Life

by Tim Flannery

  Buckley’s fascination has proved enduring. More than fifty years after his death Melbourne newspapers were still devoting considerable column inches to his story. Several books and articles have been written about him, and his narrative was revived in 1967, and again (along with related papers) in 1979 and 1996. There is an intriguing novel, Buckley’s Hope by Craig Robertson, which tells Buckley’s story from the imaginative viewpoint and is well worth reading. Buckley is also one of the few Australian historical figures whose name has entered the idiom. ‘You’ve got Buckley’s chance, mate’ means that you have almost no chance at all; though it seems that the establishment of Buckley & Nunn’s department store in Melbourne gave the saying new life as a pun.

  Buckley’s survival against the odds, both among his own countrymen and the Aborigines, does seem astounding. Because of his height he fought as ‘pivot man’ in the King’s Own Regiment of Foot against Napoleon in the Netherlands, where he was held in high esteem and was wounded in action. His military career was blighted, however, when, on 2 August 1802, he was convicted at Sussex Assizes of knowingly having received a bolt of stolen cloth. He was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, and in April 1803 was shipped aboard the Calcutta which, along with the supply ship Ocean, comprised Victoria’s ‘first fleet’. The vessels were bound for Port Phillip Bay, discovered just the year before by Lieutenant Murray of the Lady Nelson. The 300 convicts were under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins of the Royal Marines, a veteran in the field of convict transportation, having served as judge advocate with the First Fleet.

  When the vessels arrived in the south-east corner of the bay in early October, many of the passengers were at first delighted. ‘Nothing could be more pleasing to the eye than the beautiful green plains with lofty trees which surrounded us. In short the country appeared more like pleasure grounds than a wild savage continent,’ wrote Nicholas Pateshall, a lieutenant on the Calcutta. The location chosen for the settlement was Sullivan Bay near present-day Sorrento, some ninety kilometres south of where Melbourne would be founded. Despite its beauty the choice proved to be a disaster, for the soil was barren and sandy, and the water brackish and hard to procure. Within a couple of months, Collins and most of the convicts were preparing to desert the place, and it was at this critical moment that William Buckley made his life-changing decision to escape.

  Buckley was not the first convict to attempt to abscond, for twelve others had earlier tried, all of whom, Pateshall tells us, ‘had been taken and severely punished’. Buckley and his five co-conspirators (of whom Buckley mentions only two in his narratives) were much smarter. They chose Christmas Eve 1803, when the officers were presumably well lubricated with spirits and dead to the world in their stretchers, to pilfer critically needed goods—a gun, boots, and items from the hospital tent. A couple of days later, at 9 pm on 27 December, they made their break, all succeeding except Charles Shaw, who was shot and severely wounded. And this is the last, for thirty-two years, that the wider world hears of William Buckley. When David Collins, in no doubt of his fate, proclaimed him dead, it was probably just what Buckley wanted.

  Buckley traipsed around virtually the entire circumference of Port Phillip Bay before he found his future home on the Bellarine Peninsula, now made famous by the ABC television drama Sea Change. Few parts of Australia can boast such rich resources. Its sea is bounteous, including exposed ocean beaches, sheltered bayside waters, and a variety of estuaries and lagoons. It is blessed with a mild climate and reliable rainfall, and its soils are among the best Australia has to offer. It is also breathtakingly beautiful, as anyone who has looked from the peninsula over the bay to the You Yang ranges will know. The white sands, azure shallows and brooding, distant hills set among fertile plains that one still sees today would all have been familiar to William Buckley.

  Two of the most glorious places on the peninsula became Buckley’s principal haunts. One he described as being ‘surrounded by the sea and the Barwin River’. It was the headquarters of the Bengali tribe and is today known as Barwon Heads, one of Victoria’s most popular holiday destinations. The other, Buckley’s beloved Karaaf (or Kaaraf), is a small estuary located just a few kilometres to the west. It is now the site of the hamlet of Breamlea, on Thompson’s (or Bream) Creek. There, Buckley built a substantial hut with turf-covered logs; and the bream, which were then prolific, along with the roots of the yam daisy, formed his principal food. Indeed it was his skill in trapping bream and feeding his adopted tribe that led to him being given a wife.

