The clergymen.
Spare a thought for those who must spread God’s word. ‘He is placed as it were in the very gorge of sin, in the midst of the general receptacle for the worst characters in the world … of necessity compelled to take the “Bull by the horns”, to grapple at the very gates of hell if he would rescue a soul from the headlong ruin to which he is hurrying.’
These are the words of Charles Medyett Goodridge. He knows a thing or two about standing before those gates of hell and staring into its flaming abyss. Goodridge lives in Hobart for many years, working as a ferryman on the Derwent, earning his keep transporting livestock across the river; a man never far from a salt breeze and a swaying deck. In the early 1830s he publishes a book with a deceptively dull title – Statistical View of Van Diemen’s Land. But its pages are far more than a turgid catalogue of lists and numbers. They come to life as Goodridge guides us on a virtual tour of the good, the bad … and the very bad, of which there is plenty.
It is why the man insists that a Hobart preacher has the toughest job in town: ‘This truth will be painfully impressed upon the mind of any one who views the streets of Hobart Town during the time of divine service. Idle men and women may be seen loitering here and there … some standing impatiently around the doors of the public houses, waiting until the hours of public worship are over when the houses may be opened and they may go in to continue their carousing.’
A pastor’s duty, he says, is the most important a man can undertake, ‘but in these penal colonies it is extreme. He has to struggle with the enemy at close combat, face to face and foot to foot, and to brace himself up to the utmost point of exertion … his zeal and industry will readily show themselves by the character and success of his works in the pulpit.’
Good fire and brimstone stuff, this, straight from the hand and heart of a man singed by those very flames of hell.
Charles Goodridge is another Robinson Crusoe, a shipwreck survivor who lived off penguin eggs and the raw brains of sea elephants for two years. Really? Just how many of these characters can one century produce? Back in the early 1820s he had been a merchant sailor on the Princess of Wales, a cutter sent to the rugged limits of the Southern Ocean with enough salt in its hold to preserve the skins of 10,000 seals. The men would be dumped on rocky outcrops in the middle of the cold sea for weeks at a time, their small rowboats turned upside down to shelter them against the icy winds, the skin torn from their hands as they crawled across jagged boulders, hunting prey in such numbers that within decades the industry would be on its knees.
As with any decent Robinson Crusoe experience, a huge storm came out of nowhere and its monster swell seized the Princess of Wales, dashing her against rocks and leaving her crew stranded. This small band of sealers spent the next two years eking out a miserly existence, the blubber of walruses their only fuel, their raw brains a rare source of protein and their skins the only protection against the extreme weather. But what put steel in these men’s hearts and hope in their minds? The only reading matter they managed to salvage from the wreck was a single copy of the Bible and it was in the pages of the good book, read by the flickering glow of a blubber-fuelled fire, that Goodridge was reminded each night that God had not forgotten him, that if he continued to believe in Him those gates to hell would remain locked.
Salvation eventually arrived in the form of a passing ship making its way to Hobart Town. But no sooner had he set foot in Van Diemen’s Land than Goodridge was struck by the sheer meanness of the town and its ‘want of charity’. A bid to raise funds for the crew attracted just a few pounds. Money, it seemed, was good for one purpose. ‘The vice of drunkenness was extremely prevalent, more particularly among the convicts, but I am sorry to add it greatly pervaded all classes.’
While Goodridge would go on to praise many aspects of life in Hobart before making his way back home to England, he never forgot ‘the most humiliating scenes of drunkenness, disgusting indeed to the spectator’. And that, in large part, is why he insists the preacher of Hobart has the toughest job in town.
‘The great work of reformation must begin with him. If one mode of exhortation does not succeed he must try another, and his mind must be continually on the rack to discover the best means of accomplishing some part at least of the great work before him.’
