inertia. The stutter and sigh of conversation drying up. A Sunday service in the German missionary’s stilted English marked off the weeks like the tally on a prison wall. But although his body was confined, McMillan’s mind roamed free across the ocean, coasting on the thermals like a seabird; forward into the unknown, then inevitably backwards, to the comforts and the consolations of home.

He retreated to his cabin, braced himself against the rolling of the ocean, dipped a pen, and opened his journal. Bright fancy brings me to the distant shores of green Barra, for my heart will throb with warm affection at the mention of thy ever remembered name. Often do I think of thee amid this wilderness of water, when nothing is heard but the roar of the tempest and nothing visible beyond our back but the lowering heaven and the rolling sea. He knew that the lives of those he had left behind would still be rolling on without him as he trod water and stewed on his present condition: his past choices, his future chances, his lost love.

For McMillan the journey was uneventful. But below him, in the hold, the mass of his fellow passengers ran the full gamut of human experience. A young man, in a poor state of health, disappeared from his bed one day and was never seen again; over the side, presumably, but who could say for sure? His poor wife, who had left his side only to prepare him a drink, would pass the rest of the journey scouring the ship in desperation. The German missionary held a funeral, in case. Afterwards, McMillan turned back to the ocean to regard the merciless wave afresh. He did not want to die, he thought, not without ever seeing his home again.

The German held another ceremony, a wedding for a young couple from Kintyre. Afterwards, McMillan eyed the lovers fondly as they danced on deck long into the night. He envied them. They would arrive in the New World together, secured to each other, and linked too by the other to their former existence. As for him, he would have to face the future alone: I must own my weakness on thinking of dear — that loved me while I lived near her, and I hope will preserve my memory while in a foreign clime and under the heat of a tropical sun.

He mourned the loss of his old life, with no aspect of the new one yet in view. He wrote to his brothers, his sisters, his mother, his father, his Miss Margaret, but the Minerva made no stop at any port, and the letters sat, unsent and unread, in his cabin. By the time they were sent, by the time he heard back, the news would be long out of date: they had been split apart like firewood, and there would be no putting them back together.

Time passed in an interminable haze of sorrow and introspection. He resolved that on arrival at his destination he would be a better man, hereafter to do whatever I think to do my duty and work for the good and advantage of mankind. To be sweet and benevolent, quiet, peaceably contented, generous, easy company, humble, meek, diligent and industrious, charitable even of aliens. He cleaned and waxed his boots. He set himself arithmetic problems. He wished for a faster ship. He prayed.

Though progress was slow, it was constant. Celestial signposts marked their advance: every day the sun rose higher in the sky; by now it was nearly directly overhead at midday. Constellations whirled in nightly dance, slipping down and down, taking their leave as they reached the edge of the dance floor, allowing new sets to take their places from the opposite horizon.

He grieved for things it had not occurred to him that he would miss. Last night there was an eclipse of the moon. Totally eclipsed about 10 for it was quite dark then and the stars appeared beautifully, but I’ve almost lost sight of my friend the Great Bear. He took the time to examine every facet of the life he had left behind and store it carefully in a file marked home.

It is not only distance that creates lags in communication. A gulf between my boyfriend and me had begun to grow even in the moments when we lay next to each other in bed. In the rush to clear our house and catch my plane, we had left important conversations unspoken and said a goodbye more ambiguous than I’d expected.

It had been a sorry parting, and one that I felt guilty to be causing. Before we left the house I had pressed my forehead to his chest and promised everything I had, and made him promise too, again and again. But this much I knew: all our belongings were either in our backpacks or in the boxes stowed away in my childhood bedroom awaiting a plan of action, of which we had none.

Still, I was on my way. And when I found myself safe in my seat on the first of several flights, uncontactable, in transit, my initial reaction was one of relief. Out of touch, out of office, out of sync with the world, I have always found the still point at my centre. My mind is always steadiest when my body is in motion.

It was late morning when I took off from London, but there was barely time for lunch before the dark came upon us and we flew on into the night. Lights were dimmed and blinds pulled low. The frequent fliers put their eyemasks on and tried to catch up with the world we were heading towards. Twelve hours later I was reluctantly awake in the gilded purgatory of Dubai International Airport, swilling the milky dregs of a double-strength coffee and watching the flights on the departures board tick up and up and up.

