Life

by Tim Flannery

  Cannibalism evokes a kneejerk of horror in most people. Yet the practice has been widespread throughout history, as archaeological evidence from palaeolithic Europe and accounts of the starving attest. The strength of the cultural taboo against the consumption of human flesh may partly be explained by its high biological potential for spreading parasites and diseases like kuru (found in New Guinea and similar to mad cow disease). Yet situations clearly exist, such as during famine or on islands where protein is scarce, in which the benefits outweigh the potential costs. In such circumstances cannibalism is practised for its food value.

  Cannibalism in Aboriginal Australia does not seem to have been of this nature. Instead, the practice was often imbued with deep spiritual and personal significance. It perhaps finds its closest analogy in our society in the Roman Catholic rites of transubstantiation and communion. The faithful who participate in these Catholic rites implicitly believe that they are devouring the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In both Aboriginal and Catholic contexts, the ritual serves to link the living with those inhabiting the world beyond death.

  Buckley records fourteen conflicts involving the violent death of a tribe member over the thirty-two years that he lived with the Wallarranga. Nine of the casualties were women, seven children and seven men. Ten enemies (two of whom were children) were killed in revenge. Buckley also documents the massacre of a tribe near Barwon Heads, the remnants of whom joined his group. The average size of an Aboriginal tribe was between twenty and sixty families, so the recorded death rate through violence is high indeed. Buckley cites just two principal causes for the conflict: disputes over women, and ‘payback killings’ following a death by natural causes. The disputes over women, which were the source of all but two of the incidents he documents, often occurred after a corroboree or other coming together of the tribes. They are somewhat reminiscent of the traditional Irish ‘Donnybrooks’ that followed the day of the fair and their origins were sometimes complicated and historical. Perceived infringements of marital rights or contractual agreements between ‘wife-givers’ and ‘wife-receivers’ were very common starting points for these violent interactions.

  Just why these bloody disputes were such a feature of the Aboriginal society that Buckley documents is unclear. Some writers have speculated that Aboriginal people had already come under stress and suffered disruption from European influence, but there is little evidence in Buckley’s narratives for this. John Wedge gives us some inkling as to why disputes over women may have been fought so persistently when he writes that ‘the wealth of the men may be said to consist in the number of their wives’. As Andrew Todd, who was also at Batman’s camp at Indented Head makes clear, that wealth was far from evenly distributed. In his journal he lists the family units of the Aborigines he met. One fortunate man is recorded as having four wives and another as having three. A further three men had two wives each, while eight were monogamous, and seven men had no wife at all. Just one unmarried woman is listed. Interestingly, there are indications in Buckley’s journal that female babies were more highly esteemed than males, perhaps because of their value at marriageable age.

  In these respects, do Buckley’s narratives give us a picture characteristic of all of Aboriginal Australia, or was Victoria’s Western District a special case? Certainly the Aboriginal people of the Melbourne region and westwards inhabited one of the largest, richest tracts of country the continent had to offer. The abundance of resources to be found there was exceptional, and this seems to have influenced their lifestyle. Unusually, they seem to have been relatively sedentary; Batman records women moving camp burdened by seventy pounds (thirty-two kilograms) of equipment, which could hardly be carried every day or over long distances. There is also the hint of a more complex social structure in Victoria than was usual for Aboriginal people. Dawson’s informants speak of hereditary chiefs who were distinguished by their feather headdresses, and Pateshall notes that on the eastern shores of Port Phillip Bay he met a group of Aborigines whose ‘King who was with the centre party, wore a beautiful turban of feathers, and a very large cloak, he was a man of two or three and twenty, remarkably handsome, well made, and of a much fairer complexion than the rest’. He also records that such chiefs were sometimes carried on the shoulders of four men. If accounts like Pateshall’s are reliable (and there is some debate about this) it is easy to imagine how such a hierarchy might lead to unequal access to resources and be a possible root cause of conflict—particularly when the custom of infant bestowal already meant that young women were sexually monopolised by much older men.

  In Langhorne’s narrative, Buckley gives a charming vignette of how he spent his evenings.

  I have frequently entertained them when sitting around the camp fires with accounts of the English People, Houses, Ships—great Guns etc. to which accounts they would listen with great attention—and express much astonishment…As I always kept up at night the best fire and had the best Miam Miam in the camp…the children would often prefer to sleep with me and I was a great favourite among them.

  From what we can read between the lines in Buckley’s narrative, everyday life must have been good for the Wallarranga. Longevity was similar to or exceeded that enjoyed by Europeans at the time, and sickness was a rarity. Even lesser irritants such as fleas, lice and the common cold were unknown until they arrived with the white man. More significantly, food was abundant and varied. Buckley never mentions a time of hunger while he is with his adopted tribe. Instead he hints that food was often in surfeit; his people moving on from a lagoon full of eels because they were ‘tired…of the sameness of food’. Despite its abundance, the obligation to share food appears to have been strictly felt. Dawson records that the Western District tribes had a custom called yuurka baawhaar that obligated a hunter to give up the best of his catch, not even being able to share it with his brothers, but instead having to be content with the least desirable parts.