Well, if those Hobart preachers have their work in front of them, just what sort of fate awaits the Reverend William Waterfield? He arrives in Hobart in March 1838 and in just a few weeks will make his way to Port Phillip to become Melbourne’s first appointed congregational minister. Waterfield is a devout and private man who shuns parties and public displays of any sort of exuberance. Melbourne will sorely test his patience. Over the next five years he will see people out and about on the streets on Sundays, engaging in all sorts of riotous behaviour … like walking … and laughing in public on a day reserved for contemplating the Lord’s work. Waterfield will peer through his window and refuse to join these outrageous scenes because his ‘mind was too harassed’. He will be mortified to discover a couple sharing his home who, on Christmas Day, suddenly begin singing before getting up to … well … it’s almost too obscene to put down in words … but they … well, they stand up and start … dancing.
But before his departure for the Gomorrah that is Port Phillip there is one man he insists he must meet. Yes, another of God’s workers wants to talk with you and gain some insight into those heathen natives he will be forced to contend with once he crosses Bass Strait.
On 28 April the Reverend William Waterfield writes in his journal that he is introduced to you after dinner and the usual questioning begins immediately. ‘I … asked him many questions and found that the natives had no idea of a Supreme Being or a God of any kind, that all the future state that they believed in was that when they died they would be turned into white people and visit again their own land.
‘Buckley was a man about 6ft 6in. He informed me that the native fruits were very few and were something like the black and white currant. He thought the people were quite harmless. They avowed no chief but were on equality with each other.’
So far, so good. But then Waterfield throws a question your way that has to do with another of those myths that have built up around you, that you were part of a group of British soldiers who staged a mutiny in Gibraltar in 1802. It’s a story that has circulated for years. Yes, there was a mutiny in Gibraltar. And, yes, six soldiers involved in that mutiny were put on board the Calcutta at the last minute as it sailed for Port Phillip. But no, you were not one of them. When that mutiny was being staged you were making your way to the hulks at Langstone.
‘He would not acknowledge to having been at Gibraltar,’ writes Waterfield, as though he does not quite believe you. ‘He denied it altogether. He was originally a bricklayer but did not attempt to teach it to the natives. I was pleased with the interview.’ He’s not a man for extensive details, our Reverend Waterfield.
But there are others who do manage to extract far more information. All types have been beating a path to your door since your arrival in Hobart. One of the first was Dr John Lhotsky, who sat down with you just a few days after that ridiculous attempt to get you on stage at the Theatre Royal.
An eccentric Polish explorer and naturalist, Lhotsky is a divisive figure in Van Diemen’s Land. He is debt-ridden and hounded by several local newspapers that claim his request for public donations to develop his private collection of rocks and specimens into a museum is nothing but a scam. He will soon leave for London but the scorn he has earned from Hobart’s polite society will follow him. ‘Here he assumed the rank of Gentleman,’ reads a typically scathing assessment of the man in The Tasmanian, ‘… and the pomposity of a great Philosopher, mineralogist, geologist and every other ist imaginable …’
We’ll never know how Lhotsky manages to sit you down. Perhaps, as that historian and noted pedicurist to the rich and famous James Bonwick might say, he employs ‘the steamy vapour of the punchbowl’. But it’s an
exclusive interview that not even The Tasmanian can decline; no matter how much it loathes the good doctor.
Lhotsky, in fact, should have considered adding another ist to his many titles – that of journalist – for he has a natural talent widespread in this era for taking the truth and … stretching it a little.
‘Buckley must have been a splendid young man, being nearly seven feet high,’ writes a clearly impressed Lhotsky, unfortunately shattering any claims he may have to being a man of science and a master of measurement. ‘Even at the present moment there is something original, but quite sedate about him. His features have been rather darkened by thirty-two years exposure to the sun of Australia, and there is certainly something stern and “savage” in them, however thoroughly softened by a certain moral and intelligent composure, if I shall call it so.’
Did you hear that? A certain moral and intelligent composure.
‘Upon being asked whether the blacks were in the habit of killing their sickly or deformed offspring, he paused a good time very significantly, and replied that they do no such thing; but, on the contrary, that they treat their children with the greatest care and tenderness.