Unlike in McMillan’s time, when it was a tangible and gruelling process, travel today is experienced in the abstract. On board a plane, the passenger moves extraordinary distances with relative immediacy, while signing over all autonomy to the cabin staff. One has no need to worry about food, or water, or even amusing oneself, while in the hands of these unreliable timekeepers who slow or speed the passage of the day depending on the direction in which you are flying: skipping from breakfast to dinner, or working their way down the aisles shutting out the light, heralding in the artificial night even as the sun burns fiercely upon the fuselage outside

I ate what food I was offered, drank what wine was given to me, slept whenever my eyes fluttered closed. I got drunk and confused, got off one plane and onto another, drank more wine. I passed out across a bank of empty seats, then snapped at the hostess when she woke me for my meal. Breakfast again. How long had I been travelling? It was an unedifying state of affairs. At least on a ship, as the mercury of the thermometer inches up degree by degree, and the stars slip from view to the underside of the earth, there is time for adjustment. Time to come to terms with the distance, both mentally and physically.

They understood time differences in McMillan’s day – the disparity between the ‘noon’ of a clock set to Greenwich Mean Time and the actual noon observed from on board the ship had been used as a navigational tool since the seventeenth century – but in the nineteenth century it was not so pressing a reality as it is today, given the lack of immediate communication and the slow speed of travel. To those on board, it would not have been apparent that day by day their body clocks were adjusting themselves, that day was becoming night and night becoming day – that they were not, in fact, staring together with their loved ones up at the same moon every evening.

Jet lag began with the advent of high-speed travel, and it is hard, or at least it is hard while suffering from its effects, not to interpret it as nature’s payback for tampering with the natural way of things: that long-distance travel should be appropriately protracted. It put me in mind of an aside in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which quotes ‘an ancient Arcturan proverb’: ‘However fast the body travels, the soul travels at the speed of an Arcturan Mega-Camel.’ This would mean, it adds, ‘in these days of hyperspace and Improbability Drive, that most people’s souls are wandering unprotected in deep space in a state of some confusion; and this would account for a lot of things’.

Certainly, I arrived in Australia in a state of physiological and emotional confusion, my sense of purpose and understanding of my mission trailing some way behind, perhaps over Eurasia, certainly a considerable distance from civilisation.

I tottered through the streets of Melbourne, made top-heavy by rucksacks strapped to both my back and my front, navigating the gridiron central business district where tall glass skyscrapers jostled for space in their neat plantations. I was used to tangled, sprawling old cities, had always thought of the ‘central business district’ as a construct of urban development rather than as an actual physical location. But here it was, in poker-straight rows and columns like a computer simulation, every corner tipped with pedestrian signals at each axis, emitting a low, rhythmic chirrup in stereo from all around. In turn, they rose from their drumbeat in a crescendo of solid noise, cicadas taking the air on a remote hillside. In the still night streets it was disconcerting. At least navigation was easy: walk four blocks, turn, walk four blocks. Addresses here were like a game of battleships.

The hostel was an enormous, elderly institution close to the Queen Victoria Market. Downstairs was very jolly, all neon colours and glossy posters, but the bedrooms on the fourth floor had the atmosphere of a Victorian boarding house. At home, I calculated, it would nearly be time to get up. I lay sleepless on a metal cot in a cell-like room, and waited for the clock to tick round and the sun to right itself.

Angus McMillan, I thought. I need to find Angus McMillan, and then tie our lives together again.

McMillan and his fellow voyagers came in the second wave of immigrants to New South Wales: free men, who had decided to make the journey to the convict colony of their own accord.

Those aboard the Minerva were for the most part law-abiding, conscientious men and women, many of whom had been inspired to travel to the far side of the world by the writing of John Dunmore Lang, the first Presbyterian minister in Sydney, who was presently in Glasgow seeking recruits with whom to improve the colony. Lang deplored the wickedness and sexual licentiousness he saw in Sydney; an inevitable result, he wrote, of its beginnings as a repository for the criminal outcasts of British society. In a series of convincing polemics he called for willing members of his flock to populate a country that was, to his eyes, rich in opportunity yet poor in virtue.

