Buckley's Chance

by Garry Linnell

  You can’t blame John Moses for trying. The man needs bums on seats. This Wednesday night – 17 January 1838 – is his big night. A benefit for John Moses and the new Theatre Royal has never seen the likes of it. Making its debut: the play One O’Clock – or The Knight & the Wood Demon, a gothic romance from the pen of the English writer Michael Lewis.

  A day before the performance the local papers are filled with late breaking news. ‘The grand spectacle which had such an unparalleled run in London, the Wood Demon (in which will be introduced, in the character of Giant Hacho, Mr William Buckley, just arrived from Port Phillip), to be followed by a pantomime, with all its amusing fooleries …’

  The Giant Hacho himself! Never heard of him? Here’s an extract from ‘The Penny Playbook’ from the show’s run in London: ‘… in an almost impregnable castle on the sea coast dwelt a terrific giant named Hacho, who delighted in securing all the beauteous damsels who came in his way, and confining them in his castle, till they yielded to his infamous desires, after which, he mostly put them to a horrible death …’

  Staging the play in Hobart is a coup for Moses, who arrived in town in 1820, courtesy of His Majesty’s convict fleet. He’s a theatrical type. He has a ruddy face and hazel eyes that poured tears of regret when he appeared before a judge in Westminster for stealing a watch. ‘I beg for mercy,’ he cried out during his trial. But that performance hardly helped. Seven years’ transportation to the colonies. He served his time and since then has worked hard to fight his way back to respectability – well, as best a man can do in these colonial times when being Jewish puts you just a couple of rungs above the Indigenous population on the ladder of respectability.

  The local papers don’t mind publishing sarcastic stories about members of what they call ‘the money-lending tribe’. But the Colonial Times does have some sympathy for Moses. The day before his benefit it writes that through ‘the exertions of Mr Moses, the theatre has been for months past kept in highly respectable and peaceable order, it being his duty to superintend the management of the tickets taken, and the audience generally. His situation, in a colony like this, must be anything but agreeable; but he invariably does his duty and has therefore claims upon the public. The pantomime is spoken of as certain to please. Since writing the above, we find Mr Buckley, the Port Phillip giant, is to perform in the first piece.’

  So let’s get this straight. A week ago you were Interpreter William Buckley. Now you’re William Buckley, Actor? This is surely your greatest – and quickest – transformation. It was only six days ago that you disembarked from the Yarra Yarra and strode in to the colony with a cool sea breeze at your back, the ship’s skipper, John Lancey, by your side. Lancey may have been the captain of the boat that carried Johnny Fawkner’s team of first settlers to Port Phillip but he never let the man’s bile affect his view of you. He took you to a local bank to cash a cheque and by the time you arrived at the Duchess of Kent for a little light refreshment, word had already spread through town that the Wild White Man had arrived and was looking to settle down. So many people wanting to catch a glimpse of you, to confirm with their own eyes that you actually do exist and have not been a figment of the imagination of men like William Lushington Goodwin.

  You have woken this morning at the home of William Cutts, the licensee of the Black Swan hotel, a man who has been kind enough to give you somewhere to stay for a few weeks until you find your bearings. The news is already spreading about your coming appearance.

  Well, that won’t be happening, will it?

  You quickly let it be known you will not be up on stage ‘exhibited as the huge Anglo-Australian giant’. Damn thing sounds like a freak show and haven’t you just spent two years trying to escape from one? The news is relayed ‘very much to the mortification’ of Moses, who now has to find another lumbering figure to play the role of the Giant Hacho. But Moses is a professional and of course he will find a way to get on with the show.

  But if William Buckley is a man who cannot escape his past, so too is John Moses. A few months after the premiere of The Wood Demon, Moses discovers one of his actresses has stolen two valuable stage dresses. The matter goes to court and after a lengthy debate Moses decides to withdraw the charges when it becomes clear he can’t win the case.