‘Buckley being so deeply and justly attached to a race of strangers, amongst whom he had lived for so many years, I mentioned that they doubtlessly treated him well after they became better acquainted with each other; but the answer which I received, and I believe a tear glistened at the same time in his eye, was that they had treated him from the very first like one of their own.’
Lhotz is … almost spellbound. ‘It was very satisfactory, and at the same time touching to me, to find a civilized European feeling so deeply (as I saw he did) the kindness which he had received from (what we call) savages.’
So impressed is Lhotsky that he goes on to give us a hint as to why some of his critics have come to regard him as a tad pompous: ‘I was forcibly reminded of an old adage of mine, viz., that “it is easy to despise mankind, but difficult to comprehend it!”’
Well, the man doesn’t mind quoting himself. But his interview with you is the best piece of press you’ve received in a long time. If we didn’t know any better we’d be tempted to think all that hobnobbing around Hobart – rubbing those immense shoulders with the powerful, pressing those huge hands into the palms of the rich and influential – is having an effect, stripping away your layers of naivety and replacing them with a certain moral and intelligent composure …
What a pity you still have to work for a living.
35
GATEKEEPER, AUTHOR, PORTRAIT SUBJECT
Your curriculum vitae please, William. Time to update it again. Mind if we have a look? Can’t quite make out that date of birth but it seems as though you are now in your late 50s? It says here you’ve had quite a few jobs over the years, too. You were a bricklayer? A soldier? There’s quite a lengthy gap after that. Took a lengthy stint of long service, did we? Then a role as an interpreter, followed by – well, let’s ignore that 24-hour career as an actor – the job of assistant storekeeper.
Time to add another to the list. Gatekeeper William Buckley.
The Immigrants’ Home is being closed after three months because all those surviving passengers from the Bussorah Merchant have been resettled. Daniel Eagers, that stonecutter from Cork, is apparently heading off to Sydney soon to join an overland expedition to Port Phillip, leaving his wife and small daughter behind in Hobart. The rest of those Irish pilgrims have found other lodgings so your services are no longer required. Instead, the government has found a new position for you. Would you mind popping down to Liverpool Street? There’s a large house opposite the colonial hospital that shouldn’t be too hard to find. It’s filled with women and children and someone needs to keep an eye on the door. Quickly.
It is late May 1838, and the government is under pressure to improve the squalid conditions inside its workhouse for female convicts, the Cascades Female Factory. What a disaster it has turned out to be; a remodelled distillery sitting in a swamp at the foot of Mt Wellington, down where the sun never shines and the only thing that grows is mildew. Not even the man who put the Theatre Royal in the middle of Wapping could have come up with this. There are hundreds of women prisoners crammed into small, unventilated rooms. Settlers have been complaining that many of the inmates sent to them to act as servants arrive on their doorsteps in a filthy state, nits crawling through their unkempt hair. Many of the women are disease-ridden, others suffering severe mental illnesses that go untreated. The only health problem that is not an issue is obesity – dinner is a quarter pound of bread and a pint of soup. What a nutritious broth it is, too. The regulations stipulate the preferred recipe to be 25 pounds of meat to every 150 quarts of soup, boosted with vegetables or barley. But vegetables are often unavailable so the chef whips up what the French would call a bouillon, which the inmates know only as lukewarm water with tiny, floating pieces of unidentifiable meat.
For pregnant and nursing mothers, conditions are even harder. In 1834, 10 children died within six weeks. When a coroner’s inquiry subsequently visited the site it found more than 60 mothers had been living in a dormitory only 40 feet long and 11 feet wide. In the past eight years one in every four children have died within the Factory’s walls.
Even the press – no great fans of convicts male or female – has been hounding the government over this ‘miserable place … the most unfitting place in the whole colony for the prison of women, children and infants’. So the Convict Department has assigned a house in Liverpool Street to act as the new nursery. Your role as gatekeeper will be to keep an eye on the comings and goings of these female convicts who, according to the papers, make ‘their exits and entrances just when and how they please … these women are openly disgraceful – drunkenness and cohabitation being continually practiced and all from the miserable penuriousness of the government’.
