Seek The Substantial

The current Beau Miles video is about the trek of one Angus McMillan, described by Miles as murderous and yes, that would seem to be the case. As Miles grew up as a young Australian lad, he was led to believe that McMillian was an explorer and pioneer, one to be celebrated. Heck, one to even have a trek named after him of more than 220 kilometers through the rugged terrain of Omeo and Dargo in 1864. The tricky part here is that he was murderous, particularly of the Kurnai indigenous people, which you could generally know that this is  south-east Australia. Check out this resume, not all by the hands of McMillan, but he’s got more than one entry (which is not good):

1840 – Nuntin- unknown number killed by Angus McMillan’s men
1840 – Boney Point – “Angus McMillan and his men took a heavy toll of Aboriginal lives”
1841 – Butchers Creek – 30-35 shot by Angus McMillan’s men
1841 – Maffra – unknown number shot by Angus McMillan’s men
1842 – Skull Creek – unknown number killed
1842 – Bruthen Creek – “hundreds killed”
1843 – Warrigal Creek – between 60 and 180 shot by Angus McMillan and his men
1844 – Maffra – unknown number killed
1846 – South Gippsland – 14 killed
1846 – Snowy River – 8 killed by Captain Dana and the Aboriginal Police
1846-47 – Central Gippsland – 50 or more shot by armed party hunting for a white woman supposedly held by Aborigines; no such woman was ever found
1850 – East Gippsland – 15-20 killed
1850 – Murrindal – 16 poisoned
1850 – Brodribb River – 15-20 killed

And then check out this quote from a squatter (that’s someone who is stealing land right from under your nose) named Henry Meyrick as to what he and probably others thought about the indigenous peoples there:

The blacks are very quiet here now, poor wretches. No wild beast of the forest was ever hunted down with such unsparing perseverance as they are. Men, women and children are shot whenever they can be met with … I have protested against it at every station I have been in Gippsland, in the strongest language, but these things are kept very secret as the penalty would certainly be hanging … For myself, if I caught a black actually killing my sheep, I would shoot him with as little remorse as I would a wild dog, but no consideration on earth would induce me to ride into a camp and fire on them indiscriminately, as is the custom whenever the smoke is seen. They [the Aborigines] will very shortly be extinct. It is impossible to say how many have been shot, but I am convinced that not less than 500 have been murdered altogether.

That’s quite a way to say that you think a human is not a human.

The good news is that the Kurnai are the traditional owners of Gippsland, the area where McMillan trudged through, which has led to trying to understand what “traditional owner” means. What I can tell, Australia is more open to the idea of giving back rights to land that was occupied by others before Europeans arrived, that there’s a difference between land rights and native title, land rights are created by the government and are like perpetual leases while native title is the recognition of pre-existing indigenous rights.

Back to Miles, he’s running because he hates that there is this track named after a man who murdered so many people. The video is great too because Miles fails his first attempt at the run, it’s too hot and he doesn’t urinate (that’s not a good combo) and he gives it another go in the second video (it’s a 3 part series).

Good on Beau for making me do a deep dive on something I never would have known about.

Texas Monthly’s Peter Holley writes about a man and the hog he raised that tried to kill him:

The memories feed off the mystery that surrounds them. More than a year after the attack, Riley still has no idea what caused his favorite animal to turn on him. They’d both been in the pen earlier that day and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Waylon’s pen-mate, an easygoing female warthog named Peaches, wasn’t in heat and Waylon wasn’t being cornered when he attacked, nor did he appear to be guarding his food. Extensive therapy has helped Austin work through traumatic memories and flashbacks that plagued him for the first year after the attack. A part of him now feels grateful for what happened. He frequently thanks God that Waylon attacked him instead of one of his family members. He credits the attack with bringing him closer to his then girlfriend of three months, Kennedy, whom he hopes to someday marry. He is also grateful that he didn’t stop fighting, not just because he gave himself another shot at life, but because—in a twisted Texas warrior sort of way—he survived an encounter with an animal that is built to battle lions. How many individuals can say that?