  The Colonial Times no longer has any sympathy for Mr Moses. Once again it is time to poke fun at his Jewishness and dwell in some good old-fashioned racism of the era. It quotes Moses telling the court that the dresses were valuable and had been worn by a duchess at Queen Victoria’s recent coronation: ‘Dey ver vort eight coinees and ver vorn by a Tuchess at the Queen’s crownashun.’

  Just in case the reader is in any doubt about the man’s heritage, the Times ends its report by saying he would like his stolen property to be returned. ‘Vell, vell, I am shatisfied,’ he is quoted. ‘Let me have my trasses.’

  33

  ASSISTANT STOREMAN BUCKLEY

  Now listen. You may be the talk of the town but there is also another large and ageing veteran making news in Hobart. The Bussorah Merchant, a 530-ton teak vessel that has seen better days, is sitting in quarantine in North West Bay, a four-hour walk south of those squalid Wapping streets. For the past few weeks its passengers have been recovering from a five-month nightmare that saw the bodies of more than 60 children sent into the deep.

  The Bussorah Merchant left Cork in Ireland in August with almost 300 free emigrants hoping to escape their homeland’s poverty and civil unrest. They must have thought they were in safe hands with Morgan Price, a doctor who had been at sea for more than 25 years tending to the health of passengers on Navy and merchant vessels. Here was a man who knew only too well how cruel those months on board could be; how disease could spread so quickly that, before you knew it, bodies were being thrown overboard morning, noon and night. It was not just illness, either, that could move through all that oak as stealthy and deadly as … well, that stubborn bastard of the seas, Teredo navalis. Cram hundreds of people into a ship that has already been at sea for 20 years, a vessel that has already made three long trips to New Holland, and the smallest of slights could be magnified, reactions blown out of all proportion. A decade earlier, as the Bussorah Merchant sailed from London to Madras, a soldier had shot dead the ship’s serving surgeon.

  So Price was taking no chances on this voyage. Those on board who could read would have seen the General Regulations notice he nailed up for everyone to see. It was a fine list from a man doing his best to keep them safe; bedding in the dingy recesses where the poorest passengers spent their nights would have to be brought on deck and scrubbed with holystone twice a week; there would be ‘no smoaking’ between decks and every male emigrant ‘must be shaved every Wednesday and Saturday and every individual to be mustered every Thursday and Sunday when they are required to have on clean linen’.

  But Price had known these rules could only do so much. The rest would have to be left in God’s hands.

  ‘You are required strictly to attend to the sacred commandments, in order to attain a knowledge of those truths,’ Price instructed the passengers. ‘I earnestly recommend you to the frequent reading of the Scriptures, and to seek opportunities in your spirits before God, when you are at your work, as He knoweth every secret thought.’

  Well, Price did not have to fear his passengers’ loyalty to the Lord. It did not take long for these poor Irish passengers to huddle together and pray for mercy and forgiveness as the Bussorah Merchant ploughed its way through the heaving seas toward Hobart Town. Smallpox and measles soon began to spread and within weeks the first of many tiny bodies shrouded in calico were buried at sea.

  It would become a voyage that later historians would cite as an example of ‘ignorance of good hygiene … four women and sixty four out of one hundred and thirty three children died, mostly of measles and smallpox’. It is difficult to imagine what those months at sea must have been like for those on board; waiting to see whose child would be next, every cough and itch closely – and
fearfully – examined.

  The passenger list, a grim register of tragedy and misfortune, reads as though the ship was carrying an entire village of workers. There were labourers and shepherds, carpenters and sawyers, plasterers and cabinetmakers.

  A wheelwright and his wife from Cloyne, John and Ellen Cosgrove, buried three of their six boys at sea. A 29-year-old sawyer and his wife from the small town of Fermoy, Edward and Ellen Fennessy, watched their daughter Peggy die from smallpox, her body ravaged by sores and blisters. Soon after they lost their other children – Mary Anne, John and Edward – to measles.

  James Byrne, a labourer from Balriggen, and his wife, Mary, surrendered two of their three measles-affected children to the deep. So too did William and Ellen Clancy of Aghada.

