On a recent sanity-seeking retreat for a few weeks in Scotland, my partner and I made a visit to the isolated holy isle of Iona, stuck out in the Atlantic off the end of the larger island of Mull, one of the hundreds of isles which make up the Inner Hebrides. This whole area is wild and elemental, rugged and inspiring, windswept and wave-beaten, the scene of many ancient and medieval goings-on.
Iona is but several square kilometres in area, famous for its abbey and the remains of the old Celtic monastery founded by St Columba in the late 500s AD – it was also a Druid centre in prehistoric times. Columba was one of the 'Twelve Apostles' of Ireland, where Christianity had earlier taken root from the 300s onwards, dovetailing itself with the ancient Druidic tradition, and then spreading out to Scotland, Wales, France, Switzerland and Germany.
The strength of Celtic Christianity lay in the fact that it grew independently of the power-machinations of the Roman Church, which took upon itself large-scale spiritual and secular powers around the time of the demise in the 400s of the Roman Empire. The Romish Christians emphasised the hierarchical organising principles of Pope, clergy and the Church, claiming to hold the apostolic succession in direct line from Jesus. They also started accumulating much land and power.
The Celtic Church derived instead from two sources. The first was the slender thread of Jesus' influence which entered Britain through Joseph of Arimathaea – a financier, Essene and highly-placed protector of the Jesus operation – who settled and ended his days in Glastonbury. Tradition has it that he once upon a time brought his young relative Jesus there, during Jesus' 'lost years' between the ages of 12 and about 30, for training amongst the Druid teachers of that anciently sacred place. The second thread came through the Gnostic monastic tradition born in the Sinai desert, where St Anthony of Egypt and his friends had initiated the stoic, world-rejecting tradition of sacred hermitage. This passed directly to Ireland, and was seriously taken up there.
These two threads wove themselves into the Celtic (Britain and France) and Gaelic (Ireland and the Hebrides) worlds. Having declined from a state of high culture around 500-200BC, these Atlantic lands were hungry for a new spiritual influence which would break the mould of inter-clan bickering, raiding and power-play which had grown during that social decline. The imperialistic Romans hadn't helped.
Columba came from Ireland. He was not a saint in the pristine, humble or mystical way of other Celtic saints – such as the poetic explorer St Brendan, who sailed to America and back. Columba was an organisation man who, like St Patrick the evangelist, was interested in spreading the 'True Faith' and establishing religious institutions. He exiled himself from Ireland after getting into trouble – he was found breaching copyright of valuable handwritten texts – and sailed to Scotland in repentance, to the kingdom of Argyll (= the peninsula of the Gaels), otherwise known as the kingdom of Dalriada. He settled at Iona, a place northward up the Scottish coast from which Ireland could no longer be seen.
In the Hebrides Christianity found a foothold, not least because it had a rich civilising influence. As in the insecure and shifting Europe of the time, the Church transcended clan rivalries, feudal and national allegiances. Many monks were literate, and they carried with them skills and knowledge which many valued. All went well enough for the monks for a few centuries until, long after Columba's day, the terrorist Northmen arrived in the 800s. These avidly pagan Vikings did not like the Church, and they set about robbing churches and murdering monks, with gusto. The Vikings eventually settled down, having wreaked havoc all over Europe. However, they bring us closer to the main point of this story.
Europe of that time was a playground for aspirant heroic male chauvinists – feudal lords, kings, aspiring power-mongers, land-grabbers and other assorted knaves. Fighting and haggling over territory, chattels, booty and women was rife, and hunting, getting drunk and spilling blood were major forces in the carving of the history of the times. Hence the ongoing success of the Christians, who were literate, who followed higher principles (some gravely mistaken, though impressive), who cared for the poor and needy and developed architecture, farming and estate-management to a high degree.
The pattern of masculist internecine frictions carried on through the centuries of the Middle Ages amongst the clans of Scotland, held in place by the lairds (chiefs), whose own interests increasingly overruled the moderating influences of traditional social considerations and fair play. The lairds started as father-figures with clear duties and allegiance to the clan, and finished up being money-grabbing pieces in the power-games at the royal court in Edinburgh. Later the richer of them went to London, as English rule over Scotland consolidated itself – increasingly bleeding the Highlands and Islands of wealth. The consequence of this inter-clan divisiveness was that, by the 1700s, the English, wealthy and expansionist, decided to finalise the absorption of the Scottish Highlands to their orbit. Wales and Ireland had been taken over, and now English tentacles were reaching as far as Africa, America and India.
