скачать книгу бесплатно
Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir
Cal Flyn
Cal Flyn was very proud when she discovered that her ancestor, Angus McMillan, had been a pioneer of colonial Australia. However, when she dug deeper, she began to question her pride. McMillan had not only cut tracks through the bush, but played a dark role in Australia's bloody history.In 1837 Angus McMillan left the Scottish Highlands for the other side of the world. Cutting paths through the Australian frontier, he became a feted pioneer, to be forever mythologised in status and landmarks. He was also Cal Flyn’s great-great-great-uncle. Inspired by his fame, Flyn followed in his footsteps to Australia, where she would face horrifying family secrets.Blending memoir, history and travel,Thicker Than Water’ evokes the startlingly beautiful wilderness of the Highlands, the desolate bush of Victoria and the reverberations on one from the other. A tale of blood and bloodlines, it is a powerful, personal journey into dark family history, grief and guilt.
(#ub95241ee-e617-5801-a162-e489471972aa)
Copyright (#ub95241ee-e617-5801-a162-e489471972aa)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016
Copyright © Cal Flyn 2016
Cal Flyn asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work
This book has been written with the assistance of Creative Scotland and Arts Trust Scotland
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
Cover image by permission of State Library Victoria
Map by John Gilkes
The author and publishers are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others and have made all reasonable efforts to trace the copyright owners of the images reproduced, and to provide appropriate acknowledgement within this book. In the event that any untraceable copyright owners come forward after the publication of this book, the author and publishers will use all reasonable endeavours to rectify the position accordingly.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008126629
Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780008126612
Version: 2017-01-25
Dedication (#ub95241ee-e617-5801-a162-e489471972aa)
To my parents,
who make everything possible
Contents
Cover (#u3d93b522-56c7-5d18-a789-f80554574f9d)
Title Page (#ulink_5d4cae5a-f31e-5a5f-94ce-d185ebb14600)
Copyright (#ulink_21577a04-38f9-5bf6-a131-8466325a9ff2)
Dedication (#ulink_a8568c0f-d4ce-571c-b952-9568cf7ea31c)
Map (#ulink_56bdd3f2-3706-5fb2-9b30-a6a992cf457a)
Prologue (#ulink_02cc5eec-c811-5db9-9355-156938df25be)
1. Blood Relatives (#ulink_0ebaadb3-c013-5eae-9197-8a5010774a5e)
2. But for the Sea (#ulink_40213a69-a9d0-5035-816c-f01bdb8e3598)
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 (#ulink_09fd1984-306d-5cbf-9daa-c3475625de16)
Author’s Note (#ulink_7ffd5502-7201-5bb4-818c-f1a3f5806c89)
Sources (#ulink_07ad1e53-c79d-5b8f-a0c5-d1a1c56b1614)
Acknowledgements (#ulink_9b99fa0d-a12c-53c5-848c-0a74821fbeff)
About the Author (#u65e691ea-6090-5328-bac7-4905ac95cca5)
About the Publisher (#u649946e0-86c1-52ed-a0a0-859f54f83a1d)
Prologue (#ub95241ee-e617-5801-a162-e489471972aa)
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 (#ub95241ee-e617-5801-a162-e489471972aa)
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.
