Читать книгу Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir - Cal Flyn - Страница 9

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.’

I wasn’t listening. The thought was still turning itself over in my head. ‘Get on a boat here, and don’t get off until you get to Australia,’ it went. ‘Sealer’s Cove,’ it said. ‘Mount Useful.’

‘What?’ I asked, belatedly.

‘He’s a relative of ours,’ she said again. ‘I remember my father telling us about him when we were children. He was very proud of it. Angus was an explorer in Australia when it was first being settled. There are whole areas named after him. You’ll have to ask your uncle Myles, he’ll know more about it.’

‘Huh.’ I looked at the map again, impressed. There was a mountain in the north-west corner of the map that had been labelled ‘Mount Angus’. I drew this small source of fuzzy pride close to my chest, like an otter with a clam shell.

Until this moment I had never understood the appeal of family history, the draw for all those anoraks poring over their bloodlines in the back rooms of libraries. I knew it would be hard to explain the significance of my discovery, in the same way that the relating of last night’s dream is never as interesting for the audience as it is for the teller. Sheer self-indulgence. Yet it was strange how much this revelation had cheered me. How this whole trip had cheered me.

I couldn’t be sure why it had affected me so much to learn of this swashbuckling relative. His story, after all, did not appear to have had much bearing on my life thus far. But, I told myself, wasn’t it this sense of context that I was seeking when I returned to Skye? Of course our lives should stand alone, to be considered on their own merits, but didn’t it add something to step back and see myself as the latest episode in a longer series? As part of a family epic, whose themes reverberate down the generations?

There is a certain comfort, I realised, in accepting the existence of some kind of folk destiny, wherein the predecessors’ achievements confer some inherent advantage, some easing of paths on the present generation; the very simplest form of predestination. One can almost imagine the nods of approval from the family portraits in the great hall …

For this reason I was glad that McMillan was an explorer. I could use this familial detail as a hook to hang my wanderlust from – the yearning for escape that rears up in me even in the most pleasant of circumstances, the restlessness that has driven me from gainful employment and fulfilling relationships and onto aeroplanes instead, time and again, to hike along the Yangtze, or cruise the backwaters of Kerala, or snowshoe in the Arctic. With this new information, I could reimagine myself as the latest in a line of notable wanderers, rather than a deadbeat who simply found it hard to settle down to work.

I have often daydreamed of how I too would have been an explorer, had I been born into another century. It grieves me that there is now so little on earth to explore, truly explore – only the final dark crevices of deep-water trench and polar crevasse. Meanwhile the breaching of the new frontiers, beyond our own planet (stars spinning past the portholes, one-way trips to Mars), remains decades away.

What I’d give to touch down on a strange beach and walk out into unknown land. To draw the first map and write on it my own names for what I saw.

I was in the habit of following leads, so I called my uncle Myles, as my mother had suggested. He lives in London now, in a terraced house with a Greek wife and two young sons who speak with English accents, but the white walls bear his oil paintings of the Skye landscape in red-browns and mustard yellow and the deep blue slate of the Atlantic.

Myles’s reluctance to give up the tenancy of the croft at Breakish reflected a wider reluctance in both him and his wife Eleny to accept that they would stay in London, despite having lived there for nearly thirty years. Every time I visit, one or the other of them is apt to mention some new scheme they’ve been discussing recently – a house swap with a Highland family, perhaps, or a new start somewhere on the English coast. Something, anyway, that would pitch them directly from inner city to remote location. The boys do not want to go.

For my uncle, that croft kept up a tie between him – and, by association, the whole family – and Skye like an umbilical cord, a legal paper trail of personal heritage that signified so much, but in actuality boiled down to only a strip of scrappy pasture that we don’t even own. I was a Skye man, it said. And, although I’ve changed, at any point I could return to this place and be a Skye man again.