  You can see why the Karaaf appealed so strongly to Buckley, for Thompson’s Creek is teeming with life, its muddy flats riddled with the burrows of worms, crabs and shrimp that feed huge numbers of birds and fish. A sand dune protects the estuary from wind, and the landscape, perched between ocean and placid creek, has a deeply appealing aspect.

  While the Karaaf has changed relatively little since Buckley’s time, other aspects of the region that Buckley describes are now very different. Elephant seals and sea lions abounded on the coast between Indented Head and Torquay, and eels were present in such numbers that they could feed a tribe for months. Waterbirds dotted the lakes and rivers in almost unbelievable profusion, and included species such as the brolga and magpie geese that today are found only far to the north. Their vast breeding aggregations on the Western District lakes formed living larders for the tribes for months on end, and the birds returned each year despite the hunting. And the basalt plains also were rich in game, including the now vanished plains turkey, along with kangaroo, wallaby, koala and wombat.

  In one way Buckley’s story of life in this abundant region is deceptively simple. It tells of his adoption by, and life among, the Aborigines of the Wallarranga (or Wattawarre) tribe of the Wathaurung people. They called him Murrangurk, believing that he was a man who had been killed shortly before and who—in the shape of William Buckley—had returned to earthly life. The belief that whites were Aborigines come back from the dead seems to have been widespread during the early-contact period in Australia, so in this Buckley was hardly exceptional. His experience thereafter, however, was unique, for no other European lived among Aborigines in a pre-contact situation for so long, and none gained the status in Aboriginal society that Buckley eventually enjoyed. His narrative therefore reveals Aboriginal life from a perspective of extended privilege. Dealing with Aboriginal society before it was so greatly disturbed by the European invasion, it provides a precious insight into an ancient and vanished world.

  Given the light it shines on Aboriginal life, the reader comes to Buckley’s text brimming with questions. Was he truthful? How much is his story coloured by the years that intervened before it was committed to paper? And what sort of mind was acting as a lens on this lost world?

  As to his truthfulness, we know that Buckley could lie when it suited him. In 1835 he lied about his convict past, but that is understandable given his uncertainty about the kind of reception he would receive in the European camp. He also gives three different (though neighbouring) locations as his place of birth. This may, however, indicate an imperfect memory rather than mendacity. And as we have seen, he could remain silent on things when he wanted to. It seems to me that Buckley is not always entirely candid in his storytelling, instead revealing aspects of his experience to serve some greater aim. You get a sense of this secretive, mysterious man in the portrait that adorns the 1852 publication. As he stares out at us from the frontispiece Buckley looks rather like the Cheshire Cat, his lips betraying the faintest of smiles. Yet his eyes look past us into the distance, ignoring us, but all the while fixed on his own, unseen goal.

  Despite these caveats, there is nothing to suggest that Buckley is being deliberately misleading about Aboriginal society in his Life and Adventures. It is true that he was not a man like Sir Joseph Banks or Watkin Tench, who revealed the newly discovered Australia through the lens of Enlightenment thinking. Buckley was altogether a more simple soul. While that brings its own limit
ations to the story, it’s well to remember that it’s sometimes the simplest source that provides the clearest vision.

