The red world of north-west Queensland is a land where bad news is hard to come by. Filled with copper, lead, zinc and gold, this soil supports little else but sticky gum, turpentine, camel weed and a cassia that can puncture your car tires or shoes.
In February 1990, I stood on that red soil and cried. As a 20-year-old Colt kid, I was surrounded by the ruins of an exploratory mining camp: accommodation blocks, humming air conditioners, tricked-out jeeps, and somewhere my boss pointed out a man squatting in his beloved T-shirt with the words: “I’m so glad I could shit.” There was Yvonne, a geologist a few years older than me, with whom I fell in love. A second geologist, a handsome man in his 30s, came up to us. He asked what had happened. When I did not answer, Yvonne told him that I had heard that my father had died half a world away in Scotland. The man thought about it. and he said: “Don’t worry, death is just nature’s way of telling you to slow down.”
Thirty-five years later, mining may be emotionally immature, but it’s certainly slicker. It’s September 2023 and I’m in Brisbane, about to return to that stage. I became a father at a slightly older age, at the age of 52, so of course I also think about my relationship with myself. Brisbane airport looks like a dystopian movie set where Schwarzenegger went mining Andromeda: Passengers wander around in red overalls with name tags, while the Tannoy thanks us for following airport rules.
That scene in the Australian desert kept coming to my mind. ‘What was I doing there?’ I was curious
A plane to Mount Isa, an air bus to the mine. Three hours later we land on a scarred landscape. On the ground, the owner of the car rental company hands over a Toyota Land Cruiser with bars, numerical decals and a yellow dome light. “We don’t get a lot of recreational customers,” he says. The 75 miles to Cloncurry takes me past the former Mary Kathleen uranium mine, which once powered Britain’s nuclear arsenal. I turn north and, after another 30 miles, pull into Quamby, a distinctive “pub in the bush”. Although it had been closed for ten years between my visits, it came back to life almost unchanged. It’s a barn-like place, with a corrugated iron roof, a mural of a sleeping intersection, and plenty of cold beer. A rancher at the bar asks if I’m passing by, and when I tell him I worked nearby in the ’90s he says: “Really? Did they tie the pig to the front porch then?”
idea of returning I came to Queensland a few years ago on Guy Fawkes Night 2021. I was looking at the face of my newborn son in the González Coro hospital in Havana, Cuba, where I currently live. All my life I had avoided small faces—she was my first—but those small features… Her nearly closed eyes might have been full of dirt, but mine were clean. The hospital had kicked me out – per Covid protocols – so I retreated to a secret garden around the corner, La Reserva; it had become a difficult place to talk during the pandemic. I ordered rum and thought about many things that night, but that scene in the Australian desert kept coming to my mind. “What was I doing there?” I was curious.
This question arose again in the months that followed, during the hours I spent walking up and down my arms through the night. It’s a time he’ll never remember and I’ll never forget, pausing to stare at the poorly lit streets of Havana, where night fishermen pull their rafts back from the seashore. I was experiencing a reorganization of my synapses, a consequence of having children. Memories that were previously slippery and dragged behind me were coming back.
My father was not one to cry. I only saw him cry once, 10 months before he died, and the news reached me in the Australian desert. This was on the family farm in the Sutherland mountains, Scotland. I had just returned from London and we were in his office.
My mother was in a coffin on the coffee tables in the front room. My father was standing behind his desk. The window behind him looked out onto a cluster of rhododendrons and a gloomy sky. He started to cry in a way he wasn’t used to. I had no idea what to do, so I said, “He’s in a better place.” She looked at me in horror and replied: “It’s not in a better place than Ruaridh, it’s in the other room.”
They blamed Chernobyl, but he was a smoker, the metronome of my childhood, the tap-tap-tap of his pipe on the road as he leaned out of his truck to clean it. My mother had been battling lymphoma for eight years. With my father’s diagnosis, the fight started with him.
After her funeral, my father told me he was going to buy me a plane ticket around the world. I didn’t make his last years easy. I was sent to a school in the beautiful Perthshire hills, which turned out to be a walled whirlwind of bullying. The misery still makes me tremble: even now I would see this place razed to the ground, the land plowed and salted. School officials didn’t like me either. When I was 16, I was told it was best if I left.
I returned to the Highlands and got into trouble with the police. My father bought me an old Skoda for £250 and when I turned 17 he granted my wish to take it to London. He told the others he was worried I would die in less than a week.
I survived, albeit on a diet of Guinness and Häagen-Dazs. Two years later, when I asked him why he thought I should travel the world, he said: “You watched your mother die, I don’t want you to see me die too.” I did my job in London and returned home for the last time. Then he took me to Inverness train station and we shook hands in the lounge, and he took the unusual step of putting his other hand on my elbow. “Don’t go back,” he said. He meant his funeral.