  The Lord, it turned out, had not knoweth all. He had failed Morgan Price and that meant the surgeon had failed his passengers. And now the Bussorah Merchant has been forced to spend more than five valuable weeks anchored in North West Bay, its owners no doubt counting every lost day without cargo. Within the next few days its quarantine will be over and its surviving passengers will finally step on land for the first time in five months.

  So, William. You may ask what all this has to do with you. Well, among those fortunate emigrants who have survived this hellish journey from Ireland is a woman who will soon become your wife.

  In the fast, sing-song cadence of the Cork accent, words tumble into one another quickly like a trail of falling dominoes. It’s a musical dialect with a throaty Irish ‘r’; what the experts will one day call a velarised alveolar approximant. Its speed, combined with a patter of unrounded vowels, can be confusing to those not from the south-west of Ireland. A goat becomes a gawwwt. The word ‘top’ comes out as tahp. To those passengers who first laid eyes on her, the Bussorah Merchant must have seemed a tahp bawwwt, the vessel that would take them from poverty to the Promised Land.

  So it’s understandable that the poor soul charged with putting together the ship’s manifest had some difficulties. Daniel Eagers, a 34-year-old stonecutter keen for a new life in a new land, suddenly became Daniel Higgins. Naturally, his 24-year-old illiterate wife, Julia, was also given this new surname along with their two-year-old daughter, Mary Ann.

  This little island they have come to is hardly the land of opportunity. Two years ago the Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur protested to London about the large numbers of labourers being sent his way because they were taking work his tens of thousands of convicts could be carrying out. Now his replacement, Sir John Franklin, a man less interested in the outpost as a penal settlement and more concerned with having Van Diemen’s Land declared a free, self-governing colony, has suspended assisted immigration. The Eagers family might well be one of the last to make it here under a system that guaranteed skilled married men a 20-pound advance.

  That 20 quid will have to last them for some time. Jobs for skilled labourers are scarce, particularly stone-cutting, seen more as fine, backbreaking work for convicts. It may also explain why Daniel Eagers will shortly leave Hobart for Sydney to join an overland cattle drive heading to Port Phillip.

  But first, the Eagers need somewhere to live. They will make their way through the grimy streets to Hobart Town’s Immigrants’ Home. And who will they meet at this fine establishment?

  None other than … Assistant Storeman William Buckley.

  While you get an opportunity to rest that weary body, the days also pass in a blur of new faces. But it is the old ones you enjoy meeting most and no-one will do more to get you back on your feet than Joseph Johnson.

  Joe was one of your shipmates on the Calcutta and has done very well for himself. He had been 26 years old when he was sentenced to death for horse-stealing in Crown End and, like you, had that term commuted to life before being sent to the hulks in Langstone. Perhaps it was the separation from all those bad influences back home. Or maybe Joe always had a kernel of entrepreneurship in him and David Collins’ decision to come to Van Diemen’s Land finally gave it that chance to flourish. He certainly moved quickly. After receiving a conditional pardon in 1809 he was given a grant of 140 acres and has now turned that into more than 5000 acres. He has a large house in Green Ponds, properties across Hobart and has become so wealthy and successful he has paid for relatives – two nephews and their families – to join him from England and share in his riches.

  All these accomplishments have given him a sheen of respectability along with rare access to the powerful; in fact, you could say Joseph Johnson has become one of them. But despite all these achievements he has never forgotten where he came from. He greets you like the long-lost friend you are. You’re both old men now with so many stories to share. He insists you must stay with him in that grand house he calls Tissington, named after his native village in Derbyshire. Where to begin? You have spent more than 30 years living on the land; Johnson has spent the same time profiting from it.

  But after three weeks of this – ‘being tired of an indolent life’ – you beg him to organise an introduction to Sir John Franklin so you might capitalise on your new celebrity and find a way to make a living. Joe Johnson is a man for whom all doors open in Hobart and within days you arrive at Government House for breakfast with Sir John and his wife, Lady Franklin.