So would you mind heading down there right now?
It must be over the next year that news filters back to Hobart that Daniel Eagers has been killed. The only source we will have for this is your Life and Adventures, where you will say Daniel went to Sydney ‘thinking to better himself … but whilst on a journey he afterwards undertook overland to Port Phillip, he was killed by natives near the Murray River; thus leaving his family unprovided for’.
When the news of his death is confirmed you propose to the widowed Julia and she accepts. It is – and let’s choose our words carefully here – an unusual union. These are certainly times when desperation brings couples together; convict women often marry free men (see John Batman and John Pascoe Fawkner) while older, newly widowed men are known to take their female servants for brides. Your friend Joseph Johnson will do just that in a few years’ time when his wife, Elizabeth, passes away, marrying his housekeeper who will, in a rather unfortunate memory lapse on her part, turn out to have a husband back in England who eventually travels to Australia to reclaim her. So necessity often conquers love as the driving force behind many unions.
But as the Reverend Thomas Ewing stands before the pair of you inside St John’s Anglican Church on Monday, 27 January 1840, even he must find the differences between you a touch remarkable.
William Buckley is at least 58 years old and despite the care you will have taken to comb your hair and trim your beard, there is no disguising that receding hairline.
Julia Eagers is 26.
You’re a giant.
She is … diminutive.
You have been described – unfairly – as a mindless lump of matter.
She is, clearly, the smartest person in the church.
Julia knows Hobart is no place for a widow and her young daughter. She only has to glance at all those soulless buildings around the corner from the church that form the Orphans Asylum to know what often happens to young children whose parents can no longer provide for them. There are hundreds of them living in harsh and miserable conditions; underfed, often bashed and at the mercy of scarlet fever and measles epidemics that break out
every few years.
The Reverend Ewing – one of those men Charles Goodridge wants us to believe has the hardest job in town – also happens to be headmaster of the orphans’ school. Ewing is one of those 19th-century preachers who delight in the complexity that God has given nature; his days off are often spent prancing through fields with a butterfly net, examining algae and collecting specimens. The famous British ornithologist John Gould will name a species of bird after the man – Ewing’s Acanthiza.
Within a year Ewing’s name will be associated with something far more sinister when allegations surface that he has sexually molested one of the orphan girls. While an investigation will clear the married preacher of any criminality, he will eventually lose his position as headmaster because of his ‘impudence’.
But that is a year away. In front of him right now stand Mr and Mrs Buckley. The church, newly consecrated, is all convict stone and sturdy beams hauled down from the slopes of Mt Wellington. Do they ring the large bell donated by the King to announce your marriage? And by the way … have you told Julia that she is not your first wife?
Not long after your wedding, a letter announcing you have just been married will arrive in Port Phillip. Its contents will be read to some of the Wadawurrung people who formed your family for 32 years, among them Purranmurnin Tallarwurnin, the woman who says she was your wife. They cried when you left for Van Diemen’s Land. With this news that you have settled down with an Irish woman, they will cry again, too. Now they know Murrangurk will never return.
Good thing you married Julia. Soon after the wedding you contract typhus, a bacterial infection they often call jail fever. You thought you were coming down with the flu for a few days until a week later when you noticed the beginnings of a rash. It didn’t take long for it to spread and for the fevers to kick in. Hobart has had a few typhus epidemics and body lice usually spread them. That convict nursery where you work. It must be nit headquarters. Typhus can lead to delusions and ultimately death – it has killed hundreds of millions of sufferers in the past couple of centuries. But thankfully ‘the kind attentions I received from my wife and her daughter … at length restored me to health, but not to such health as I had previously enjoyed; my privations and exposure in the bush, with increased years, having no doubt materially damaged my naturally strong constitution’.
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