These ‘very superior’ immigrants were promised land, an improved standard of living, higher wages, and an escape from the destitution of their homeland. Lang secured sponsorship for 140 Scottish tradesmen, much in demand among the largely unskilled population of New South Wales, and persuaded around four thousand more to emigrate under their own steam over the course of a decade.

McMillan himself carried a copy of Lang’s An Historical and Statistical Account of New South Wales when he boarded the Minerva, which he read from cover to cover over the course of the voyage. It was a very flattering account of the country, he thought, and he was taken with one of Lang’s poems, which he copied out in full during a bout of homesickness.

No parent, sister, brother

Can greet me now – nor other

Earthly friend.

The deep sea lies before thee

But Jehovah’s shield is o’er me

To defend …

McMillan’s own writing reveals him to be as devout a recruit as Lang could have hoped for. At his weakest moments he turns his gaze to the heavens, prostrating himself before the Almighty, he who has the boundless ocean in the palm of his hand. He repeats his motto again, and again, until his mind is still: God’s will be done. God’s will be done. God’s will be done.

When the sailors slaughtered a sheep on the Sabbath, the young Highlander was outraged. The German missionary too attracted his wrath when McMillan spotted him whistling on the poop deck after a sermon. It was not the Gaelic way, McMillan said. (It’s true – it is not. Even today the Sabbath is widely observed throughout the Highlands and Islands, particularly in Eilean Siar, the Outer Hebrides, where on Sundays many still refuse to work, watch television, exercise or drive a car except to travel to church. On Lewis there were protests when ferries introduced Sunday sailings in 2009.)

He tried to arouse the indignation of the other passengers, but there were few takers. His neighbour Taylor quoted the apostle Paul: ‘Whatsoever is set before you, eat, asking no question for conscience’ sake.’ The German himself only took a slow look of me and left me to discuss my argument alone.

McMillan felt angry and isolated aboard this ship of heathens. Were they not on a mission to improve an ungodly land? He shut himself in his cabin and refused the meat, turned his face from the world. The captain, a moderate man, tried to talk him down. He was older, made wise by experience. McMillan was quite right, of course, he assured him. He’d defy any one on board to say otherwise as I have the word of God on my side.

But the realities of life in a primitive colony might loosen McMillan’s chokehold upon right and wrong, the captain warned. He said if he met me 40 years hence I would be of a different opinion.

I knew where to find him. His words, at least. His journals – kept during three crucial phases of his life – are held in the State Library of Victoria, a neoclassical pile on the corner of Swanston and La Trobe.

I was there as soon as the doors opened, filed my complicated request forms and waited in the drab manuscript room in the bowels of the building. They arrived quickly, in cream accordion envelopes tied with string, and I unpacked them, fingers quivering over creased, delicate documents in their protective plastic sleeves. At last, the insight I was looking for, file 268/1: ‘Journal of a cruise from Greenock to New Holland, 5 September 1837–22 December 1837’. In flowing hand, on the tall, thin pages of a handbound notebook, the thoughts of the young McMillan. I had found him.

It was strange to think that his inner thoughts, scrawled down in a cabin on the raging sea, were present in the here and now, in this buzzing bright-lit room more than a century later. Did he ever consider that they would be read by anyone other than himself, never mind pored over and parsed phrase by phrase by generations of researchers? By me? I suppose we all must, we diarists. Otherwise, what would be the point of recording our thoughts at all? If it were merely the act of writing we seek, we could write upon a slate and then wipe it clean.

I read as fast as I could, my eyes straining to find words in the looping, old-fashioned cursive. When the library prepared to close I stood on a chair and photographed each page, of this and the two later documents, and retreated to my hostel to continue detangling his words from the screen of my laptop. It was my first insight into the character of this man I had hitched myself to.

Much had been made of the negative aspects of his character – his superiority, his outspoken piety (‘sanctimonious, intolerant and churlish’, as one historian has described him) – but I was unconvinced. They should read my diaries, I thought, if they’re looking for a case study in intolerance and churlishness. There was something sturdy about him, his optimism and his faith; his resolve to devote himself to work and to the furthering of mankind.