  The Lieutenant-Governor is another of those men the 19th century specialises in producing, a Navy man who somehow always manages to turn up when history is being made. He was at the Battle of Copenhagen with Horatio Nelson. He was a midshipman on board the HMS Investigator when it made the first circumnavigation of Australia under the command of Matthew Flinders. And he was on board the HMS Bellerophon at the Battle of Trafalgar when Nelson, on board the Victory, was shot through the spine by a sniper.

  But it is not just the sea that calls out to Franklin. Twenty years earlier he led an expedition charting the rugged north-east coastline of Canada. Over the next two years more than half of his force perished from starvation, survivors like Franklin forced to chew on their leather boots and eat the moss clinging to the cold rocks. Whispers of cannibalism would linger for years. Now there’s something for you. Want to boast about all those shellfish you were forced to suck down all those years ago, those days and weeks when you thought you would collapse from being so famished? This man knows what it is like to go hungry. There are colleagues of his who still call him ‘The Man Who Ate His Boots’.

  Perhaps that is why Sir John looks so well fed these days, his balding head softened by a chubby face and a fleshy chin that droops dangerously close to his collar and silk tie. Take a good look at him because chances are you won’t be seeing much more of the man after this meeting. In just a few years he will head back to the Arctic to lead an expedition to chart the remainder of the famed Northwest Passage, that legendary route Europeans have spent centuries exploring as a potential path to Asia. It will also be the last Lady Franklin sees of her 59-year-old husband, whose disappearance will earn him a special place in 19th-century history.

  As commander of the expedition Sir John will take 130 men, two ships – the Erebus and the Terror – and three years’ worth of supplies into the frigid, iceberg-laden seas around Lancaster Sound. The expedition is never heard from again, its fate uncertain until Inuit Eskimo discover the Terror floating in an ice-bound cove, the Erebus long broken into pieces by the vice-like pack ice. Dozens of search parties will be sent out over the next 40 years and Sir John will become mythologised in song and legend. But it will take another 150 years until the fate of Franklin and his men is revealed. Human bones found on one of the islands in the Northwest Passage will contain traces of tuberculosis and possible lead contamination from tinned food that turned bad. Other bones – broken and previously boiled – will indicate attempts at extracting marrow. Most of the men, it seemed, either froze or starved to death as they ran out of companions to dine on.

  So if Sir John is enjoying his breakfast, no-one should complain. He asks you if there is anything he can do to make your life a little easier. Hav
ing seen what Joe Johnson has accomplished, you tell him a small allotment of land would be nice.

  But that won’t be happening. ‘His excellency said he could not grant land,’ you say in Life and Adventures, ‘but that he would see what could be done in the way of finding me employment.’

  Assistant Storeman at the Immigrants’ Home. Perhaps not the greatest of occupations. But then, what exactly can you do these days? You’re too old to haul bricks. And these colonists have no need for an Aboriginal interpreter because they effectively wiped them off the face of the earth years earlier. You’ve made it clear that acting is not your passion. So let’s make do with what you have been given.

  Besides, you get to meet the Eagers family. Julia is a tiny woman, clearly devoted to her precious daughter, particularly after that voyage of the Bussorah Merchant. She might be a little hard to understand when she talks in that tumbling, lilting Cork accent. But all you have to do is listen closely. You are, after all, a man from Cheshire who mastered Wadawurrung.

  34

  ‘A CERTAIN MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL COMPOSURE’

  This raucous place they call Hobart Town. What do you see as you stride down streets of cobblestones and sawdust and horse dung on your way to your storeman’s job at the Immigrants’ Home? There are convicts with calloused hands hauling stone slabs, carpenters furiously sawing and hammering, blacksmiths swinging their mallets like Thor himself, pounding hot metal against their anvils until it bends to their will. The chill of autumn might be in the air but the entire town is perspiring, toiling in rivers of sweat and industry.

  Hard workers, most of them, diligently obeying the directive from Colossians 3:23: ‘Whatever you do work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.’ But not a single one can hold a candle to those few brave souls tasked with the hardest occupation in this town.