Buckley's Chance

by Garry Linnell

  Those are your words – or at least the words John Morgan writes on your behalf. It’s about this time that you must meet the man. Your absence from work because of illness, coupled with your already low salary, means things have grown quite tight. Someone – perhaps Morgan – petitions the government in 1841 on your behalf in which you ‘humbly solicit your Honour … to allow rations to be issued to his wife and child on account of the smallness of his pay as well as for numerous duties which petitioner has to perform’.

  There’s the usual trail of memos and notes sent to various bureaucratic departments. There is even talk that your measly half a crown a day be increased by sixpence. But when the petition finally lands on the desk of Sir John Franklin any hope of improving your lot comes to a quick end. The Lieutenant-Governor who was all over you at breakfast three years earlier has no sympathy for your plight. The Man Who Ate His Own Boots effectively tells you to chew on yours. ‘The Lt Gov … has directed me to inform you that he cannot approve of the petitioner prayer being granted, neither does His Excellency think it necessary to increase the petitioners pay.’

  But in this paper trail there is one telling sentence that sums up how this town works. One of the bureaucrats writes: ‘I certainly think Buckley’s pay is small being only half a crown a day with his rations, but I cannot [vouch for] his wife to be placed on rations as she forms no part of the Establishment.’

  The Establishment.

  Now he could be meaning that Julia is not a government employee and therefore not entitled to a weekly food subsidy. But it’s hard not to detect a whiff of snobbery in those words. It’s just the sort of condescending elitism that riles John Morgan, the man who will now have to help you find a way to boost your income.

  These years in the 1840s are hard ones; scrapping by on that meagre salary in a series of rented homes, trying to provide for Julia and her growing daughter. By the end of 1842, when your work with the convict nursery is moved to Dynnyrne House in South Hobart, Morgan appears to have finished writing Life and Adventures because a small advertisement appears in the Colonial Times in early December with the headline ‘New Work’.

  It’s an ad that is surely written by Morgan, a lover of the complex inverted sentence: ‘Preparing for the Press, and will be published in this colony by the undersigned, if a sufficient number of copies are ordered previous to the 1st of March, 1843, the life and extraordinary adventures of the Anglo-Port Phillipian Chief WILLIAM BUCKLEY, thirty two years a wanderer amongst the Aboriginal Natives of Australia Felix. The work will be embellished with twelve plates, descriptive of the costumes, habits and manners of the Aborigines. One volume, octavo, boards: price 21s.’

  But Morgan’s dreams of wealth and fame as the new Daniel Defoe, along with your hopes of securing some much-needed cash, will have to be put on hold. Not enough readers with inquiring minds, it seems, make their way to the printer’s office at 39 Elizabeth Street to register their interest. Over the coming decade similar advertisements will appear in the press. Yet the manuscript will continue to languish on Morgan’s desk.

  It’s not that your name and fame has been forgotten. People still point you out when they see you. Many will never forget the sight of the ageing giant strolling the streets with his tiny wife, one end of a looped handkerchief around your arm, the other around her hand. Just so the both of you can go out arm-in-arm like everyone else. In 1848 the papers will carry a story that originates in The Geelong Advertiser – a paper owned by little Johnny Fawkner – so full of exaggerations about your years in Port Phillip that a letter from you appears in the Hobart press saying ‘every word of it is totally at variance with the truth … I further beg to state that I never gave any person an account of my adventures … except the person who wrote the manuscript and which I have now by me.’

  But the manuscript continues to gather dust on Morgan’s desk. It will not be until late 1851, just as the gold rush in Victoria begins to transform Melbourne into a pulsating vibrant city, that Morgan finally stands up at a meeting of the Mercantile Assistant’s Association and gives a reading from several of its pages. The book is finally published in March 1852, and William Robertson, one of the old members of the Port Phillip Association and now part of the landed gentry of Victoria, acts as trustee. Morgan is mindful of the accusations thrown at Defoe after the publication of Robinson Crusoe – that he had used Alexander Selkirk’s experiences and profited enormously from them without a penny going to the man who provided its inspiration.

