‘I don’t want you to watch me die’: the last words my father said before sending me away

The red earth of Northwest Queensland is tough country to get rough news. Full of copper, lead, zinc and gold, it supports little other than snappy gum, turpentine, buffel grass and a cassia capable of piercing car tyres, or your shoes.

In February 1990, I was standing on that red dirt crying. A coltish boy of 20, I was surrounded by the detritus of an exploratory mining camp: accommodation block, humming aircons, tricked-out Jeeps and, somewhere, my boss in his beloved T-shirt showing a crouching man with the caption: “I’m so happy I could shit”. Next to me was Yvonne, a geologist a few years older than me on whom I had a crush. A second geologist wandered over, a rangy fellow in his 30s. He asked what was up. When I didn’t reply, Yvonne told him I’d just heard my father had died, half a world away in Scotland. The man thought about this, then said: “Don’t worry, death is just nature’s way of telling you to slow down.”

Three and a half decades on, mining may not have emotionally matured, but it’s certainly slicker. It’s September 2023, and I’m in Brisbane, about to return to that scene. I have become a father, at the somewhat advanced age of 52, so of course I’ve been thinking about my relationship with my own. Brisbane airport is like the set of a dystopian movie where Schwarzenegger is off to mine the Andromeda: passengers march about in name-tagged red overalls, while the Tannoy thanks us for complying to airport rules.

The plane to Mount Isa is an airbus to the pithead. After three hours we descend over a scarred landscape. On the ground, the owner of the car-rental company hands over a Toyota Land Cruiser with bullbars, numeric decals and a yellow rooftop light. “We don’t get many recreational clients,” he says. The 75 miles to Cloncurry takes me past the old Mary Kathleen uranium mine that once gave Britain’s nuclear arsenal its zing. I turn north and after 30 more miles pull up at the Quamby, a self-styled “pub in the scrub”. Despite having closed for a decade between my visits, it’s returned to life virtually unchanged. A barn of a place, it has a corrugated iron roof, a mural of a sleeping roustabout and plenty of cold beer. A rancher at the bar asks if I am passing through and when I tell him I worked nearby back in the 90s, he says: “Aw yeah? Did they have the pig tied to the front porch then?”

The idea of returning to Queensland had come a couple of years earlier, on Guy Fawkes Night 2021. I was in Havana, Cuba, where I now live, in the González Coro hospital looking at the face of my newly minted son. I had been running from small faces my entire life – he’s my first – but those little features… Well, his all-but-closed eyes might have been filled with gunk, but mine were running clear. The hospital had chucked me out – Covid protocols – so I’d retreated to a hidden garden around the corner, La Reserva, which had become something of a speakeasy during the pandemic. I ordered rum and thought about many things that night, but that scene in the Australian desert kept coming back. “What was I doing there?” I wondered.

The question returned over the months that followed, in those hours spent walking up and down during the night, the boy in my arms. It’s a time he will never remember and I’ll never forget, of pausing to gaze down at Havana’s badly lit streets, where night fishermen rolled their rafts back from the seafront. I was experiencing a consequence of having a child, a rewiring of my synapses. Memories that had previously been slippery, drifting off behind me, were coming back.

My father hadn’t been one for crying. I only saw him weep once, 10 months before he died and the news reached me in the Australian desert. This was in Scotland, at the family farm in the mountains of Sutherland. I had just returned from London and we were in his office.

My mother was in the front room, in a coffin on trestles. My father had been standing behind his desk. Beyond him the window looked out on a bank of rhododendrons, the sky gloomy. He’d begun to sob in that way of someone unused to it. I had no idea what to do, so I said, “She’s in a better place.” He’d looked at me, appalled, then replied: “She’s not in a better place Ruaridh, she’s in the other room.”

They had blamed Chornobyl, but he’d been a smoker, a metronome of my childhood the tap-tap-tap of his pipe on the road as he leaned out of his pickup truck to clean it. My mother had been fending off lymphoma for eight years. With my father’s diagnosis the fight went out of her.

After her funeral, my father said he was buying me a round-the-world airline ticket. I hadn’t made their last years easy. I’d been sent away to a school in the beautiful Perthshire hills that turned out to be a walled tornado of bullying. The misery still makes me shake: even now I’d see the place razed, the ground ploughed and salted. The school authorities didn’t like me either. At 16, I was told it was best if I left.

I returned to the Highlands and proceeded to get in trouble with the police. My father bought me an old Skoda for £250 and, as I turned 17, granted my wish that I take it to London. He told others that he was worried I’d be dead in under a week.

I survived, if on a diet of Guinness and Häagen-Dazs. When, two years later, I asked why he thought I should go round the world, he said: “You watched your mother die, I don’t want you to see me die, too.” I worked my notice in London and returned home one last time. Then he drove me to Inverness train station and we shook hands on the concourse, he taking the unusual step of putting his other hand on my elbow. “Don’t come back,” he said. He meant for his funeral.