And there was a romance to him that I had not anticipated. During a storm far out in the ocean he listened as the wind moaned in most melancholy tone through the rigging. Outside, a dark haze extended itself over the whole southern sky. As sail upon sail was taken in and hatches secured, McMillan headed out onto the deck to stand in the lashing rain. I stood silent and alone, thinking of Him who overrules the deep as well as dry land and gladdens our weak hearts when infused with fear.

He had a comic turn of phrase, too. In another such storm, as the ship rocked most fearfully, he noted how some of the passengers were thrown on their beam ends and rolled from side to side, like so many seals. His sketches of his dinner-table companions were lacerating: the captain was a gentlemanly fellow, but a skipper from Greenock travelling as a passenger was of a very cannibal appearance. The German missionary was a fat greasy man, whose wife was so extensive in raising the little finger for I have seen her gulp five glasses of wine and a tumbler of beer before 3 o’clock. (Oh, for a Highland lady, he mourned. She would hardly put her rosy lips to the glass.) An Englishman called Simpson came in for special criticism: a down right ass and a fool of all the company. A Mr Mitchell, on the other hand, was no better than a guttural mumbler.

Ha. Perhaps it was my tiredness, my sense of being out of sync with my surroundings, but his particular brand of misanthropy appealed to me. As I sat alone in the hostel’s bar, adrift in a sea of backpacker hedonism, I found myself strangely drawn to him, so tightly bound by his standards and his islander integrity.

Endless streams of European youths filed out of the main doors into the Melbourne streets, only to be replaced by yet more backpackers coming in, weighed down like packhorses with their rucksacks and carrier bags looped through and over every arm. Girls slept sprawled on the bar sofas, their backpacks like totem poles in every corner. The PA stuttered into life from the speaker above my head every few minutes with the Australian call to prayer. ‘Come on down to the bar,’ a disembodied voice wheedled. ‘Half-price vodka, free beer pong until 10 p.m.’

‘I can’t wait for tomorrow night,’ a Brummie lad told a pretty Czech girl beside me. She smiled blandly back at him, inviting explanation. ‘I’m going to get muntered.’

In my tired, cantankerous frame of mind, I was enjoying McMillan’s catty remarks and his Eeyore-like air. This life, he reminded me, in schoolmasterly reprimand, is only a scene of variety which soon passeth away and affords no solid satisfaction, but in the consciousness of doing well, and in the hope of another life. He was a strange, earnest young man. If he were to exist in the here and now, I reflected, he might have been sitting with me, nursing a glass of wine, glowering at all the fun-havers with as much venom as I was. The thought gave me heart.

Across the room, a rowdy drinking game came to some orgiastic conclusion as a stocky young man reared up and half-ran, half-fell out of his seat while his companions roared and heckled. He barged sideways, unseeing, into the nearest sofa, lost his balance and tipped bodily over the back and onto one of the sprawling sleeping girls. Pandemonium. The girl, thrust suddenly from dream into alarming reality, screamed in shock and fear. Strangers clapped and catcalled. The PA coughed again, theme and variation: ‘Come to the bar before 10 p.m. tonight for free beer pong and half-price jugs!’

‘McMillan,’ I couldn’t help thinking, ‘if only you were here to see this.’

I turned back to my screen, read again McMillan’s response to the captain’s warning that in forty years he would have reconsidered the rigidity of his beliefs. McMillan would have none of it: I answered, if I was spared to see another forty years that I hoped to be guided by the same guide.

His comment came down upon me like a weight. Forty years later, I knew, McMillan would be dead. Within five, he would already have the blood of innumerable innocents on his hands.

I felt myself pulled by a complex tug of emotions. I’d come looking for a killer, and had instead found an earnest, headstrong man of my own age, full of ideals and expectations. What happened to him?

They had crossed the equator and found the earth upside down. Each change rang through him with a piercing tone: the new moon, when it appeared, had inverted. It looked strange, but also just the same. The southern sky at least was beautiful. At night he lay on his back on the boards and traced his finger down the sweep of the Milky Way, joined the dots of the Southern Cross, smoothed the smudges that marked the Magellanic Clouds.

