THE MURDERER IN MY FAMILY
When writer Cal Flyn discovered the dark secret in her family’s past it started a long but cathartic investigation
Cal Flyn’s investigation of a shocking ancestral discovery
In the summer of 2011 I made a discovery about my family history that has dominated my work and thoughts ever since. I learned that I was the great-great-great niece of Angus McMillan, who left Scotland during the Highland Clearances to emigrate to Australia. He became a noted explorer and the foremost pioneer of an area near Melbourne called Gippsland, where he is celebrated by a series of cairns, has an electoral district plus several parks and countless streets named after him.
He also, it has been revealed recently, acted as the ringleader of a number of gruesome massacres of the local indigenous people, the Gunai.
McMillan has been linked to a number of ruthless attacks, some so brutal that their sites have been synonymous with death ever since. Boney Point, for example, on the shore of Lake Wellington. But the bloodiest episode – indeed, one of the bloodiest in Australian history – took place at Warrigal Creek in 1843 when, as revenge for the murder of a prominent settler, McMillan gathered an angry militia and set upon an unsuspecting encampment where they killed every man, woman and child they saw. In all, somewhere between 80 and 200 Gunai people were slaughtered that day.
Other assaults, attributed to McMillan or
‘My ancestor was the ringleader of a number of gruesome massacres of the local indigenous people’