The Highland clans had rendered themselves internally vulnerable and splintered. They were addicted to whisky-driven heroism, battles of honour and territorial issues between themselves. The English infiltrated the clan system, drove some against others, and with the usual trickery and spillage of blood, overcame the Highlanders after the rising of 1745 (behind Bonnie Prince Charlie). They took control, building towns and roads and binding the Highlanders into the money economy. They saw the Highlands as a good source of materials – timber, wool, meat – for their growing cities and industries.
The social matrix of the clans disintegrated. All clan members had originally been allocated land rights, livelihoods, rights and responsibilities according to need and well-tried tradition. The English ended all that: clan chiefs were turned into legal property-owners of the clan lands. The lairds began a rat-race of stripping the forests of timber, turning the Highlands over to sheep grazing (for the 'dark satanic mills' of Britain). They cleared the land of what by now had become obstructive crofters (smallholders) – which meant that 70% of the population lost their homes and land rights. The rules of the clan system fell – the people were betrayed. This was a tragic breakdown for Highlanders and Hebrideans, and the beginning of a desertification in which the forests became bleak open heather moors: this phenomenon was called 'the Clearances'.
The consequence of the Clearances was the emigration of hundreds of thousands of people to the industrial cities, to North America and all points in the growing British Empire – including the then fledgling colonies of Australia and New Zealand. These were broken people, torn from their birthright and homes, deeply hurt, sometimes branded as criminals – dispossessed with little to lose. However, they were at least still alive – many lost their lives. The only option for them was to head over the horizon seeking a future.
Yet this tragedy released much energy, since the Scots are a brainy, stalwart and courageous nation, accustomed to a tough life. They played a disproportionately large role in developing the Empire and driving the forward-thrusting Victorian period. These were such people as the Carnegies in America, Livingstone in Africa – and one of Australia's founding fathers, Lachlan Macquarie, a child of the Clearances (born 1762, died 1824). Brisbane is a Scots name too. Macquarie became governor of New South Wales in 1809, and did much to build new national foundations on those far-distant shores of Australia. He returned to the Hebrides to die, however, and the Australian government maintains his grave there, on Mull, to this day.
These exiled Scots made a big difference, worldwide. Their yen for wide-open spaces moved them to explore distant lands and endure hardships others wouldn't face. On Hebridean seas and in the fierce Highland mountains nature was always wild, grand and belittling, beautiful and threatening – and survival in foreign parts was thus manageable for 'Jocks'. The cruelty and finality of their departure from the lands of the Gaels and Picts meant there was no going back, and a rugged fortitude in foreign parts was the only alternative. This applied equally to the women, who gave the colonies their first children, and who ran the outback homesteads of early Australia, while the menfolk penetrated unknown expanses by foot, horseback and ship.
Time has moved on. Today the tide is turning. The empire is long dead. The world pre-eminence of Britain and Europe is gone and the dominance of whites and males is ending. 'Progress' and 'civilisation' as we know them – worshipping quantity, greatness, ownership and control – are losing steam in the face of inevitable reaction from nature and from formerly-subjugated majorities of 'natives'. A new clan integrity is calling us from the future: the call of humanity, in which cooperation and mutually-assured security are the name of the game, and in which respect for nature and emulation of her ways constitute the means for clan survival.
Australia is no longer a child of the imperial parent, but a being in its own right. The umbilical link with the Old Country is now nearly obsolete, and the parent and the once-child now have the adult option to become friends by choice. The Macdonalds are now known as a burger joint, not great Highland clan. And Australia has a potentially crucial role to play in the future world matrix.
It was Maclean the bus-driver, who drove us along the winding single-track roads of Mull who started me off thinking about this story. It was he who talked wistfully about Macquarie and his kin. Mull is an isle of gulls and seals, lochs and muirs, crofts and castles, with ever-changing Atlantic skies. Columba left his Irish home to colonise Iona, and Macquarie left his home to colonise Australia. Too often we forget the threads of history which have made us what we now are – threads which have caused two peoples, Aussies and Pommies, each on our respective islands, to speak the same language and share related cultures, though separated by thousands of miles and millions of people unlike us.
The social foundations of Australia have a major root in the wave-battered rocky shores of the Hebrides and in the cloud-bedecked heather-clad crags of the Highlands. Bagpipes skirling from Balmain across the Parramatta carry the call of the fulmars and guillemots and the wail of winds searching for home. Interestingly for the English, both Scotland and Australia are seeking to cut their now-questionable ties with the oak-panelled ministries and regalia of London, once the centre of the world. I wonder who will do it first?
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