  It is difficult to determine the size of the Aboriginal population of this most privileged part of Australia, but according to a widely travelled and famous Aboriginal messenger interviewed by Dawson, the people of the Western District ‘were like flocks of sheep and beyond counting’ in Buckley’s time.

  Imagine what it would have been like to awake on a crisp autumn morning in an Aboriginal camp beside one of the Western District lakes. This is the time when the eels are at their most abundant, and when hundreds of people gather for the harvest. The frost on the grass would have had people reaching for their warm possum-skin cloaks and wood to stoke the embers, and perhaps there would have been some cooked eel or yam daisy left over from the previous night to breakfast on. Then the people would have walked to the great stone eel-traps, covering many hectares, to empty the night’s catch. If the return was meagre perhaps some men would wade into the lake to spear the eels they could feel with their feet, or to angle for them with worms tied to a piece of string. Whatever means were used the hunt would not be long, and within a couple of hours everyone would be heading back to camp carrying great bundles of the slippery creatures.

  Camp consisted of a collection of tightly waterproof, dome-shaped wuurns, each large enough to sleep a dozen people in comfort. Depending upon the availability of building materials they might be constructed primarily of stone or tree branches. In the centre of each was a fireplace to provide warmth. Cooking was done outside.

  The camps were kept immaculately clean, for the inhabitants believed that if an enemy found anything belonging to them, it could be used in sorcery to harm them. A trip to the dunny necessitated use of the muurong pole. It was used to ‘remove a circular piece of turf, and dig a hole in the ground, which is immediately used and filled in with earth, and the sod so carefully replaced that no disturbance of the surface can be observed’.

  One can imagine that the afternoon was given to cooking, eating and sleeping, or perhaps to the repair of nets and spears. Maybe some women would go searching for firewood, or yams or other food to vary the diet, while
those involved in ceremony would prepare themselves at a secluded location; for at night, initiations and other social events would take place.

  Aboriginal people have a natural sense of drama and use their environment to magnificent dramatic effect. I can imagine the glow of a fire that would provide a backdrop for a corroboree, and around it the dimly visible, seated figures of singers and onlookers. Even today the rising of a full moon is often used to heighten the effect, and in western Victoria the dancers may have waited for its silvery light to appear above the crater of one of the area’s many extinct volcanos. Only then would the first strains of the corroboree sound out as the dancers, painted spectacularly in white clay, came stalking onto the fire-lit stage to the accompaniment of the rhythmic beating of possum-skin rugs. The celebrations would continue all night as the tribes renewed their ancient ties, until at last the great moon slid below the horizon and the first faint light of piccaninny dawn heralded the coming of the day. Night after night the celebrations would go on, until the fires died to a low crackle for the last time, and the tribes moved on to their winter quarters.

  The cycle of life of the Wallarranga seems to have been subtle. Buckley tells us nothing of birth practices except that mothers gave birth unassisted, but as a man he would have been privy to very limited information on this subject. It is known that in the Western District an expecting mother was confined with two married women to assist her. Her own mother would tend to her and her child’s needs, or if she were unavailable a professional helper, known as a gneein, would be sent for and paid a possum-skin rug to do the job. Once the child was able to walk it was given a name, which might change several times during an individual’s life.

  Buckley’s Aboriginal name, Murrangurk, meant ‘returned from the dead’, while some other Western District names translate as ‘bite meat’, ‘stutter’ and ‘wattle bloom’. Initiations appear to have been mild, involving neither circumcision nor subincision.

  Buckley documents several methods of disposal of the dead, including cremation and exposure on a platform in a tree, both of which practices were widespread in Aboriginal Australia. Describing one tree-burial he says,

  They selected a strong…tree, and in the branches about twelve feet up, they placed some logs and branches across, and sheets of bark; on these they laid the body, with the face upwards, inclining towards the setting sun…The women sat round the tree…in the most bitter lamentations…A fire was…made all round…and at that side in particular which was nearest to the sun at its setting, so that he might have, in the morning, not only the sun’s rays, but the fire to cheer and warm him. All things being completed, one word was uttered, ‘animadiate’, which means, he is gone to be made a white man.

  While it must have seemed to many Wallarranga that things would go on this way forever, Buckley’s narrative reveals presentiments of change on the distant horizon, but strangely he plays the main warning for a joke. ‘They have a notion,’ he declares,

  that the world is supported by props, which are in the charge of a man who lives at the farthest end of the earth. They were dreadfully alarmed on one occasion…by news…that unless they could send him a supply of tomahawks for cutting some more props with, and some ropes to tie them with, the earth would go by the run, and all hands would be smothered…All…were forwarded…to the old gentleman on the other side and, as was supposed, in time to prevent the capsize, for it never happened.

  While superficially reminiscent of the story of Chicken Little, I wonder whether this warning that the Aboriginal world was about to change had been generated by events at Sydney Harbour, which for the Wallarranga was doubtless at the ends of their known earth. The catastrophes unfolding there, including the smallpox epidemic of 1789 and the appropriation of land, had repercussions throughout south-eastern Australia. News of them would eventually have spread though perhaps not surprisingly, given language differences, in a somewhat garbled form.

