‘The first lash … the skin rises not unlike a white frost … the second lash often reminds me of a snowstorm … the third lash … the back is lacerated dreadfully.’
The two missionaries groaned, glanced at one another and uttered a couple of prayers.
But Fyans wasn’t finished. ‘The painful feelings then subside … for the blood flows freely.’ He then offered to have a convict flogged – God knew there was a never-ending line of them to choose from – so that these men might better judge the process and its effects.
‘No … we thank thee,’ said the missionaries, eager to find the door.
This Fyans … not exactly the sort of man you are likely to warm to, is he? But meet him you must. He’s on the ship with you returning to Melbourne from Launceston having just been appointed the police magistrate for Geelong. As it happens both of you have served with the 4th (King’s Own). But any similarities end there. You’re tired and have never had any time for trumped-up little men. And Fyans will hardly have time for you, either, given your convict background. Apart from his sadism, Flogger is also a snob of the worst kind; just the sort the British Army specialises in producing.
Fyans is an Irishman who survived a cholera pandemic during his time in India and eventually moved to Sydney, where he was appointed second-in-charge of the notorious penal colony on Norfolk Island. Even by the standards of the time Norfolk was renowned for its cruelty. Convicts sent there – usually the most hardened and difficult to discipline – would often prefer suicide or hanging to serving out their time.
It was a special kind of hell, a place where nightmares played out in full daylight. A prisoner might receive 100 lashes for singing a song, 200 for defying a soldier’s orders and up to eight months in solitary confinement for refusing to work. The blood-soaked grounds of the whipping yard were dried black. It was here, amid an orgy of unrestrained violence and payback, that Fyans earned his nickname.
In 1834 several hundred convicts staged a coordinated uprising. Like most rebellions of the time it was ill-conceived and within hours had been put down as Fyans – his commander restricted to bed with a timely migraine – relished the opportunity of once more wielding a sabre and gun in pitched battle.
Hunting down escapers through gardens and a field of sugar cane, Fyans’ men of the 4th were as bloodthirsty as their boss. ‘The men were very keen after these ruffians,’ Flogger will recall years later. You can almost hear him sighing with nostalgia. ‘It was really game and sport to these soldiers … “Come on out, my honey” – with a prick of the bayonet through both thighs or a little above.’
… Or a little above.
Now wouldn’t that be a just punishment for rebels who could not be regarded – let alone treated – as men? Just a little stab to the nether regions. When one of the rebel ringleaders was found at the foot of a hill dying slowly from bayonet wounds, Fyans defied a doctor’s request and had the man dragged back to captivity in chains – on his back and across a stony field.
The recriminations went on for months. Fyans ordered new irons for the convicts, the insides roughly chiselled to gouge ankle flesh with every movement. He paid the floggers tobacco to choose a random prisoner and tighten the ropes binding their arms until blood ran from their fingertips. And there were lashings, thousands of them, so many that the penal colony’s whips began falling apart and a frustrated Flogger began questioning the quality of the men wielding them.
Having distinguished himself on Norfolk Island, Fyans was promoted to commander of the Moreton Bay settlement and had famously overseen the rescue of Eliza Fraser, one of the survivors of a ship that had been wrecked by coral on its way to Singapore. Heavily pregnant, Fraser had given birth to a baby that died just days after the wreck and had been taken in – against her will, she would claim – by an Aboriginal group for several months on what would become Fraser Island. The story of Eliza Fraser would echo for more than a century to come, burnished by myth and so many distortions until the truth of what really happened was completely obscured.
But wasn’t that the problem with so much history? A man was better off worrying about his own place in it. The rescue of Fraser had taken place the year before and the only thing that mattered now was that Flogger Fyans was on his way for another adventure.
A couple of photographs remain of Fyans. In one, wearing a top hat that hides his bald head, his face is austere and highlighted by a long sharp nose. Later in life the lens will capture him again and that face will have filled out, leaving the nose less pronounced. But his eyes will remain the same, hard and all knowing, the look of a man who has rarely been racked with self-doubt or uncertainty.
Fyans will forge a decent reputation for himself in Geelong and throughout the western district of Victoria, acclaimed for helping the settlement gain access to fresh water. They will name streets and suburbs after him. A man of action he certainly is. But getting along with William Buckley is something beyond his abilities.
‘I stared when I saw the monster of a man,’ Fyans will record in memoirs that many historians will regard as self-serving and unreliable.
It is late September 1837. Lonsdale wants Fyans in the Geelong area as soon as possible and who else does he order to accompany him but the one man who knows the Wadawurrung and their land better than anyone else. According to Fyans, who wants to set out immediately on the 50-mile walk, William Buckley is ‘rather sulky, wanting to put it off for a week’.
Two days later, according to Fyans, the pair of you begin the trek.
‘Now for the road, Mr Buckley … have you no blanket?’
‘Nothing.’ Good old sullen William Buckley. Never been good at hiding those feelings, have you?
Fyans hands over a piece of pork and a large slice of damper.
‘“What?” He said looking down on me. “Carry damper and pork? I don’t care for such things. I can feed myself. You may do as you like.”’