Myles did know more about the family explorer. Angus was his great-grandfather Martin’s uncle, he said. ‘He discovered a region in Australia and opened it up for the British. The area he discovered was called Gippsland, after Sir George Gipps, the governor then. You might have to go and find out all about it.’

I made a non-specific sound. ‘Maybe I should.’

‘The McMillans were a big family, and most of them went abroad. Dad was always telling us stories about their adventures. Martin was a captain on the clippers sailing round the Horn and back with wool. One brother took ill with measles on board ship and died. He was put ashore and buried on Tierra del Fuego.’

I smiled wistfully to myself, visualising and then weighing the phrase ‘latest in a long line of adventurers’ in my mind.

Myles also seemed wistful. He was a wanderer too, in his youth, a traveller who carried his home on his back. ‘Personally I’ve always yearned to see Australia. To see the coral, swim around the Great Barrier Reef. Those red deserts … Angus has a statue somewhere over there, apparently. I’d like to see that too.’

‘Where?’

‘In Gippsland, which I’m told is in Victoria … More research needed, I think, before you go booking any tickets.’

More research needed. I took it as an order, and started to read.

It started promisingly, with the entry in The Australian Dictionary of Biography:

Angus McMillan (1810–1865), explorer and pioneer pastoralist, was born on 14 August 1810 at Glenbrittle, Isle of Skye, Scotland, the fourth son of Ewan McMillan … He arrived in January 1838 with letters of introduction to Captain Lachlan Macalister, who made him … manager at Currawang in the Maneroo (Monaro) country and he began there in February 1839. In this year he learned much bushcraft, befriended Aboriginal tribes and after an eventful journey in May climbed Mount McLeod and glimpsed the plain and lakes country of Gippsland.

McMillan pioneered Gippsland and spent the rest of his life contributing to its welfare … He died while extending the boundaries of the province he had discovered. Although he received little wealth from Gippsland, his journals and letters and those of his contemporaries reveal him as courageous, strong and generous, with a great love for his adopted country.

I read the entry with a thrill of pride, printed it out and basked in the reflected glory. Soon after, I stumbled upon a second-hand copy of Ken Cox’s florid hagiography, Angus McMillan: Pathfinder, online (‘the story of one man’s battle against natural obstacles’), and when it arrived I pored over it like a gospel, underlining the most flattering passages.

On the inside cover I found a ballpoint inscription declaring the book the property of ‘Cllr Robinson, Port Albert’, and a map of the first European explorers’ routes through and around the state of Victoria and its surrounds, showing McMillan’s explorations in their proper context.

Each was given a different mark to denote their routes. The first forays into the region were confined to the coast. The earliest, marked COOK 1770 and characterised by a trail of dots and crosses, was shown to swoop in from New Zealand to the south-east, hit the Gippsland coast at Point Hicks, turn and follow the coast round Cape Howe and north towards Botany Bay, in the southern suburbs of modern-day Sydney.

Cook was not the first European to encounter this mysterious continent – a series of seamen working for the Dutch East India Company had sailed along the northern coast and skiffed the underside of Tasmania over the previous century – but his expedition would prove crucial to the future of the new land. Evidence submitted to Parliament by members of his party (notably the onboard botanist Joseph Banks) would lead to the founding of the first convict colony in 1788.

Short choppy dashes showed BASS 1797 sailing south from Sydney in a whaleboat as he sought to prove the existence of a strait separating Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) from the mainland. He skimmed Wilsons Promontory, where the tiny Little Penguins come ashore, briefly touched land at Western Port Bay, before shooting back the way he came.

Then came GRANT 1800 (long, confident dashes), the first to sail Bass Strait from west to east, and MURRAY 1801 (the dot-dash, dot-dash of Morse code), discoverer of Port Phillip Bay, a shallow inlet leaping with dolphins and whales, on the shores of which Melbourne would later be founded.