  Given the huge potential of Buckley’s narratives to inform us of the amazing world of Victoria’s Aborigines, it is astonishing how frequently the work has been ignored, or mentioned only in passing by historians. Where not overlooked, it has often been greeted with scepticism, perhaps traceable to Bonwick’s early dismissal of the book. Yet it is hard to escape the feeling that a more important reason may be that Buckley’s account of Aboriginal life is so at odds with contemporary preconceptions. Yet another factor may be that studies of Aboriginal Victoria have long relied heavily on archaeological evidence. Perhaps researchers have not known what to do with Buckley’s intensely human and confronting story.

  Despite its cool reception by some, Life and Adventures has been received creditably by experts over the years. Edward Curr, author of The Australian Race (1886), was one who knew traditional Aboriginal societies well. ‘I think I am right to say,’ he wrote, that ‘Morgan’s Life and Adventures of William Buckley gives a truer account of Aboriginal life than any work I have read.’ More recently Marjorie Tipping, who wrote Buckley’s entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, noted that Life and Adventures is ‘close to fact’ while anthropologist L. R. Hiatt has said (in personal communication), ‘There is a much higher degree of consistency with modern understandings of Aboriginal social life… than inconsistency.’

  Buckley’s life after he took that momentous decision to enter Batman’s camp at Indented Head reveals much about frontier Victoria. He claims that he played an important role in keeping the peace between black and white, and even that he saved the infant settlement from massacre. There is no reason to doubt him in this, for he had already been playing the role of peacekeeper for some time in the Aboriginal community. He recalled:

  I had seen a race of children grow up into women and men, and many of the old people die away, and by my harmless and peaceable manner amongst them, had acquired great influence in settling their disputes. Numbers of murderous fights I had prevented by my interference, which was received by them as well meant; so much so, that they would often allow me to go amongst them previous to a battle, and take away their spears, and waddies, and boomerangs.

  By virtue of his age and peaceful ways, Buckley had become a ngurungaeta—a person of considerable respect among his people—and his voice was influential in deciding matters of war and peace.

  George Langhorne, who knew Buckley better than anyone else in those pioneering days, wrote that he appeared to be ‘always discontented and dissatisfied, and I believe that it would have been a great relief to him had the settlement been abandoned, and he left alone with his sable friends’. Indeed Buckley confessed to one settler that ‘he wished the whites had never come’. The stresses of living between the worlds of black and white must, at that time, have been almost unbearable. Usually, of course, only Aboriginal people knew those stresses, but Buckley clearly foresaw the fate awaiting his Aboriginal family and all those he had lived among for so long—yet there was little he could do about it. He records his satisfaction in seeing that justice was done in cases that came to his notice, such as that of a young Aboriginal boy who was wrongly accused of murder.

  Yet a much larger episode of murder and dispossession was unfolding, and as a friend of the Aborigines—and one who could report on the evils done to them—he represented a huge threat to many settlers. Neil Black of Geelong probably expressed the prevailing view when he wrote around 1840: ‘a few days since I found a grave into which about twenty [Aborigines] must have been thrown…A settler taking up a new country is obliged to act towards them in this manner or abandon it.’ Despite these barbaric attitudes, government sensitivity to frontier brutality was growing, and in 1838 the massacre of twenty-eight Aborigines at Myall Creek in New South Wales resulted in the hanging of seven Europeans. In such a climate the last thing Victoria’s pioneer settlers wanted was someone like Buckley on the scene.

  When Joseph Tice Gellibrand and George Hesse disappeared without trace on a reconnaissance from Point Henry near Geelong in February 1837, many settlers suspected f
oul play by the Aborigines, and some led armed search parties that committed atrocities upon innocent Aboriginal people. Buckley, who was genuinely fond of Gellibrand, offered to search alone for the lost men. He was probably their best hope of rescue, but in the prevailing climate of fear and revenge his services were not wanted. An unknown assailant maimed Buckley’s horse to prevent him from leaving, and afterwards he found that ‘some persons were always throwing difficulties in the way’ of his work. Buckley soon realised that his position had become untenable. His decision to leave Victoria may have been met with official relief, for he wrote that his work was ‘badly appreciated by the principal authorities’.

  You get the feeling that Buckley was hated by many in this frontier land, and that had he persisted in championing justice for the Aborigines his own life would have been in danger. It must have struck the ‘wild white man’ as ironic that he found himself in such a position upon returning to supposed civilisation.

  In 1837 Buckley left Victoria for Hobart Town, never to return. There he was appointed by Sir John Franklin, lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land, as assistant to the storekeeper at the Immigrants’ Home, a position he held for twelve years. In 1840 he married Julia Eagers who, said contemporary George Russell,

  was as remarkable for her short stature as he was the opposite. When they walked out together, she could not reach his arm; but Buckley got over the difficulty by tying two corners of a handkerchief together. The handkerchief was fastened to Buckley’s arm, and his wife put hers through the lower end of the loop.

  Purranmurnin Tallarwurnin, Buckley’s Aboriginal wife, evidently heard about this second marriage by letter, and when she and the surviving Wallarranga received the news they ‘lost all hope of his return to them, and grieved accordingly’.