Fyans tells you carrying the food supplies will have to be shared. ‘The long fellow took the charge but soon tired of it. Relieving him of this small parcel, only a few pounds of weight, before we reached the native track to Geelong … I found that I was to be the carrier. With great difficulty he kept up until we arrived at the Werribee River, where Mr Simpson had a sheep station. Buckley engaged himself during the night. In the morning he, if possible, was more discourteous and with difficulty I could get him on his legs.’
The next 12 miles pass in silence. Fyans is clearly intimidated but growing increasingly frustrated. By the time you reach the You Yangs, a series of rugged 300-metre-high granite ridges that stud the Anakie plain a dozen miles from Geelong, it is time to stop for water at a small creek.
Fyans offers you some pork, damper and a cup. ‘Seating himself in sulkiness on the bank, thrusting his legs into the stream to the knees, thus he remained for about a quarter of an hour, when again I asked him to eat something.
‘Without a reply, pulling from his belt a tomahawk, he proceeded to an old tree, cutting and hacking it in particular places, extracting large grubs, eating them with much relish. He continued at his repast for nearly a quarter of an hour.
‘“Well, Buckley, are you ready?”
‘“For what?”
‘“For Geelong.”’
According to Fyans’ account, you say, ‘It is too far for me to pull away there.’
Fyans insists, ‘Why, Buckley, you must come on with me.’
But you refuse and Fyans continues on toward Geelong, ‘on a dreary path in a strange and wild country unknown to me, and then seldom frequented by Europeans’.
You eventually join Fyans in Geelong a day or two later, helping Flogger look for a site for a permanent settlement with a fresh water supply. And then you organise a muster of the local Wadawurrung. By Fyans’ count there are ‘275 of all classes – men, women and children’. As you interpret for the new police chief, flour, blankets and clothing are handed out. But Fyans, nervously eyeing off the large mob, decides the two do
zen tomahawks sent down from Sydney to be distributed to the local Aboriginals should instead be thrown into the river.
‘The natives saw this preparation, and I kept some distance from them with my double barrelled gun, accompanied by Mr Patrick McKeever, district constable, also alarmed; it had the effect of making the natives retire, the interpreter Buckley telling them to do so. I was exceedingly happy at the result, not having the slightest trust in Buckley; and I may now add, my conviction is that the natives assembled wishing an opportunity to murder every person in the place …’
You can no longer put up with this. A day later you receive permission to return to Melbourne. The Reverend Langhorne has lost his battle to set up an Aboriginal mission far to the east and away from the town, and must settle for a site just south of the Yarra River. He has plans to use you as an interpreter to the Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung people but it soon becomes clear that won’t work. According to Langhorne, ‘… unfortunately I was placed on the Yarra with a tribe who identified Buckley as one with a tribe with whom they were constantly at war’.
You’re trapped now, caught between worlds. Only one option left.
‘I could not calculate on one hour’s personal safety from either one party or the other,’ you will recall years later. ‘Under such circumstances, for if our lives had been lost or cattle stolen in any locality where I happened to be stationed, prejudice or vindictive feelings might have been brought into play and I should have been sacrificed.’
Someone – probably Batman or Wedge – drafts your resignation letter to Captain Lonsdale. Dated 9 October 1837, it states: ‘I do myself the honour respectfully to request that you will be pleased to accept my resignation as interpreter to the Aborigines and special constable for this district from this date, as it is my intention immediately to proceed to Europe …’
Europe? Well, that plan does not last long, and directions were never your strong point. You’re going south – south to Van Diemen’s Land.
But first you need to secure your future. A man in his mid-50s needs to think about such things. A petition is sent to Governor Bourke in Sydney ‘praying that he may receive the indulgence of a grant of land … in order that your petitioner may not in his old age be reduced to distress’. It adds that your advancing years and absence from the white world for 32 years mean you are ‘unable to gain his livelihood and further he has, by joining his countrymen, so far displeased … the natives of Port Phillip that he could not with safety, comfort or satisfaction … again join them’.
Bourke has a soft spot for you and writes to Lord Glenelg in London recommending an annual pension of 100 pounds. Lord Glenelg is Charles Grant, a long-time politician and the son of a former chairman of directors of the British East India Company. He is known as a ditherer and it will not be until June the following year that he writes to Bourke’s replacement in Sydney, George Gipps, saying: ‘I do not see any sufficient reason to justify the grant of a pension as suggested by Sir Richard Bourke. Buckley has already obtained presents and a salary of 75 pounds a year for his services which he has rendered, but especially when taken in connection with his former history they do not appear to me sufficient to warrant any further remuneration from the public.’
Your former history. There really is no escaping it. On 28 December 1837, you board the cargo ship Yarra Yarra, bound for Hobart Town. Behind you, the country in which you have spent the majority of your life continues to change. The boats keep disgorging their loads of sheep and cattle, the white men keep squabbling over land and money and the people who took you in, who protected you for 32 years, are being trampled by the white stampede.