And so, after all these years, Here I am in Australia, leaning on the hood of my rented Land Cruiser, the morning sun warming me. I pulled over on a dusty trail leading up to a distant ridge, hoping to remember the past, to see myself as I was just before I received the news of his death.
Cattle fidget fretfully in front of me while finches frolic in the trees above. It was so hot in February 1990 that the dogs wouldn’t get out of the truck, but I didn’t have that option: I was a field assistant to a geologist and I would dig where Yvonne pointed.
This job was arranged for me by a friend of a helicopter pilot friend who worked for the company. I drove a Jeep until Yvonne told me where to stop. Then I would dig a meter or two, he would reach down and pick up a pebble, use the geologist’s digging tool to break it open and lick the surface. She was so sexy.
I was trying to get out of my childhood, create something of myself, and impress Yvonne. Then I received a message that my brother was trying to reach me. It wasn’t unexpected; When I stepped onto the train in Inverness I knew I would never see my father again.
The cows don’t like me being here, they shift grumpily and my youth is evaporating. I get back into the Land Cruiser and continue driving. The bush gives way to a park full of beautiful horses and I arrive at Mount Roseby station. Farm owner Harold Macmillan under a gum tree full of cockatoos. I say that retirement after Downing Street is funny, and he replies: “Not many people make that joke anymore.”
The camp was on the McMillans’ sprawling farm. Harold and his wife Cathie offer me tea in their low house. They remember the miners well. “Consulting geologist Ian Whitcher and I were very friendly,” says Harold. “He would walk the land and map it. He would return every August and emerge from the bush with a handful of gold coins for Cathie. He was a tough bloody Welshman. “They had to scalp him because of the melanoma, but I think it caught up with him in the end.”
I love Harold and Cathie; their stoicism is clouded by emotion. My mother loved them too, admired their industry, their sense of family. When my mother died, she left a note for her children wishing them good luck in their love affair. I ask Harold about the view. He tells me the names of things and tells me that the camel weed came with the packing of old Afghan camel trains, planted the seeds and allowed for cattle farming.
“There is more grass than usual this year because the rains were so heavy,” he says. “But that means the fires will be terrible.”
The McMillans have no airs, but they have plenty of heirs. Cathie’s nine children, whom she raised herself, gave them 23 grandchildren. At various stations in Queensland and the Northern Territory, the McMillans and their children run 100,000 head of cattle.
Our farm in Scotland was very different. It was a thicket of scrub and pines cut by peat-coloured streams and hard-earned green fields, but it was also harsh and isolated, two miles from the nearest house. My siblings and I sold it after our parents died. This was their dream, the one who bought the year I was born. But we loved it too. This was the place of imagination, the only distraction was the book; the hills were too high for television.
The plane ticket my father bought taught me something magical; that I could escape the humiliations of my school days by going to places where no one knew me. As I started traveling, the discomfort I felt in my own skin diminished. Continuing has become a kind of pathology. If I got too close to someone in my 20s, I would say, “I love you, but I need to go live abroad.” I would come up with some excuses, sometimes a real job. However, in a few months I will be heading in the opposite direction. I got used to confused expressions.
If I got too close to someone, I would say, ‘I love you, but I need to go and live abroad.’
I discovered that by remaining in front of those who called me, I could reinvent myself as someone I wanted to be. After a few embarrassments, I learned not to go too far with reinvention, to anchor myself in reality as the past became increasingly blurry. That’s a good thing, because if you keep running, at some point you’ll meet someone you don’t want to run from. One day I will tell my son where babies come from.
It’s another glorious dawn and I’m heading towards where the mining camp used to be. What used to be just rails is now a two-lane highway ending at a gatehouse. A large zinc mine has opened, its workers coming in and out by buses. I park next to the bridge over the Dugald River. An emu herds her chicks on the dry bed below. It was tea time in Havana, so I called home to show my son this scene. Santiago’s little face, covered in black beans and rice, fills the screen. “Father!” he shouts and the emu takes off.
I go down to the river bed and try to point out the Willie wagtails in the eucalypts, but he can’t see them. He gets bored and leaves. I look around. If I’m looking for depth here, I find none. No bush is on fire in front of me. The only question left is: “What was I doing here?” I think of my father buying me that plane ticket, saying his final goodbyes in the gray of Inverness railway station, sending away the stupid, rambunctious, barely capable son he could no longer protect. This was his last attempt to spark something in his son before he was consumed by darkness.
There isn’t even a breeze in the trees. I realized that even though I was half a world away from my father, I was now half a world away from my own son. And I think: “What am I doing here?”