The McMillan Diaries was the recipient of the 2019 AAWP/UWAP Meniscus Chapter One Prize for manuscripts. It is slated for a 2026 release through Vitagraph publishing and will be available for preorder soon. Its own dedicated website is forthcoming.

From 1840-1850, pastoralist Angus McMillan and his men waged war against the Gunaikurnai people on the Gippsland frontiers, resulting in the deaths of thousands and widespread displacement.

In 2010, his distant descendant, Western Sydney property developer Samhain McMillan was declared missing while visiting Gippsland. The only clues to his whereabouts are a series of diaries uncovered at his last known location, while official investigations have borne no fruit.

Since his disappearance, the case and its subject have become an object of fascination to the Australian public. Like his ancestor, Angus McMillan, Sam McMillan was beneficiary to the spoils of tangible human misery, but nevertheless retroactively attained deific status.

Canadian researchers Dr Jeanette Dawson and Percival Watson attempt to unravel the mysteries of McMillan’s disappearance, compiling all of McMillan’s known writings, forensic evidence, critical perspectives, historical contexts, and more, ultimately confronting the question: What turns a man into a myth despite his misdeeds?

What happened to Sam McMillan?

Praise for The McMillan Diaries

“Like the narco-tropic compositions of deranged psychopharmacologist, Ellis Carmichael, whose amoral interventions are a catalytic agent for the enigmatic events surrounding Samhain McMillan’s much mythologised disappearance, Benjamin D. Muir’s experiments on the outer limits of post-colonial fiction offer a psyche-altering amalgam of genres and technical ecstasies. The McMillain Diaries transubstantiates from a Lovecraftian gothic satire of late-capitalism’s eldritch excesses, into a footnote-frenzied disquisition on the conspiratorial nature of Australian literature’s fascist underpinnings that, in turn, frames a first-person expose of the performative absurdities present in Melbourne’s contemporary anarchist movements, all underscored by a bloody retelling of Oedipus Rex as suburban body horror set in Western Sydney. Nesting these wild intersections in a postmodern parody of meta-fictive literary largess that pays playful homage to Mark Z. Danielewski’s cult classic, House of Leaves, Muir’s heteroglossic novel is an admixture of literary innovations and stylistic interventions intent on coming to terms with fiction’s radical function in a nation stricken by contesting testimonies, ignoble amnesias, and genocidal histories.”

Luke Carman, author of An Elegant Young Man, Intimate Antipathies, and An Ordinary Ecstacy

“A nitromethane-powered burst of literary maximalism that confronts the problems of history and the multigenerational horror of frontier massacres. Benjamin D. Muir writes from the edge and on the edge, and that’s where you get stuff that matters.”

Michael Winkler, author of Grimmish

“Reading Muir’s [until now unpublished] work has been a welcome reminder of something I’ve felt for a long time: that the best writing in Australia is sitting unpublished in a Dropbox folder, not between the pages of the literary rags.”

Max Easton, author of The Magpie Wing and Paradise Estates

“For me, it evokes Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, Borges, Sebald – that delicious feeling that the writer is somehow ‘having a lend of one’, dismantling (and satirizing?) the kind of assurances and conventions that usually support this mode of inquiry.”

Michael Meehan, author of The Salt of Broken Tears, Deception, Below the Styx, Stormy Weather, and An Ungrateful Instrument