A few days before Christmas Day 1852, the Scots McIvor family were preparing for the Yuletide in their home in Coburg, a suburb to Melbourne’s north, just a little off the track that would, after an extremely arduous journey of several weeks, eventually lead to Sydney. Not that the McIvors had ever taken that journey themselves, and nor were they likely to. Having migrated from Scotland a decade earlier, they had done all the travelling they ever intended to do. Nevertheless, many of their traditions had been brought with them, and one of those was the celebration of a very Scottish Christmas. Being Presbyterians, there was little in the way of showiness, but one or two hymns, a shortbread and a haggis could always be counted upon. This year, however, a sense of unease was running through the family, as it was for many of the Scots of Melbourne. Certainly, every Christmas in this new country was somewhat odd, occurring as it did in the midst of a summer that, before leaving the frigid climate of Inverness, they scarcely believed was possible.
The talk among the Melbourne Scots this Christmas was of the ship that had arrived at the Heads some weeks back, and was still confined to quarantine. A thousand Highlanders were said to be aboard her, and the loss of life had already been terrible. However, no passenger list was as yet available, so no one could have any idea who was on board. McIvor, in his sixties and very much the patriarch of the family, tried not to listen to the rumours, but as time went on, they became virtually unavoidable. The papers—his friends were telling him—were starting to talk about this ‘fever ship’, this ‘plague ship’ and her sorry passengers, stranded and sick, so close yet so far from their destination of Melbourne. ‘The unfortunate new arrivals,’ penned McIvor’s grandson John Andrew McIvor many years later, in an article that appeared in The Argus in August 1934, ‘were as remote as though on a distant island.’ Old McIvor had been lucky, he knew. The ship on which he and his family had made the voyage had been a small one, and illness had hardly gained a foothold, despite the journey having taken much longer than that of the Ticonderoga.
A doctor, he had heard this very morning on one of his regular leisurely visits to Haymarket in Melbourne to meet friends and read the newspapers, had just returned from the quarantine station itself. Two or three people were still dying every day, he had said. Some said the disease was yellow fever, others that it was the dreaded scarlet fever. Others still said it was yellow jack, a terrifying sickness usually found in the American south, but since the ship had come from that part of the world in the first place and traded there regularly, that’s what some had convinced themselves it was. McIvor listened solemnly but said nothing.
Then, late one evening on the day before Christmas Eve, while McIvor’s wife—known to all simply as Granny—was making the shortbread with the imprint of the Scots thistle, a knock was heard at the door. Visitors at this hour were not usual, and when McIvor answered the door, he nearly fell back in the stoop with shock. Standing before him was a young man, barely older than a boy. He was filthy, thin and exhausted, but in the unmistakable accent of his homeland, uttered the words he had for days repeated over in his head,
Your cousin, the wife of Malcolm McRae, came in the ship Ticonderoga. I am her son, but my sister Janet and my two younger brothers died of the fever since we were landed at Point Nepean, and I have walked from that place with another young man and we followed the beach till we came to Melbourne.1
With that, the young man, seventeen-year-old Christopher McRae, collapsed in the doorway.
McIvor shouted to his wife, and as both of them brought the boy inside, she exclaimed loudly in Gaelic. Here was young Christopher, the son of her dear cousin Helen, having come all that way from Inverness—can you believe it?—and on that terrible ship everyone was talking about. They sat him down and he devoured the fresh scones that had been prepared, as well as the tea.
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A few weeks earlier, Christopher McRae had watched his father approach Captain Boyle on the deck of the Ticonderoga to seek permission to go ashore and bury his sister, ten-year-old Janet. The kind man had assented and Christopher helped to bring his sister’s body up from where she lay in the female hospital. Then, in a small rowboat, they had been taken to the shore of the little beach where, guided by one of the seamen, they had been shown the freshly marked-up burial ground and prepared the little girl’s grave. Upon returning to the ship, it transpired that his baby brother, Malcolm, his mother’s joy, had died too. Then, a short time later, it was the turn of another brother, Farquhar, just six. As he told the story to his ageing cousins, Granny McRae let out a terrible cry, and an ancient Gaelic lamentation filled the room. She clutched her husband’s hand; he could only shake his head and stare at the floor in silence.
Christopher had been able to bear the grief of the beach no longer. Besides, he sensed his turn too would surely come if he stayed there amid the death of the quarantine station. With another young man whose name has now been forgotten, one evening he simply decided to take a walk along the beach away from the station and not return. They had told his father, who was in no position to object. He was too busy looking after his wife, Christopher’s mother Helen, but gave them the address of her cousins in Melbourne and told them to find them and tell them what had happened. Christopher and the unknown young man set out on their trek along the beach, neither knowing nor caring where it was leading, nor how they were going to get there. All they knew was that the settlement of Port Phillip was somewhere to the north, at the end of this beach. Exactly how far that was, they had no idea.
For two weeks they had walked, hugging the shore where they could, or scrambling over cliffs. They drank from puddles in the rocks, and their only sustenance came courtesy of the Aboriginal people who ate the shellfish on the shore, and a couple of surprised but kindly squatters or leaseholders who took pity on the lads and their story, furnishing them with an occasional meal.
They crossed rivers and creeks, sleeping where they could and travelling when they were able. Eventually, they came across a few outlying dwellings, which then became more frequent before passing, without them realising, the former quarantine station at Little Red Bluff, now abandoned. It was hard going and exhausting, but eventually they arrived in Melbourne, worn out after an overland journey of nearly 60 miles. At no time, despite the hardship, had they for an instant been tempted to return to the camp at the beach. Exactly how Christopher McRae managed to find his way to the address in Coburg has endured in the family as a minor miracle.
The tragedy of the McRae family was not yet finished. Three days into the new year, 1853, having lost four of her seven children, Helen McRae became one of the Ticonderoga’s final victims and also died, to be buried alongside her children: Janet, Farquhar, John and Malcolm. Having travelled so far from Scotland, she never did manage to again meet with her cousin Granny McRae in Coburg.