Buckley's Chance

by Garry Linnell

  Of course, Fawkner will never forget to even that ledger. Many years later he will recall the reverend as ‘fond of drink and also of women and given to the coarse vulgar propensity of swearing if not blaspheming. He was a remarkable man: he never was known to look any man directly in the face – he carried his head on one side when conversing with anyone and scowled under his very dark eyebrows with a one-sided glance, and if looked at, invariably cast his eyes down, still holding his head at an angle with his body. He had a dark sinister scowl and his head finally settled on one side.’

  When Fawkner returns to Van Diemen’s Land a few years later trouble is never far away. The year 1819 is a turbulent one. Having opened a bakery he is convicted of selling short-weighted loaves of bread and fined 20 shillings. A few weeks later he is found guilty of stealing roof shingles and is ordered to repay the government by providing it with 1400 of them at no charge. In July he is placed on a good behaviour bond for 12 months on suspicion of being involved in the robbery of a general store by several Crown prisoners.

  He has been whipped, jailed and racked by severe illness. All of it seems to fuel the fury inside him. And if those worms in the grave are not to be feared, a huge former convict who lived with the blacks for 30 years is hardly the sort of foe to instil fear in his heart. In the years to come Fawkner will dismiss Buckley as nothing more than a savage, ‘a mindless lump of matter’. Given the way Johnny describes most folks, it’s almost a compliment. You can even sense the historian and pedicurist to the rich and famous, James Bonwick, wrestling with how best to describe the furnace blazing inside Fawkner. In the end he will suck in his breath and write that Johnny has ‘a native energy that made him rise superior to all assaults, endure all sneers, quail at no difficulty, and that thrust him ever foremost in the strife, happy in the war of words and the clash of tongues’.

  It is as close as Bonwick will ever come to describing someone as a vindictive bastard. Others will be more than happy to do so. Hamilton Hume, the acclaimed explorer and an old school friend of Batman’s, will say in the years to come: ‘Fawkner must be a vindictive, vain-glorious and a low bred fellow. His accusations against poor Batman prove him such.’

  That’s just a little too crude and direct for Bonwick. You can almost see him shrugging his shoulders when he writes of Fawkner: ‘Although a public personage with rancorous foes, the temptation to exhibit his private weaknesses is to be resisted as unworthy of the historian, and contemptible in manhood.’

  But the temptation to exhibit the private weaknesses of others has never been a problem for Johnny. For the rest of his life he will do his best to criticise Batman and distance himself from the man. Yet the pair will forever remain shackled together; pioneers of a new settlement, sons of convicts … and husbands of convict women.

  Batman’s wife is Eliza Callaghan, a tough Irish woman – ‘passionate and sexually attractive in a dark, perhaps even sullen way’ – who had been transported for 14 years for forgery. A serial absconder who once spent time in the stocks and was forced to wear an iron collar, Batman had sheltered her after she escaped from her role as servant to the superintendent of police in Launceston and finally gained her a pardon after lobbying the Governor.

  Fawkner’s story of how he found his wife involves, like a lot of his tales, a stretching of the truth, shaped to suit his purposes. But he tells it repeatedly; having heard about the arrival in Hobart Town of a new immigrant ship, he rushes to the dock and selects the best-looking woman he can find. Barely an hour later a friend spies him in the street with his bride-to-be and steals her away from him.

  So Johnny returns to the ship and finds its captain.

  ‘Hullo,’ says the captain, ‘what do you want now?’

  ‘Another wife,’ I says.

  ‘Why, confound you, how many wives do you want? You took the best looking girl on the ship a few minutes ago.’

  ‘Yes, but my mate took her away from me and now I want the homelyess-looking girl you have got and I will marry her.’

  Her name is Eliza Cobb, described by one historian as ‘unattractive, ungainly with a pock marked face and a caste eye’. Truth is, she has not just stepped from an immigrant ship looking for a new chance in a new world. The boat is just another female convict ship, like the one William Lushington Goodwin so memorably steered to the new country.

