When We Were the Strangers
Updated: Oct 10
What our ancestors' journeys can tell us about migration, belonging and the kindness of strangers.
I am an immigrant to Australia.
That is not something I think about every day. Australia is home. It is where I have lived, worked, raised a family and built a life. Yet there was a time when I arrived here from somewhere else, carrying with me the habits, memories and assumptions of another country.
My ancestors did the same.
For Margaret and Martin McGilvray, the journey was considerably harder.
They left the Isle of Mull in the 1850s, not as adventurers looking for excitement, but as a family trying to find a future. They had known hunger, insecurity and the gradual loss of a way of life that generations before them had taken for granted.
When they reached Victoria, they were newcomers.
They did not know the land. They did not know what awaited them. Their accents marked where they had come from. Their experience of the world had been formed among the crofts, townships and coastal communities of Mull.
And yet, like so many others arriving in Australia at that time, they had to begin again.
While writing Dispossessed, I kept returning to that simple fact.
Arriving as Strangers
We now look back at nineteenth-century settlers and
describe them as pioneers. We know what came afterwards. We see farms, towns, roads and communities and can easily forget that the people who helped create them once arrived as strangers.
A World of Newcomers
The Victorian goldfields brought that reality into particularly sharp focus.
People came from different parts of Britain and Ireland, from Europe, from America, from China and from other parts of the world. They brought different languages, religions, customs and expectations. Many had little in common beyond the hope that life might somehow be better than the one they had left behind.
It would be wrong to romanticise that world.
There was prejudice. There was violence. Chinese miners in particular faced hostility and discrimination. The goldfields could be competitive, harsh and unforgiving.
But history is rarely made only from its worst moments.
It is also made from the smaller encounters that never find their way into official records.
That was something I wanted to explore in Dispossessed.
A Pair of Shoes
At one point in the story, Martin McGilvray encounters a Chinese man whose shoes are in need of repair. Martin is a shoemaker. He could charge what the work is worth, and he has every reason to do so. His own family has little enough.
Instead, he repairs them for very little.
It is not presented as a grand act of charity. Martin does not give a speech. There is no sudden understanding between cultures.
He sees a man who needs help and possesses the skill to give it.
Later, when Martin's son James falls into a hole at the goldfields, it is Chinese miners who help bring him out.
Again, I did not want the scene to become symbolic in an obvious way.
People help because another human being is in trouble.
That, to me, was enough.
When writing historical fiction, there is always a temptation to view the past through what we know came afterwards. We divide people into groups and movements and communities because history becomes easier to explain that way.
Real life must have been less tidy.
A Scottish shoemaker and a Chinese miner might not have shared a language. They might have understood very little about one another's lives. They might have carried assumptions about each other that neither would recognise today.
But one man could still mend another man's shoes.
And later, other men could still reach down into a hole and pull a child to safety.
There is something very human in that.
Perhaps there is also something worth remembering.
When the Newcomer Becomes the Local
My own family's story has made me increasingly conscious of how quickly the newcomer becomes the local.
Margaret and Martin arrived in Victoria as immigrants. Their children became Australians. Their grandchildren would have looked upon the places in which they grew up as home.
Within a generation or two, the story of arrival becomes a story of belonging.
The same is true of countless Australian families.
Some arrived from Scotland. Others from Ireland, England, Italy, Greece, China, India, Vietnam and many other parts of the world. The circumstances differ enormously, as do the experiences, but somewhere in many family histories there is a moment when somebody arrived and hoped they would be given the opportunity to build a life.
That does not answer every modern question about immigration.
Nor should a novel try to.
But looking backwards can sometimes give us pause.
It can remind us that the people we now regard as part of the fabric of a place were not always regarded that way.
They were once unfamiliar.
They spoke differently.
They dressed differently.
They brought customs from somewhere else.
They had to find work, make neighbours and learn where they fitted.
They were the strangers.
When I think about Margaret and Martin arriving at Geelong, I do not primarily think of them as pioneers.
I think of them as a young family stepping into a country they did not know, carrying children, possessions, memories and hope.
They could not know whether Australia would accept them.
They could only begin.
Perhaps belonging has always started that way.
Not with governments, declarations or grand gestures, but with ordinary people making room for one another.
Sometimes it may be no more complicated than repairing a pair of shoes.
Sometimes it may mean reaching down and pulling somebody out of a hole.
And sometimes, generations later, it means remembering that once upon a time, we were the strangers too.
Bringing the Story Home
There is another symmetry in this story that means a great deal to me.
Dispossessed will be officially launched on 5 December at the Daylesford Highland Gathering in Victoria.
There is something wonderfully fitting about that.
Margaret and Martin left Scotland and crossed the world to make a life in Australia. More than 170 years later, their story will be told at a Scottish gathering in the country they came to call home.
Highland gatherings in Australia are about more than tartan, pipes and dancing. They are also places where a diaspora comes together carrying memories, traditions and stories inherited from an ancestral homeland.
Some of those connections remain vivid. Others have faded over generations. But the gathering itself is a reminder that migration does not always mean leaving everything behind.
People carry pieces of home with them.
Songs. Stories. Names. Traditions. Memories.
And sometimes, generations later, those pieces find their way back together.
That seems an appropriate place to launch Margaret and Martin's story.
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 novel follows the McGilvray family from Mull to Geelong, the Victorian goldfields and ultimately Wareek, exploring migration, land, family and the difficult question of what it means to belong.
The book will receive its official in-person launch at the Daylesford Highland Gathering on Saturday, 5 December 2026.
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