And across that glorious sky in the daytime came great flocks of birds. Birds of all stripes: sea swallows and storm petrels; fowl of a sort the sailors called the stormy pheasant – they put me in mind of the common plover, but much brighter in colour – and another they called the castle pigeon, its back spotted with black and white. Albatrosses too, in their dozens, their six-foot wingspans in beautiful dun colours, dark eyes rimmed with white.

But while McMillan’s eyes turned upwards, death stalked the deck, and down below, in the hold, all hell was breaking loose. Fever was taking root among the steerage passengers, spreading from bunk to bunk. McMillan was right not to have travelled there: they were dropping like flies. Almost every other day seemed to herald a new death.

The first victim, a three-month-old child, had died a month into the voyage. All the passengers had attended the service as the tiny body was consigned to the deep. A few days later, more bad news – the young woman who had been married on board was sick: our surgeon reports her to be in a dangerous way.

By the end of November, McMillan reported that ten of the steerage passengers were ill. He fretted that they must be suffering from a contagious fever, though the ship’s surgeon assured him it was ‘only a cold’. I am grieved to say that I cannot rely much on his judgement. Fearful consideration if it proves infectious – no one has a chance to escape its ravages.

And so it proved. A young unmarried man from Greenock was the next to die, and within hours another, a shepherd, laid low by the strong arm of the King of Terrors. McMillan worried for their souls – how poor a time to meet God, when the mind is infected with disease – and prayed that there would be no more deaths. But to no avail. The surgeon soon grew to regret his earlier confidence, as first his own father and then his mother were taken. His oldest sister, by every appearance, is on the brink of the grave.

By late December, another sixteen or seventeen were confined to the hospital. Far from help, the Minerva sailed on. They were far out in the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from dry land. McMillan was running out of paper. He used his last scraps to prepare himself for the worst, and to reassert his faith. If it is thy holy will to call me Lord, grant that all who are dear to me may be forever united in thy kingdom. Thy will be done and may I be submissive to it.

He was resigned to his fate, whatever it might be. He crammed his last entry into the bottom corner of the page on 22 December 1837, still a month’s journey from Sydney: It is a beautiful day.

The Minerva finally staggered into port on 23 January 1838. ‘THE FEVER SHIP’, as Lang’s newspaper the Colonist greeted it, had by then lost fourteen to typhus fever, while eighty-six of the 198 steerage passengers had contracted the disease, including the surgeon, who was in ‘a dangerous state’.

At that time it was not known how typhus was spread (via lice), but an inspector saw enough to attribute the cause of the sickness to the ‘overcrowded state of the ’tween decks’, where the steerage passengers slept crammed together. ‘I am informed,’ he added, ‘that when the vessel left Scotland, the space between decks was [also] crowded to excess with lumber, which was made a receptacle of refuse provision, and filth of every description.’

McMillan and all the others travelling in the cabins had escaped its grip, but were obliged to spend three weeks in quarantine on board the ship, under a yellow flag in Spring Cove, before they were finally allowed to disembark.

Arrival in Sydney would have been a shock to the system for a good Presbyterian boy from Skye. In 1838 the colony was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, but while Sydney and Parramatta were now under stable government, the rougher edges maintained a lawless, frontierland air. Around a third of the population still were serving prisoners but, in terms of numbers, the dominant group was now the former convicts who had served out their sentences. Unable to afford the return fare, they were marooned indefinitely in a continent-sized prison. Many were now pursuing their own interests, searching for suitable land on the margins of the colony

There, conversation tended towards the coarse, and justice towards the brutal. Survival required cunning and self-interest, with little call for manners or sympathy for one’s fellows. New arrivals often wrote home shocked by the discovery of how the realities of Antipodean life had robbed the colonists of human decency.

The very earliest arrivals had had the worst time of it. They had been dispatched from Britain in 1787 as a matter of urgency after the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 halted transportation of convicts there, generating enormous pressure on British jails. In Westminster, politicians watched with concern as elderly vessels were anchored in the Thames for use as prison ships, and convened an emergency parliamentary investigation: where could all these convicts go?

