Is Storytelling in the Blood?

​I remember being stirred as I swung down the main street of Broken Hill, marching behind a Scottish Pipe Band. Was it the Baird in me that surfaced with the skirl of the bagpipes that day?  Traditionally the Bairds were bards - travelling storytellers who wove wondrous tales, repeated age old myths and told gospel stories among the scattered dwellings of my ancestors. It was a noble calling because their Celtic songs were the music of the Scottish heart. READ MORE …

I remember being stirred as I swung down the main street of Broken Hill, marching behind a Scottish Pipe Band. Was it the Baird in me that surfaced with the skirl of the bagpipes that day?  Traditionally the Bairds were bards - travelling storytellers who wove wondrous tales, repeated age-old myths and told gospel stories among the scattered dwellings of my ancestors. It was a noble calling because their Celtic songs were the music of the Scottish heart. 
Maybe that’s why I’m a storyteller...I’ve been known to recount a myth or two in my time!

Half a world away from Scotland, the rural town of Maclean, on the banks of the Clarence River in NSW, has painted each clan tartan on 200 telegraph poles to celebrate its Scottish heritage. The townsfolk have gone to the trouble to build a cairn of rocks brought from Scotland and from across Australia, to recognise the grafting of Scottish stories into our modern Australian history. Many of the Scots immigrants were refugees driven off their native Highlands in the mid-19th century and forbidden to speak their native Gaelic.
 
I suspect the same dislocation from traditional country and stories happened to my folk.
 
Still, I felt proud as my grandson posed beside the pole displaying our Baird clan plaid. Tobin’s also got Murray blood, so he’s more Scots than me!  But I felt sad too, because I learned that these tartans were used to signal a religious divide. Apparently, blue branded you Protestant, red declared you Catholic. Maclean boasts two Presbyterian kirks and a large Catholic Church.
 
Religious pride was precisely what Jesus disdained the most.
 
I wondered if Scotland’s patron saint, Andrew, would have wept over all the Scottish blood that stained the heather in the name of the Jesus he loved. The story told was that this disciple humbly chose to be crucified in the X form rather than copy the crucifixion of the Master he served and it's now the white cross of St Andrew on the Scottish flag. It is also contained in our Australian flag and said to symbolise free speech, rule of law and democracy - the foundations of our nation. 
 
It would do us all good to add Andrew’s humility as a national ideal.
 
The Baird clan motto is ‘The Lord Made’. I've decided my calling is to be the bard who sings songs telling of the bigger story that Andrew the fisherman from Galilee preached. He learned it from his friend Jesus and it's the one that reconciles all clans to God. I hear it's lilting music everywhere in Australia - even in the drone of bagpipes and didgeridoos!
 
It puts a swing in your step if you follow.



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