  Cobb had been sentenced to seven years for kidnapping a four-month-old baby while serving as a maid at a home in Kensington, possibly not long after giving birth to a baby of her own which had died. She and Johnny will remain childless while the Batmans will bring eight children into the world, seven daughters and a son.

  Maybe that’s one of the reasons little Johnny cares so much about legacies, about making sure history is written in his hand. There is no-one else to do it for him so if he has to twist the facts a little this way and that, so be it.

  Like that plot by the Aboriginals to murder every white in the settlement – and how you, William, wanted to see it happen. Johnny Fawkner can twist and turn. But you should see him spin.

  25

  YOUR NAME BLACKENED; MASSACRE AVERTED; A MISERABLE DEATH

  Didn’t take long, did it? A few months after rejoining these white men and what have you come to realise? They are as aroused and engaged by the same petty arguments and disputes as the tribes you lived with for more than 30 years. Their vindictiveness, their need for revenge, their desire to assert superiority over a rival, it’s all the same. Nothing has changed. You’re still caught between warring factions and the only difference is that the white men are not interested in working within the land. They are here to change it, forever.

  A day barely passes without another boat arriving from Van Diemen’s Land to disgorge its stinking load, a white plague destined to inflict as much damage to Aboriginal land and culture as bullets and disease.

  Forget Teredo navalis, that indestructible bivalve worm that loves nothing more than dining out on the hulls of wooden ships. Sheep by the thousands, soon to soar into the millions, are being shipped bleating across Bass Strait to fill these new pasture lands. Within just a few years their hooves will turn much of the earth into a hardened mass, causing water runoff and turning plains into dust bowls. Their teeth will gnaw away at much of the native plant life; the yam daisy and many nutritious berries will virtually disappear. The numbers of native animals, including the kangaroo, will begin to decline. The land will ache.

  It all happens so quickly, tidal forces so strong that once unleashed they can never be stopped. There is land to be claimed, homes to be built, boundaries to be drawn, Aboriginals to be won over and, if not, chased away or hunted down. Two centuries later one noted historian will regard what takes place around Port Phillip Bay as one of the ‘fastest land occupations in the history of empires’. At the same time the annihilation of the Aboriginal people and their culture will also be one of the swiftest ever experienced. No-one knows how many Aboriginals live in Victoria when Batman’s treaty is struck. Best estimates range between 30,000 and 60,000. Within the space of two generations there will be little more than an estimated 800 left.

  It’s as if you already know how this is all going to end because once it starts there is no pulling back. You will always be seen by many of the whites as sympathetic to the Indigenous people. And by the Aboriginals who showed you so much respect for three decades? As the land grab quickens and their numbers begin to rapidly decline they will grow ever more suspicious that you are nothing more than a simple instrument of the men hell bent on taking their hunting grounds.

  Look at that little Johnny Fawkner and the Batmans, eyeing one another off across a few pathetic parcels of land, always probing and testing one another. There’s a clash in February 1836. Henry Batman, drunk as usual on rum and the power handed to him by his ailing brother, tells Fawkner he can continue building a house but the Port Phillip Association owns all the land and will seize his place at some stage.

  Fawkner writes back: ‘I cannot acc
ount for the manner in which you act towards me. I do not deserve to be treated as you continue to use me. Only two days ago you shot one of my dogs close by your men’s fire. The day before yesterday you would have shot another dog of mine … only your piece misfired …

  ‘I beg leave to tell you that if I had thought proper to act towards your brother as you seem inclined to act towards me I could have injured him severely, for most of your men are ready to leave you.’

  A few days later Henry writes back to Fawkner: ‘Sir, you say my piece miss fire at your bitch, it is a bloody lie, and so is the whole of your letter.’

  On it goes, this clash of egos, the Batmans resentful over Fawkner’s presence on the Yarra River, Fawkner bitter because he is … little Johnny Fawkner. Why, when he casts an eye across the fields and sees Henry and his wife lurching about in the middle of the day, stone drunk as usual, it is easy for Fawkner to take the moral high ground. Truth is, the depravity of the Batmans means even a man like Johnny can sense the hand of God on his shoulder. Back in October, just a few days after settling here, Fawkner had written in his diary: ‘Cloudy day. I performed divine service this day by reading the prayers usually read in the established church, to our own people and Wm. Buckley.’