  The reader may be horrified to find in Buckley’s narrative the Pallidurgbarrans, a people notorious for their cannibal practices ‘not only eating human flesh greedily after a fight, but on all occasions when it was possible’. The women particularly were renowned for ‘sacrificing’ their children. These barbarous ‘people’ were, according to Buckley, of light copper colour with tremendous protruding bellies, and they slept like animals, without shelter, in their dank Otway forests. Buckley solemnly informs us that a huge fire was set to suffocate them, and that the last survivors were turned to stone. ‘We saw no more of them in my time,’ he writes in conclusion. It might also surprise the reader to discover Buckley’s sighting of the bunyip in a lake at Waurn Ponds (on what is now the outskirts of Geelong). In an eyewitness account that perhaps helped the creature enter Anglo-Australian folklore as a credible entity, he reported that the beast was ‘covered with feathers of a dusky grey colour…about the size of a full grown calf, and sometimes larger’.

  When reading about the bunyip and Pallidurgbarrans, we need to remember that Buckley was a rural Cheshireman who doubtless believed implicitly in the faeries and hobgoblins of his homeland. Likewise, the Aboriginal people who were educating Buckley about their environment made no clear division between myth and material reality; instead both were interwoven in a seamless view of the world. I think that in his discourse on the Pallidurgbarrans and the bunyip, Buckley is describing life through the experiential eyes of his Aboriginal family—and this includes the phenomena at the edge of their social universe. There is not the slightest impression that Buckley is reporting anything but what he sensed was true, yet for the modern reader there is equally little doubt that bunyips and Pallidurgbarrans are mythical beings. This aspect of his narrative is something that makes Buckley special, for in a very deep sense he entered into Aboriginal life and understood it as did no other outsider, revealing it to us in that light. It also means, however, that we must be cautious in our approach to interpreting the text.

  The more fundamental problem in coming to terms with Buckley lies in reconciling the two versions of his life, neither of which the barely literate man penned himself. The accounts by George Langhorne and John Morgan were written seventeen years apart, and while similar in general outline they differ vastly in tone. This is because they were recalled under remarkably different circumstances, and were written for very different reasons.

  Morgan’s 1852 The Life and Adventures of William Buckley is by far the more famous of the two accounts, and indeed has come to be thought of as the Buckley story. One could hardly expect a book written under the burden of financial penury suffered by both Morgan and Buckley to be entirely candid, and as we shall soon see, Life and Adventures has its own distinct bias. Langhorne’s 1835 account suffers from a different problem. At the time it was taken down, Buckley’s English was rudimentary, and communication with Langhorne was excruciating and uncertain. Perhaps as a result it is brief to the point of frustration, the reader heartily wishing amplification of the many fascinating issues it raises.

  The most striking overall difference between the two narratives is the lighter mood of the Langhorne script. In it Buckley reminisces fondly about his time among the Wallarranga. He also makes an extraordinary admission, reporting that he was quite aware of the visits of European sealers to Westernport Bay, but that he kept well away from them. He justifies his action by commenting that:

  during thirty years residence among the natives I had become so reconciled to my singular lot—that although opportunities offered, and I sometimes thought of going to the Europeans I had heard were at Western Port I never could make up my mind to leave the party to whom I had become attached. When therefore I heard of the arrival of Mr Batman and his party it was some time before I would go down as I never supposed I should be comfortable among my own countrymen again.

  Nothing could provide a stronger contrast to the tone of Life and Adventures. Here we encounter Buckley as an abject Robinson Crusoe, who on several occasions is so miserable with his adopted family that he leaves them to live as a hermit. While there is no doubt that Buckley occasionally suffered in the wilds, particularly before he was adopted by his Aboriginal family, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the stark emphasis on the bad times in Life and Adventures is designed to evoke the sympathy of the reader. If so it succeeded abundantly, for shortly after the book’s publication the new Colony of Victoria granted Buckley a pension of £40 per year.

  Strangely, in light of its tale of loneliness and peril, Life and Adventures occasionally exhibits a wry, self-deprecating sense of humour, such as when Buckley recalls that at age fifteen he ‘was apprenticed… to be taught the art and mystery of building houses for other people to live in, it being my fate…to inhabit dwellings of a very different description’. Just how much of this endearing quality is due to Buckley and how much is the work of his editor John Morgan, wishing to make the book more appealing, is unclear. Yet it’s a kind of humour that is greatly loved by Aboriginal people, and there are hints of it in other writings relating to Buckley.