You have no idea that six months earlier a requiem for their souls was laid out in the pages of a British parliamentary report. After months of inquiries and testimony, the House of Commons’ Select Committee on Aborigines made a bleak and often poignant finding about the fate of the nation’s dispossessed.
‘The inhabitants of New Holland, in their original condition, have been described by travellers as the most degraded of the human race,’ the report said. ‘But it is to be feared that intercourse with Europeans has cast over their original debasement a yet deeper shade of wretchedness.
‘These people, unoffending as they were towards us … suffered in an aggravated degree from the planting amongst them of penal settlements … it does not appear that the territorial rights of the natives were considered, and very little care has since been taken to protect them from the violence or the contamination of the dregs of our countrymen.
‘The effects have consequently been dreadful beyond example, both in the diminution of their numbers and their demoralisation.’
It’s doubtful that Foster Fyans ever peruses a copy of the committee’s report either. It is not the sort of bedside reading for a man of action and firm views who now finds himself in a world that grows softer by the year.
Later in life he will write to Charles La Trobe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of what will become the official state of Victoria. A gold rush is about to engulf the land that Batman and Fawkner and so many others long believed would prove to be the richest in the nation. But Flogger Fyans has a more important subject to discuss; the thorny and difficult question of apprehending and putting on trial Aboriginals who may have committed theft or other outrages in far-flung regions of the country.
‘It’s a difficult thing to apprehend natives, with great risk of life on both sides,’ writes Fyans. ‘On the Grange, and many parts of the country, it would be impossible to take them; and in my opinion, the only plan to bring them to a fit and proper state is to insist on the gentlemen in the country to protect their property, and to deal with such useless savages on the spot.’
PART IV
WILLIAM RETREATS FROM BOTH WORLDS
32
WILLIAM BUCKLEY, AKA ‘GIANT HACHO’
Now this just might be the thing to keep all those prostitutes and drunks in their seats for once. The Wild White Man from Port Phillip, live on stage! Who knows, with a little luck everyone might get through the night without another brawl erupting and spilling on to the dirty streets of Wapping.
Just who had the ridiculous idea of putting a theatre down here among the brothels, slaughterhouses and slums of this sewage-ridden suburb of Hobart?
Not that the town couldn’t do with a dose of real culture. Might actually lift spirits a little and add some polish to this raw and rowdy frontier. But down here? Talk about a rose among thorns. The Theatre Royal is a majestic Georgian building, an edifice of sophistication and grandeur, its stone blocks stained with convict sweat. And what did they do? They put a tavern beneath the auditorium called The Shades – a seedy joint overflowing with rum-swilling sailors and hookers. It has its own entrance to the theatre pit and for the gentry in the boxes above it’s often hard working out just what spectacle to concentrate on – the music and the theatrical plays, or the cockfights and the drunken melees.
There’s little relief once you get outside, not unless you happen to be a connoisseur of stinking tanneries and butcheries and all those cheap tenements and flophouses of flood-prone Wapping.
Mean streets, these, just the sort of squalid lanes and alleys where you might bump into that legendary receiver of stolen goods, Ikey Solomon. One of the most famous convicts of all time, Solomon is now a free man on the condition he stays away from Hobart. But how can the old fence resist wandering by to catch up with old friends and soak in a little more of his growing fame? Charles Dickens’ latest novel, Oliver Twist, is being serialised in the British papers right now and its main character, Fagin, is said to be based on Solomon, the ‘Prince of Thieves’ who trained hordes of London orphans to pick pockets.
But even Solomon’s stature pales next to the celebrity status of Mr William Buckley. You have only been in Hobart for a week and you haven’t been able to step outside without someone wanting to shake those large hands and make those ears bleed with hundreds of questions about Port Phillip and your life a
mong the Wadawurrung.
In fact, that is how this whole damn theatre business began in the first place.
There you were, loping down the street, revelling in the knowledge that little Johnny Fawkner wasn’t around the corner plotting his next move against you, when a man came out of nowhere and asked if you would like to go to the theatre with him. Well, of course you did. Hard to remember the last time you actually went anywhere for pure enjoyment, let alone the theatre. You had a regular seat at some fine performances under the stars for 32 years and if the Theatre Royal could put on a show half as good as the corroborees you have seen, it would be time well spent.
Turned out to be a pleasant evening. You liked what you saw and at the end of the show one of the performers wandered over and asked if you would like to return – but this time to the stage. That sounded like an offer too good to refuse. What a kind and generous proposal. Say what you like about William Buckley, but don’t say he never grabs an opportunity when it presents itself. It’s just that … you can be naïve, can’t you? It’s why some folk will suggest you can come across as being a little … simple. You think they are going to put a seat on the stage for you where you can watch the entire performance without your hulking frame blocking the view of those behind you.
Not really a man of this world, are you? You may have just spent two years among some of the most deceitful and duplicitous men God ever put on this earth, but it’s been almost 40 years since you rubbed elbows with the sort of urgers and lags that inhabit Wapping. So put this down as another of life’s lessons where, once again, you will leave people feeling as though you have let them down.
Buckley's Chance Page 25