  It takes Fawkner a little time to set about demonising you, to start bending and twisting those facts.

  But here is how it begins.

  Just weeks after arriving in Port Phillip, little Johnny will make a diary note that ‘the blacks we learnt intended to murder us for our goods’.

  It will be three decades before he elaborates on this threat. Like Batman, Fawkner realises it is better to forge relationships with the Kulin people than to go to war with them. One of them is a young man, Derrimut, a leader or arweet of the Yalukit Willam, a horde who have roamed the area around Port Phillip for tens of thousands of years and can still tell stories of the times when the bay was a vast plain. The Yalukit Willam is one of six main language clans among the Bunurong people and white fellas fascinate Derrimut. He has accompanied Fawkner and his men on fishing and hunting expeditions. But the gulf between languages remains a problem and a reluctant Fawkner will come to rely on you to bridge the gap.

  According to Fawkner – later in life when he is busily using every opportunity to cast himself as the original and only founder of Melbourne – Derrimut warns of an imminent attack on the settlement by tribes from the north of Port Phillip and repeats the warning a few weeks later, giving Fawkner and his men enough time to arm themselves and prepare for any attack. Fawkner, Henry Batman and a handful of others fire several rounds of buckshot to scare off the northern tribesmen. Then they round up the remaining Aboriginals lingering around the camp and haul them across to the other side of the river in their bark canoes, burning them before returning to the settlement.

  Say what you like about John Fawkner, but don’t say he does not have a flair for the dramatic. ‘Derramuck came this day and told us that the natives intended to rush down upon us and plunder our goods and murder us. We cleaned our pieces and prepared for them … I and two others chased the blacks away some distance.

  ‘I do not believe that one of us would have escaped. But fortunately for us the Melbourne party of Aborigines was favourable to us. They felt thankful for the things we gave them.’ Fawkner had ordered one of his men, William Watkins, to learn the locals’ languages and to forge as close a relationship as possible with the Aboriginal tribes around the Yarra.

  ‘He taught them words of our language and very readily learnt theirs and two of these sons of the soil, named Baitbanger and [Derrimut], formed a friendship with him and the latter told Watkins of the plan to murder the whole party, in order to possess themselves of our goods etc etc …

  ‘Watkins could not make out the words used by [Derrimut], who appeared much excited. I therefore called Buckley to explain what information the boy Watkins could not make out. Buckley, having been 32 years with these blacks understood their language fully, and he at once declared that the Aborigines had agreed to murder all the white people by getting two or more of their fighting men alongside each of our people, and upon a given signal each of us were to be cut down by blows on the head with their stone tomahawks …

  ‘The half savage Buckley declared that if he had his will he would spear [Derrimut] for giving the information.’

  There it is. Did you even see that allegation coming? It’s a severe one – according to Fawkner you view Derrimut as a traitor to the Aboriginal people. You – William Buckley – would prefer to see all the whites massacred and this settlement put to the torch.

  It is a charge hard to believe. Just a few months earlier you prevented a similar massacre taking place on the shores of Indented Head. Since then you have done nothing but try to keep the peace. When you finally met John Batman here in Port Phillip you organised several hundred Aboriginals to greet ‘King John’ and Batman had been so impressed he could not ‘refrain from expressing my thankfulness to that good providence which threw Buckley in our way, for certainly he has been the medium of successfully establishing between us and the natives an understanding which, without his assistance, could never have been effected to the extent it has been …’

  You have sat with tribal leaders and explained the motives of Batman’s people ‘and the consequences which might arise from any aggression on their part’, as well as promising them swift justice if white men ill treat any Aboriginals. That message will always be remembered. Listening and watching on will be an 11-year-old boy, William Barak, who will become the last ngurungaeta of the Wurundjeri-willam clan.

