The Real Family Behind Dispossessed
The surviving records, objects and family story behind Margaret and Martin McGilvray.
When we read historical fiction, there is often a question sitting quietly in the background.
How much of this really happened?
With Dispossessed, the answer is both simple and complicated.
Margaret and Martin McGilvray were real people. They lived on the Isle of Mull. They left Scotland in the 1850s. They travelled to Australia with their children, arrived in Victoria, lived for a time around Geelong and the Barrabool Hills, moved into the goldfields around Alma and Maryborough, and eventually settled on land at Wareek.
Their births, movements, children, occupations, land and deaths can be traced through the surviving records.
But records only take us so far.
They can tell us where somebody lived.
They can tell us when a child was born, when another died, when land was selected, when a family moved from one district to another.
What they rarely tell us is what any of those things felt like.
That is where Dispossessed begins.
Margaret and Martin
Margaret McGilvray was a member of my own extended family.
She and her husband Martin lived through a period when life on Mull was changing rapidly. Families who had occupied the land for generations were facing economic pressure, reorganisation of estates, poverty and displacement.
For many, emigration became one of the few realistic choices available.
Margaret and Martin eventually made that choice.
They left Mull with young children and travelled south, eventually reaching Liverpool and boarding the Hornet for Australia.
We know that journey happened.
We know where it took them.
But imagine for a moment what the record cannot tell us.
What did Margaret think when Mull disappeared behind them?
What did Martin feel as a husband and father, carrying responsibility for his family into a country he had never seen?
What did they expect Australia to be?
What did they fear?
Those questions are not answered in passenger lists or certificates.
They are the territory of the novelist.
Arriving in a Different World
The Australia Margaret and Martin entered was very different from the island community they had left behind.
Victoria was in the grip of the gold rush. People were arriving from across the world. Settlements were expanding quickly. Roads were busy with carts, livestock and people heading inland. Fortunes were being made and lost, often with astonishing speed.
The McGilvrays did not simply step from one settled life into another.
They had to begin again.
Their story took them first through Geelong and the Barrabool Hills. Martin was a shoemaker, a trade that could travel with him. Wherever there were working men walking long distances, labourers wearing through boots and families needing repairs, there was work for someone who understood leather and tools.
Over time, however, the family moved north towards the goldfields.
They lived around Alma and Maryborough before eventually finding something more permanent at Wareek.
That movement became one of the most interesting parts of the story for me.
They had left land behind in Scotland.
In Australia, land eventually became part of the life they were trying to build.
What the Records Reveal
Family history often arrives in fragments.
A birth certificate.
A death.
A name in a passenger list.
A land record.
A school reference.
An occupation written in a margin.
Each one gives us another piece.
In Martin's case, those pieces gradually reveal a man who was much more than simply an emigrant from Scotland. He worked as a shoemaker. He became a farmer.
He selected land at Wareek.
He became involved in the local community and was associated with the development of the school there.
Margaret's presence in the documentary record is often quieter, as was so often the case for women of her generation.
Yet that does not mean her role in the family was any less important. If anything, it made me more determined that she should not simply stand in the background of Martin's story.
Dispossessed is very much Margaret's story too.
She experiences the same migration, the same losses and the same uncertain beginning in Australia. But she sees things differently.
That difference between Margaret and Martin became one of the central relationships in the novel.
The Children
Their children also give the family story its shape.
Children were born, one was lost.
Others grew up in Australia knowing a country their parents had first encountered as strangers. That change between generations fascinates me. For Margaret and Martin, Mull remained part of their memory. For their children, Australia increasingly became home. That is one of the quiet transformations at the heart of Dispossessed. A family does not simply move from one country to another. Its sense of belonging changes over time. The parents remember. The children adapt. The grandchildren inherit stories. Eventually, somebody begins asking questions about where the family came from.
That was how I found Margaret and Martin.
Where Fact Ends
I have always been careful about one thing when writing these books.
I do not want fiction to replace history.
Where a date, place or event can be established, I have tried to respect it.
Martin was a shoemaker.
The family travelled to Australia.
They lived in the places described in the novel.
They eventually settled at Wareek.
Those things belong to history.
But I cannot know what Margaret said to Martin on a particular evening.
I cannot know the exact conversation they had before deciding to leave Mull.
I cannot know what Martin thought the first time he looked across the Australian landscape.
Those moments belong to fiction.
My task has been to build them around what we do know, rather than in spite of it.
That distinction matters to me. The characters in Dispossessed are not simply names I created for a story. They lived, worked and raised children.
They lost people they loved.
They crossed the world.
And because fragments of their lives survived in records, more than 170 years later I was able to follow them.
From Echoes to Dispossessed
Readers of Echoes of the Clearances will recognise the world from which this story grows.
That first novel asked what happened to families struggling to remain on Mull as an old way of life was being dismantled.
Dispossessed asks the next question.
What happened when remaining was no longer possible?
For Margaret and Martin, departure did not end the story.
It began another one.
Australia offered opportunity, but it also brought uncertainty, grief, work, change and the need to create a new sense of home.
That is why I wanted to write Dispossessed.
Not simply because Margaret and Martin were my ancestors.
But because behind their names in the records was a journey.
And behind that journey were two people who had no idea how their story would end.
Dispossessed — Margaret and Martin McGilvray: From the Isle of Mull to the Plains of Victoria will be published by Eagle's Rest Press on 30 November 2026.
The book will receive its official in-person launch at the Daylesford Highland Gathering in Victoria on 5 December 2026.
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