Inland, it was another twenty-three years before HUME AND HOVELL 1824–25 (Xs and dashes) made the first inroads into Victoria, hiking south with a party of convicts from the former’s home at Lake Hume, trying and failing to cross the Great Dividing Range at 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 among the Scots. Only a year after the bloodbath of Culloden, Prime Minister Henry Pelham declared that ‘every Scotch man who has zeal and abilities to serve the King should have the same admission with the administration as the subject of England had’. It was a shrewd move on the part of the British government, and one that would see the colonial administration becoming increasingly Scotch in character over the following decades.

Britain sent at least forty governors of Scottish descent to America before it declared independence in 1776, including General John Campbell, governor general of Virginia and commander-in-chief of British forces in North America during the Seven Years’ War (he was later replaced by James Abercrombie, another Scot).

As the American colony grew restless, it was Pitt the Younger’s Edinburghian right-hand man Henry Dundas – bitterly nicknamed ‘the uncrowned king of Scotland’ – who called most vocally for the harsh punishment of the rebels. He also devoted much time and energy to blocking attempts to outlaw the slave trade – according to one estimate, he single-handedly delayed its abolition in the British Empire by ten or fifteen years through his ‘skilful obstructions’.

As Home Secretary, Dundas acted to open India to his fellow Scots, and they soon came to dominate the administration of the colony and the East India Company. The first three governors general of India were Scots, and later, seven of the twelve viceroys. Others, like Sir Arthur Hamilton-Gordon, son of the Fourth Earl of Aberdeen, skipped from colony to colony, serving as governor of Trinidad, Mauritius, Fiji, New Zealand, and finally Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka).

Thus in America, India, the Caribbean and the Pacific, the hand of empire stretched out in the form of opportunistic Scots, as the colonised became the colonisers. In Gippsland, Australia, Angus McMillan wreaked destruction upon the indigenous people in the name of British expansion.

I had known – however vaguely – that men like him had existed. Men who had fled a homeland made miserable by colonisation, then made it their lives’ work to extend the empire, some of them, like McMillan, killing wholesale in its name. But whereas previously they had been aberrations, incongruous footnotes to a rousing narrative, now here he was, right there in the family tree. Part of my story, part of my heritage, part of me.

I returned to London determined to put the whole sorry business out of my mind. I took another job, at another paper, and tried to concentrate on fitting in and getting on. But I couldn’t forget what had been, for me, a momentous discovery. It rolled around in the back of my head, unsettling me. All my easy assumptions about my heritage had proved to be flimsy.

What I was feeling reminded me of a concept I’d once stumbled across in a book: ‘intergenerational guilt’. It described a generation of Germans who felt a profound sense of guilt and remorse for their nation’s role in the Holocaust, although they had not been born at the time it took place. At the time I had flicked through the pages with indifferent curiosity, but now I rolled back through their reasoning. I couldn’t help but wonder: what responsibility for our ancestors’ actions do we all unwittingly take on?

It seemed to me that McMillan’s story sat at the very crossroads of what makes a person victim or aggressor, good or evil. From my reading I had been presented with two characters: McMillan the hero – the hard-working, generous Scot honoured with plaques, portraits and cairns – and McMillan the villain – a bloodthirsty tyrant who rampaged through the bush, cutting down unarmed women and children. But what was the truth? I was left with the task of fitting both together to construct the image of one man, seen from two different directions.

Was it the views of his contemporaries or the harsh realities of life in the outback that had prompted such an apparent transformation – from virtuous Presbyterian lad to cold-blooded killer – or even the ravages of the landscape itself? I struck upon the idea of travelling to Australia to retrace his journey, as closely as I could, in search of the answer. Perhaps I might find it wandering still the rough tracks through the bush in the Snowy River gorge and the foothills of the Australian Alps. Perhaps it was grazing with the cattle in the Gippsland pastures.

There too I could confront the true legacy of McMillan’s actions by seeking out the present-day representatives of the Aboriginal group he had terrorised. What state were they in? What could I do to help them? Would they want my pity? I had no way of knowing; I would have to go there to find out.