  Decades later Barak will recall how ‘Buckley told the blacks to look at Batman’s face, he looks very white. Any man that you see out in the bush not to touch him. When you see an empty hut not to touch the bread in it. Make a camp outside and wait till the man come home and finds everything safe in the house. They are good people. If you kill one white man white fellow will shoot you down like kangaroo …’

  Besides, you are the only man who fully understands what Derrimut is saying. Would it not be easier for the threat to be lost in translation? There is no doubt you are beginning to doubt the wisdom of your return to white culture; you’re going to grow increasingly surly with officialdom over the coming 18 months as all the talk about respecting the natives and their land comes to nothing. But slaughter on the scale Fawkner is claiming? You have been friendly with Derrimut. You know his people; during your travels with the Wadawurrung you will have passed through Bunurong lands and traded with them.

  The simplest explanation is that Fawkner is at it again, inflating his own importance, tickling the truth a little further than necessary, showing the world how it is he, not Batman, who is able to reach out and bridge the two cultures.

  The man’s inconsistencies are as common as the enemies he creates and pursues. On the final day of 1835 a newspaper in Hobart Town, The True Colonist, publishes a letter from Fawkner, whose supply of ink seems endless. Johnny has taken a set against John Helder Wedge, who has informed Fawkner that he is trespassing on land owned by the Port Phillip Association. Fawkner has just read an account of Wedge’s tour of the land near Indented Head a few months earlier and how Wedge claimed he had discovered three rivers and a lake.

  ‘Please to contradict Mr Wedge’s assertion … Buckley discovered them to Mr Wedge. He, Mr Wedge, also says that he established a manufacture of baskets. This is utterly false: the basket trade, Buckley says, was carried on before he joined the Blacks thirty-two years back … almost the whole of his letter is false or delusive, but it is like his language while here: he first asserted he was only employed by the Company [the Port Phillip Association] to survey land, but had no interest in it: the next day he declared he was a partner.’

  It’s not unusual for Fawkner to build up a head of steam when on the attack and this is no different. He pours on the bile, noting that the local Aboriginals did not like Wedge.

  And then this: ‘He never mentions the great exer
tions of Mr Henry Batman, who has done wonders here with the blacks … Mr Batman has kept them in good order, and with the able assistance of Mr William Buckley, I don’t doubt but the settlement will eventually become of importance – fine feed both for sheep and cattle … no perjured villains swearing people’s lives away, to please a Botany Bay Magnifico …’

  So let’s get this straight. Fawkner is full of praise for you and the Batmans? But wasn’t he supposed to have been horrified just a few weeks earlier to learn you were threatening to spear Derrimut? The man is a mess of contradictions. But he is at least consistent on one point. He signs his letter: ‘John P. Fawkner. Pascoeville, Fawkner’s River, Port Phillip’.

  His river. His town. His idea.

  His blackfella, too. So fond does Fawkner become of Derrimut that he will take him to Hobart Town the following year along with another influential Bunurong man, Baitbanger, for a show-and-tell session with Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur, who will present Derrimut with a drummer’s uniform. It is easy to picture the scene; little Johnny Fawkner triumphantly returning to the island that for so long had looked the other way whenever he tried to better himself, rubbing shoulders – finally – with the elite of Van Diemen’s Land, showing off his latest acquisition.

  It is a grand occasion. The resident English artist Benjamin Duterrau is summoned to paint a portrait of Derrimut. After a year living and working alongside Fawkner – the pair have even traded names, a significant act of bonding among many of the Kulin – Derrimut usually wears European clothing supplied by little Johnny. But this would be jarring to the colonial eye. So Derrimut is stripped down, a kangaroo skin draped around his hips, the scarring on his muscular upper torso exposed. Beyond the cliché, though, it is Derrimut’s face that captures the observer. Framed by a mass of curly black hair and a thin beard, and with his left eye slightly larger than the right, he has an almost mischievous look on his face, as though he is laughing at all the attention he is receiving.