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