  Reading Life and Adventures one could imagine that Buckley lived as a celibate for much of his time among the Aborigines. He is far more candid about sexual matters in the Langhorne account, perhaps because he is closer to the experiences he is describing and has not yet learned how to cloak them in mid-nineteenth century decorum. He says that ‘promiscuous intercourse of the sexes is not uncommon, and in certain festivals is enjoined—at certain times the women are lent to the young men who have not wives’. Langhorne adds that ‘Buckley says he did not live with any black woman; but I have doubted from circumstances which came under my notice the truth of this assertion, and also I think it probable he had children’. This suspicion received support almost fifty years later when James Dawson, a Victorian pioneer and champion of Aboriginal people, published an account of Buckley by his Aboriginal wife. Her name was Purranmurnin Tallarwurnin, and in later life she lived on Framlingham mission station in Victoria’s Western District. Her account was obtained by the superintendent of the station sometime prior to 1881.

  Purranmurnin Tallarwurnin tells us that she originally belonged to the Buninyong tribe and was around fifteen when she became ‘acquainted’ with Buckley. She recalled that an Aboriginal man found Buckley’s ‘giant’ tracks, and followed them until he ‘discovered a strange-looking being lying down on a small hillock, sunning himself after a bath in the sea’. The man returned with others, but

  when they came near he took little or no notice of them, and did not even alter his position for some time. They were greatly alarmed. At length one of the party, finding courage, addressed him as muurnong guurk (meaning…one who had been killed and come to life again), and asked his name, ‘you Kondak Baarwon?’ Buckley replied by a prolonged grunt and an inclination of his head, signifying yes… They made a wuurn of leafy branches for him, and lit a fire in front of it, around which they all assembled. He was then recognised as one of the tribe…When ships visited the coast to get wood or water, Buckley never sought to make himself known to any of them.

  Buckley admitted to having had a daughter by his ‘Aboriginal wife’, probably this same Purranmurnin Tallarwurnin, yet there is no mention of her in his own book nor in Langhorne’s narrative. One wonders whether she and the person identified in Life and Adventures as the daughter of Buckley’s brother-in-law (whom Buckley claims to have adopted) were one and the same. If so, their parting was tragic. Buckley, perhaps knowing that he was incapable of defending her from attempted abduction or other violence, gave her to the man ‘to whom in her infancy she had been promised’, though this fellow and his first wife were very reluctant to take her at such a tender age.

  There is much in Buckley’s account of Aboriginal life that may shock contemporary Australian sensibilities. We want to know how much of this information is tru
e, either of Aboriginal Australia in general, or the western Victorian situation in particular.

  Life and Adventures has much to say about cannibalism, and the scenes are both graphic and disturbing. The practice, Buckley tells us, either allows the consumer to avoid an unspecified catastrophe or express grief for a dead child or other relative. On several occasions he describes the practice of eating flesh from the legs of slain warriors which, according to Buckley, was ‘greedily devoured by these savages’. Yet he gives as the reason for this ‘greedy devouring’, feelings of ‘respect for the deceased’.

  Langhorne’s narrative reveals cannibalism in a different light, giving somewhat different reasons for the practice. Here we find no greedy savages, but people who ‘eat small portions of the flesh of their adversaries slain in battle. They appeared to do this not from any particular partiality for human flesh, but from the impression that by eating their enemies they would themselves become more able warriors.’ Buckley continues that ‘many of them are disgusted with this ceremony and refusing to eat, merely rub their bodies with a small portion of fat as a charm equally efficient’. The Langhorne narrative confirms, however, the practice of mortuary cannibalism for love, relating that ‘they eat also of the flesh of their own children to whom they have been much attached should they die a natural death’.