Buckley's Chance

by Garry Linnell

  ‘Buckley … and a few blackfellows were keeping up a conversation with others on the opposite side, talking at the pitch of their voices in the native language … he was a tall, ungainly-looking man, about six feet four inches in height. His looks altogether were not in his favour. He had a shaggy head of black hair, a low forehead, shaggy overhanging eyebrows which nearly concealed his small eyes, a short snub nose, and his face very much marked by small pox.’

  Russell says this many years later. Fair to say he is unimpressed. In fact, he concludes that you are ‘such a man as one would suppose fit to commit a burglary or a murder … he was a very ignorant, uneducated man. The government expected that he might be useful in reconciling the native population to the settlers; but he was indolent and never did much in that way.’

  Now why would George Russell say that? He has very little to do with you, apart from one quick exchange where, walking past Batman’s house, he sees you putting together its brick chimney: ‘He seemed to be very well pleased with his work and asked me if I did not think it was pretty good work for a man who had lived thirty years with the blacks.’

  But there’s always a reason – a motive that is never far from the surface. Russell knows you lived with the Wadawurrung for all those years and he is going to take a dim view of those people once he settles just outside Geelong. ‘The natives as a class were very deceitful, and very little reliance could be placed in them,’ he will say in his memoirs. Russell is one of those men who see the Aboriginals as little more than a nuisance, people with no real relationship to land that really belongs to grazing animals. His organisation – the Clyde Company, a rival of the Port Phillip Association – does not even bother with meaningless treaties like the one offered by Batman. In fact Russell will join several groups in the years to come, hunting down clans who have stolen sheep or property belonging to the Company.

  That rumour that does the rounds about how Buckley gave land to William Robertson? George Russell, a rival of Robertson, is the man who spreads it. And that, William Buckley, is how this world works.

  27

  THE WORD OF GOD

  It is not often that a man has his prayers answered, much less feels God’s guiding hand on his shoulder. But Henry Reed is blessed like that. He is only 25 and everything he touches seems to turn to gold. He is already building an impressive property and business portfolio and he knows all the right people. In Launceston he has become friends with John Batman, so close he stands as witness to the man’s marriage to Eliza in St John’s church. But not even Batman, that crafty and resilient bushman, can help Henry Reed right now. Someone – some thing – far more powerful is required.

  It is the Year of Our Lord, 1831. Reed is on board the Bombay on a quick journey home to England when one of those truly biblical storms comes out of nowhere, whipping the sea into a maelstrom. Wind and rain lash the deck. The ship is tossed from the peak of one wave to the next. Reed is certain his time has come, that the next crashing sound he hears will be the Bombay exploding into splinters and taking all her passengers down into the black cold depths of the Atlantic.

  And then all is quiet. Reed is not being washed away – it’s his fears and doubts that are draining from his body. Calmness has taken hold of him. It can be only one thing – the hand of God! – and suddenly Henry Reed understands why, as he counted his money at the end of each day back in Launceston, there had been ‘an aching heart in the midst of prosperity, and with all the world could do for me my soul was not satisfied’.

  The storm, exhausted by all that fury, disappears as quickly as it arrived and Reed looks to the sky and gives thanks: ‘I saw all the mercies and deliverances of God; and when I saw them how astonished I was at the ingratitude of the wretch who had been watched over by that loving God and not even thanked him!

  ‘… I was conscious that I had hold of God and that God had hold of me.’

  Reed returns to Launceston and while he will lose none of his business skills, his life will now be devoted to spreading the Lord’s words. And so in late 1835 he decides to head to Port Phillip to see how his friend Batman’s little settlement is faring (he has loaned Batman 3000 pounds for the venture) and, most importantly, spread the word of God among the heathen natives.

  He finds this sorry excuse for a colony – just three shabby sod huts – sorely lacking in enlightenment. Each morning he preaches and sings and celebrates the work of the one true Being who had so graciously saved his life four years earlier.

