Thicker Than Water by Cal Flyn review – my ancestor the murderer

A descendent of Angus McMillan, who massacred Indigenous Australians, travels to Gippsland to confront difficult truths

In 1843, at Warrigal Creek in the south-eastern corner of Australia, known as Gippsland, between 80 and 200 Indigenous Australians – a significant portion of the Bratowoolong clan of the Gunai people, including children – were massacred by a vigilante gang of white drovers calling themselves the Highland Brigade. The Indigenous Australians were surprised in their encampment on the banks of a waterhole. There was nowhere for them to run; those who tried to flee were gunned down in the water. Afterwards the Scotsmen pulled a 12-year-old boy, who had been shot through the eye but was still alive, from the creek, and marched him on ahead at gunpoint in search of further camps.

There were other cullings, at Boney Point, Butchers Creek, Slaughterhouse Gully – the names are grotesquely eloquent. When the first European settlers arrived in Gippsland, 1,800 Indigenous people lived in the area that had been their ancestral home for some 20,000 years; by 1854, only 126 remained, mirroring a nationwide pattern that led later historians to conclude that Indigenous Australians had, in the words of John La Nauze, been little more than a “melancholy anthropological footnote” to the continent’s history.

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