And so, all these years later, here I am in Australia, leaning on the bonnet of my rented Land Cruiser, the morning sun warming me. I’ve pulled over on a dusty trail that leads towards a distant ridge of hills, hoping to conjure up the past, to see myself as I was just before I received the news he’d died.

Cattle are fidgeting grumpily in front of me while finches frolic in the trees above. I remember that in February 1990, it was so hot that the dogs wouldn’t get out of the truck, but I hadn’t had that choice: I was a geologist’s field assistant and where Yvonne pointed, I’d dig.

A friend of a friend, a helicopter pilot who worked for the company, had got me the job. I drove a Jeep until Yvonne told me where to stop. Then I’d dig down a foot or two, she would reach in, pick up a pebble, use her geologist’s pick to break it open and lick the surface. It was sexy.

I had been moving out of childhood, attempting to create something of myself, attempting to impress Yvonne. And then came the message that my brother was trying to reach me. It hadn’t been unexpected; stepping on to the train at Inverness, I’d known I would never see my father again.

The cows don’t like my being here, are shifting grumpily, and my younger self evaporates. I get back into the Land Cruiser and keep driving. The scrub gives way to a park full of beautiful horses and I arrive at Mount Roseby station. Harold Macmillan, the rancher, is under a gumtree full of cockatoos. Funny kind of retirement after Downing Street, I say, and he replies: “Not many people make that joke any more.”

The camp had been on the McMillans’ sprawling ranch. Harold and his wife, Cathie, offer me tea in their low-slung home. They remember the miners well. “We were very friendly with Ian Whitcher, the consultant geologist,” Harold says. “He’d walk the land, mapping it. He used to come back every August, arrive out of the bush with a handful of gold for Cathie. He was a tough, bloody Welshman. They had to scalp him for a melanoma, but I think it got him in the end.”

I like Harold and Cathie, their stoicism undercut with feeling. My mother would have liked them, too, admired their industry, their sense of family. My mother left a note when she died, wishing her children the luck in love she’d enjoyed. I ask Harold about the landscape. He tells me the names of things and says the buffel grass arrived in the packing of the old Afghan camel trains, seeding and allowing the ranching of cattle.

“There’s more grass than usual because the rains this year were heavy,” he says. “But that means the fires will be terrible.”

The McMillans have no airs, but plenty of heirs. Their nine children, who Cathie educated herself, have given them 23 grandchildren. On various stations across Queensland and the Northern Territory, the McMillans and their children run 100,000 head of cattle.

Our farm back in Scotland was very different. It was heather and pine cut by peat-dark streams and patches of hard-won green, but it was also tough and isolated, two miles to the nearest house. We – my siblings and I – sold it after our parents died. It had been their dream, bought the year I was born. But we loved it, too. It was a place of imagination, the only distraction books – the hills were too high for television.

The airline ticket my father bought taught me something magical, that I could escape the humiliations of my school days for places where no one knew me. As I took to travelling, the discomfort I felt in my own skin fell away. Moving on became something of a pathology. In my 20s, if I grew too close to anyone, I’d say, “I love you, but I have to go and live abroad.” I’d come up with some excuse, sometimes an actual job. But after a few months I’d be heading in the opposite direction. I got used to baffled expressions.

I’d found I could create myself anew as someone I might want to be, staying ahead of those who would call me out. After a couple of embarrassments, I learned not to take reinvention too far, to tether myself to the truth even as the past was growing more hazy. Which is good, because it turns out that if you keep running, at some point you’ll meet someone you don’t want to run from. One day I’ll tell my son that’s where babies come from.

Another spectacular dawn, and I drive out to where the mining camp used to be. What was barely a track is now a two-lane highway that ends in a gatehouse. A big zinc mine has opened, its workers bused in and out. I park by the bridge over the Dugald River. An emu is herding her chicks on the dry bed below. It’s tea-time in Havana, so I call home, wanting to show my boy this scene. Santiago’s little face, covered in black beans and rice, fills the screen. “Papa!” he shouts and the emus take off.

I clamber down to the riverbed and try to point out willie wagtails in the eucalyptus, but he can’t see. He gets bored and is gone. I look around. If I am searching for profundity in this place, I’m finding none. No bush ignites in front of me. All I’m left with is that question: “What was I doing here?” I think about my father buying me that airline ticket, saying goodbye for the last time in the grey of Inverness train station, sending away a son – idiotic, drifting, barely capable – that he could no longer protect. It was his last attempt to spark something in his boy, before he was taken by the darkness.

There is not even a breeze in the trees. It dawns on me that while I might have been half a world away from my father, I’m now half a world away from my own son. And I think: “What am I doing here?”