  ‘The congregation had in it William Buckley, the escaped convict who had been living in a state of wilderness and barbarism with the natives for over thirty years, the brother of Mr John Batman, and three natives from Sydney who but imperfectly understood the English language. I had prayers in the hut with these five men every day, read the scriptures, expounding to them the Word of Life, and telling them of the love of God for poor sinners …’

  After that Reed heads out with the natives. ‘The Yarra Yarra tribe “corroboried” to me, and alone I accompanied them up the river and lived with them. Having gained all the information I required I returned to Launceston, the Lord having mercifully preserved me whilst living with them in the wilderness.’

  Reed’s visit is just the first of what will become a worn trail of preachers and moralisers making their way to Port Phillip. You meet them all, don’t you, all of them spellbound by your 30-year journey among the ‘savages’. A spirited revival of evangelicalism began in London at the start of the 1830s and now its doctrine of salvation is being spread to the outer reaches of the Empire. These men of God have many questions for you but one keeps recurring. What did you do to lift these heathens out of their savage ways? Did you not teach them there is only one true God? You always have the same answer, mumbling about your own personal safety. Truth is, you were baptised in that bulging little church back in Siddington and like everyone else you no doubt believed in God. But … well, hard to imagine anyone, let alone a man who dispenses words the way Johnny Fawkner bestows compliments, standing in front of a Wadawurrung clan explaining the mysterious ways in which God moves.

  The Reverend Joseph Rennard Orton is the next of the Lord’s helpers who makes his way to you. He is a Wesleyan missionary who epitomises the Empire’s new anti-slavery stance and its determination to Christianise the world. In the 1820s he had been posted to Jamaica where he quickly grew appalled at the treatment of the plantation slaves. He had watched helplessly, his indignation rising, as slaves were whipped for petty offences and forced to work 18–20 hour days. Many had been left so disabled that, according to Orton, they were left with ‘bodies almost eaten up by disease – so sorely affected with scorbutic humours that in some instances their limbs were literally rotting from their bodies’.

  Slavery was anathema to the civilised man; not only was it physically repulsive but it ‘corrupted the morals, induced idleness, theft, debauchery and duplicity; all of which strongly characterised the negro slave, particularly petty theft … it being difficult to convince a slave that there was any moral evil in taking his master’s provisions’.

  Orton and another missionary were charged ‘with seducing the negroes into dangerous notions of the rights of men’ and thrown into a fetid prison cell for 10 days. He barely slept, kept awake at night by ‘barbarities beyond description’. The experience left him shaken and physically he would never be the same again. Appointed to run the church’s outpost in Van Diemen’s Land and to also take responsibility for Port Phillip, he makes the journey across Bass Strait – and you are one of the first he meets. Orton does not fall prey to the preconceptions held by so many others. He senses something different, something deeper in this Wild White Man he has heard so much about.

  ‘He is a man of thought and shrewdness,’ Orton will say in a report to the Wesleyan Missionary Society in August 1836, ‘a proof of which he has exhibited in the policy he has adopted with the natives – particularly in carefully avoiding to mix in any of their party feuds, by which mean
s he has kept on terms of friendship with all …’

  Yet Orton is perplexed. He finds you very willing to listen to religious instruction ‘and sometimes flattered myself that he was under the influence of good impressions’.

  There you go again. Gruff old William, always giving these civilised white men what they want. Well, up to a point.

  ‘He informed me that during the whole period of his heathenish sojourning he never forgot to acknowledge one Supreme Being, upon whom he daily depended … and yet, strange to say, I cannot learn that he used the least effort to instruct the natives but descended and conformed to all their barbarous habits without endeavouring to raise them in any degree.’

  It’s not as though Orton does not try to discover if the Aboriginals believe in a God. He uses the ‘minutest observation’ and ‘strictest inquiry’ but cannot detect a sliver of evidence to support any belief in a Supreme Being. But he does discover that ‘since Europeans have settled among them they seem to have imbibed the ludicrous notion that the white people are their ancestors returned to them – and that after they die they will ‘jump up white man’.