Evidence submitted by those aboard Captain Cook’s expedition in 1770 – the first European encounter with Australia’s eastern seaboard – was enough to convince the desperate policy-makers to send a fleet of boats carrying around 1,500 passengers, roughly half of whom were convicts, to establish what is now Sydney.

Incredibly, due to the time constraints, these reluctant colonists were sent out without any further reconnaissance. It took a gruelling eight months to reach Botany Bay, the proposed site of the new settlement, and perhaps another ten minutes after that to realise that this was not the green and pleasant land so stirringly evoked by Cook’s botanist in the oak-panelled committee rooms of the Palace of Westminster, but instead a dry and alien habitat where the plants were unrecognisable, the soil arid, the climate treacherous and the animals unknown and often venomous.

They might have arrived on the surface of Mars for all they knew or understood about their new environment, and they were woefully ill-suited to master it. As the art critic and historian Robert Hughes has explained, ‘The colony that would have to raise its own crops in unknown soil had only one professional gardener, and he was a raw youth of twenty. It would need tons of fish, but had only one fisherman. There were only two brickmakers, two bricklayers and a mason for all the houses that would need building [and] no sawyers.’

It was, to put things mildly, a very uncomfortable few years for those first arrivals, who struggled by on starvation rations as their crops failed year after year. Watkin Tench, an officer whose account of the colony’s founding was published by Debrett’s, wrote of those first, desperate months: ‘Famine … was approaching with giant strides, and gloom and dejection overspread every countenance. Men abandoned themselves to the most desponding reflections.’

The arrival of these incompetent pioneers had been met with surprising good humour by the local Aboriginal population. The Eora people, who populated the Sydney basin, had made some show of aggression on first contact, gathering in great numbers on the clifftops to brandish their spears and chant threateningly. (‘Warra warra,’ they shouted. ‘Warra warra.’ Go away.) But they were intrigued by the new arrivals, and soon came down to investigate, leading to a scene of some geniality. ‘They came round ye boats & many little things were given them,’ the future governor Philip Gidley King recorded in his journal. ‘Hatts was more particularised by them, their admiration of which they expressed by very loud shouts, whenever one of us pulled our hatts off.’

This initial bonhomie would soon give way to anger and resentment as boatload upon boatload of the British began to arrive: the Second Fleet in June 1790, the Third Fleet in July of the next year. Thus began the trickle, which became the flood. In all, 825 convict ships were sent to Australia, averaging around two hundred prisoners aboard each. These white interlopers spread inland from Port Jackson like a plague, occupying the most fertile land and encroaching upon a culture that had successfully existed in its present form for tens of thousands of years.

It is impossible to overstate the disruptive effects that these settlers would go on to have upon the lives of the Aboriginal people. Of these, disease would be the most devastating, jumping from tribe to tribe, racing across the continent far in advance of even the most adventurous Europeans. Of the Aboriginal nations of south-east Australia, only the Gunai people of what became Gippsland and their neighbours the Ngarico avoided the smallpox epidemics that cut down their countrymen like scythes, first in 1789 and again between 1829 and 1831. They were probably saved by their hostile outlook and lack of interaction with rival tribes. How sad, then, that they would be so devastated by the Gippsland pioneers led by Angus McMillan.

Today’s Sydney, with its clean, breezy streets, gleaming skyscrapers and iconic harbour, is unrecognisable from the fleapit that McMillan encountered, but it is still a mecca for travellers and immigrants. Arrivals at Central Station are faced with a street of towering youth hostels and hotels, while nearby George Street, where dim sum and noodle restaurants vastly outnumber any other type of shop – apart from, perhaps, the backpackers’ travel agents offering budget tours – has a distinctly international feel.

I stopped there overnight, still brooding on the future that beckoned to the serious young man I had encountered in the journals. But I felt calm. I had direction again – I was back on a path he had beaten before me. From his arrival at the quayside, he turned inland into the dry interior, and set about learning the skills for life in the fledgling colony.

I paused just long enough to take in the sights – but like Angus, I wasn’t stopping long. I was off in search of cowboy country.