Читать книгу Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir - Cal Flyn - Страница 7

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.