  Orton is a man who knows what it is to sacrifice oneself for the good of the Lord. He can only explain your unwillingness to try and convert the Wadawurrung down to one thing – ‘his incompetency to convey instruction (for he is totally uneducated), his inertness of disposition and the policy he deemed prudent to adopt. His admissions are that it would have been useless and might have endangered his personal safety.’

  He grills you, of course, on the subject of cannibalism and ‘though evidently unwilling to disclose such deeds of darkness, yet in several conversations which I had with him he most distinctly asserted the awful fact’.

  Orton is the first minister to conduct a formal church service in the new colony. More than 100 Aboriginals attend and Orton begins to read from the book of John with more than a little apprehension ‘lest our devotions would be interrupted by their noise and restlessness, for they are usually exceedingly loquacious and in their social intercourse maintain a constant jabber and confusion’. But it goes off without a hitch, the Aboriginals sitting quietly and at one stage are ‘struck with silent admiration’ when a hymn is sung.

  Orton is reminded of his time in Jamaica ‘but with this appalling drawback – that these poor creatures were totally ignorant of and not able to receive the proper truth which I was endeavouring to explain. The mingled feelings of pitiful commiseration and compassionate desire which were wrought in my breast are not to be described.’

  It is not hard to picture you there, a quiet smile forming beneath that beard of yours as Orton does his best to convey God’s word to the Aboriginal people. How many times have you seen this since that day you walked out of the bush? How many well-meaning white people have you come across who simply don’t even know where to start when it comes to trying to fathom the rich and complex culture it took you more than 30 years to appreciate?

  Henry Reed. Joseph Orton. Next to take his turn is another missionary, George Langhorne, sent by NSW Governor Sir Richard Bourke to establish a government-sponsored mission to protect the Aboriginals. Langhorne has a lengthy meeting with you and does his best to record what you tell him about your experiences while living among the Wadawurrung. But it is a difficult exercise, one that Langhorne labels ‘extremely irksome’ because he finds your command of English still limited. Is that why he calls you ‘James’ instead of William?

  It’s easy to assume that you have decided to be difficult and are growing tired of these men. It is about 18 months since you met Batman’s party at Indented Head and almost everyone who has had something to do with you has said how quickly you regained the English language. But there is no disguising your disenchantment with the way things have turned out; the mischief-making of Johnny Fawkner, the illness that is now consuming Batman, the ongoing loss of your people’s lands and the sheer rudeness and arrogance of so many of these white pastoralists.

  Langhorne finds a man who ‘appeared to me always discontented and dissatisfied and I believe it would have been a great relief to him had the settlement been abandoned and [he] left alone with his sable friends’.

  Certainly, the story you tell him is similar to the one John Morgan will publish with you in 1852. There are some inconsistencies – you say you used a boat as part of your escape from Sullivan Bay (and of course you fib to him about ever living with an Aboriginal woman). But most discrepancies can be put down to language difficulties, your disgruntled mood and the unreliability of Langhorne’s memory and notes.

  For 30 years you always had a place to escape to when the fighting and talk became all too much. You could head straight to the coast, down to the Karaaf with your little hut with its endless supply of fish and solitude.

  But here in Port Phillip there is nowhere to go, no way to escape from people like … John Hepburn.

  Hepburn is typical of those white men descending on the country of the Kulin nation. He is a former seaman whose business running a steamer between Sydney and the Hunter has gone belly-up. He has joined a party of would-be pastoralists who set out on an arduous overland expedition from New South Wales to Port Phillip. It takes Hepburn a while before his sea legs leave him; eight miles into the journey he had tumbled off his horse to the amusement of his fellow travellers, a mishap that set the tone for the rest of the trip.

  It takes the party more than six weeks before they reach the settlement and, tired and saddle-sore, they are far from impressed. The Promised Land has no accommodation for weary travellers and is nothing but a motley collection of huts – ‘slabs stuck in the ground, forming a roof and covered with earth’.

  So who is the first man he sees? He could have stumbled into Fawkner’s hut and spent hours being regaled with stories about how little Johnny has founded this … err … thriving metropolis. But no, the first person he meets is William Buckley.

  Hoping to extract information about available grazing land in the district, Hepburn asks you where his group might go to snatch themselves some of this precious ground that is now the talk of the entire country.

  It isn’t hard to picture his face as you quickly roll out a succession of monosyllabic answers. That simpleton routine works just like a charm.

  ‘I found him what he had been represented,’ Hepburn will say about you years later, ‘a very stupid fellow not possessed of any knowledge of the country.’

  Say what you like about William Buckley, Mr Hepburn, but is it possible to say something nice?

  ‘Before taking leave of Buckley I may be allowed to observe that all writers on this to-be-a-great empire have lost sight of this man, who laid the foundation stone (if it may be considered so) of this interesting colony. Buckley built chimneys of bricks imported from Van Diemen’s Land, for Mr Batman. This I consider constituted the foundation of the capital of Victoria, which seems to have been entirely lost sight of, but never less is true.’

  28

  MURDER MOST FOUL; BLOODTHIRSTY REVENGE; VICIOUS CALUMNY

  Promises, promises. These white men have made a lot of them in the past few months. They keep saying they don’t want a war with the black man and will do their best to protect them. Batman, Gellibrand, Wedge and the others – all insistent that white man’s justice will apply equally. Well, here’s a chance for them to live up to those words, an opportunity for you, William, to take their measure.

  You heard a rumour a couple of weeks ago that bark strippers in Western Port, almost 50 miles south-west of Port Phillip, had been up to their usual mischief and had attacked a group of Aboriginals. You alerted Wedge and sent word for the wounded to be brought to the Yarra. Here they are now, limping into the settlement. The parents of one teenage girl have carried their daughter on their backs the entire way. John Wedge is shocked – given his past he may well be overacting a tad – and picks up his quill to send a letter to the authorities in Hobart Town.

  ‘It appears the natives were fired upon soon after sunrise
whilst lying in their huts and one young girl about 13 years of age, was wounded in both her thighs, the ball passing through one into the other, grazing the bone in its passage … her parents were obliged to carry her on their backs … and it is apprehended that she will not recover the use of her legs.

  ‘To rescue this poor girl the mother took her in her arms and in carrying her away was fired at and wounded in the arm and shoulder with buckshot. Notwithstanding this inhuman attack the natives persisted in removing the girl and two more of them, a girl and a boy, also received wounds.’

  Outrages like this are nothing new. Isn’t this one of the reasons why you avoided places like Western Port and the land around Portland? The year before Batman made his way into Port Phillip, a group of Portland-based whalers went to war with the Kilcarer gundidj clan of the Gunditjmara people. It will take years before the details emerge and how a dispute over a beached whale turned into a gruesome massacre. The Gunditjmara will say only two men of the Kilcarer gundidj survived. Several white historians will estimate the death toll at anywhere between 60 and 200 in what will become known as the Convincing Ground massacre. According to George Augustus Robinson, who becomes the Chief Protector of Aboriginals in the Port Phillip District at the start of the 1840s, ‘the circumstances are that a whale had come on shore and the natives who fed on the carcass claimed it was their own. The whalers said they would “convince them” and had recourse to firearms …’

  Wedge fears that more incidents could see conflict escalate: ‘Unless some measures be adopted to protect the natives a spirit of hostility will be created against the whites, which in all probability will lead to a state of warfare between them and the Aborigines, which will only terminate when the black man will cease to exist.’

  New South Wales Governor Richard Bourke issues a proclamation warning that anyone ‘guilty of any outrages’ against the Aboriginals will be brought to trial in the Supreme Court. He dispatches the police magistrate of Campbelltown, George Stewart, to Port Phillip to investigate and while Stewart does not venture down to Western Port, he reports back to Sydney that the whalers responsible for the attack have already left.