  By all accounts it is a success; extracts are published across the country and overseas. The Colonial Times says ‘the life of Buckley would be an instructive addition to many a family library, and its perusal furnish no small pleasure during the long winter evenings … the Aboriginal character, in its lowest depths, is truthfully depicted and the painful illustrations with which this little work abounds must excite pity in every Christian bosom for the fast declining tribes of the sister colony’.

  The money from the book sales must be invaluable. Your job as gatekeeper ended in 1850 and you have been getting by on a paltry annual pension of 12 pounds. Morgan concludes Life and Adventures with a plea for the Victorian government to grant you some form of financial reward for all you have done. ‘Let us then hope that some additional provision will be made for him, so that he may never have cause to regret (on account of poverty) his return to civilisation, or the services rendered to those of his countrymen who found him in his solitude and restored him to what he hoped would provide happiness for the few remaining years of his extraordinary existence. In all the surrounding prosperity, arising out of the increase of flocks and herds and gold, surely Buckley may be permitted, in a very small degree, to participate?’

  Accompanying the book is a sketch of you by the artist Ludwig Becker, a German artist and naturalist who has only just arrived in Van Diemen’s Land and is paying his way around the island by painting miniature portraits of notable people. Becker is a gentle and sensitive man with an unruly red beard who will die in 10 years from scurvy and dysentery as part of the disastrous attempt by Burke and Wills to cross Australia from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. The artist’s perceptive nature becomes apparent when, years later, he develops his sketch into a life-sized oil portrait. It will be the only colour representation of William Buckley that will endure down the centuries and Becker manages to give you a rare sense of nobility.

  It’s the type of portrait normally found in one of those aristocratic English manors, hanging high on the wall of a private library or sitting room, an impression of a man of wealth and stature, not one spending his final years in penury. It is one of two misleading aspects of the painting. No-one ever said you were a handsome fellow. Becker has done you a favour, removing that unsightly mole high on your left cheek, softening your features to leave a dignified, if slightly austere, lasting image.

  But there is no mistaking the hanging brow and the pair of haunting eyes. They stare impassively back at the observer, the look of an ageing man who has seen far more than he can ever tell.

  36

  ‘THE ORIGINAL DISCOVERER OF PORT PHILLIP’

  That quill must feel strange in your hand. You have mastered two languages in your life but you have never known how to put them down in words. Perhaps these last few years might not have been so hard if you had known how to read and write. But it’s all too late now for that. So take that quill, place it between your fingers and press gently on the paper before you.

  It is Tuesday, 6 September 1853. Julia’s daughter, Mary Ann, has just married William Jackson, a 30-year-old labourer, in the same church where you tied the knot 13 years earlier. The reverend needs you and Julia to leave your mark as witnesses on the wedding certificate.

  Perhaps you are hesitant. Nervous. You certainly haven’t done this very often because it looks as if you press the quill on the page just a little too long; the ink runs, turning the only mark we will ever find from your hand into something closer to a blob. Julia doe
sn’t fare much better, dragging her finger back over her cross to leave a faint smudge.

  Not that it really matters. Today is all about the future, not the missed opportunities of the past. Hard to imagine that the young girl whose mother you married all those years ago is now a grown woman. Despite all the hardship of recent years, Mary Ann can read and write and in just a few years she and her husband will move to Sydney where they will bring 11 children into the world.

  You are now a man in his 70s and the last 12 months should have been a little easier after the publication of the book. Seems all that pleading on your behalf by Morgan, all those petitions requesting an acknowledgement of services rendered, finally paid off. At the start of this year the Victorian Legislative Council voted to give you a 40-pound gratuity. In fact, the original motion put to the elected representatives was that ‘Forty pounds be voted to William Buckley as the original discoverer of Port Phillip …’

  The original discoverer of Port Phillip.

  Well, didn’t that set off little Johnny Fawkner. That title, combined with your name in the same sentence … in an instant that furnace of bile inside the man was ablaze, a molten river of hatred just waiting to spill over. Fawkner is a member of the Legislative Council, of course. Why wouldn’t the original discoverer of Port Phillip occupy a position of power and influence? He fronts up to every sitting of the Council, a velvet smoking cap pulled over those wispy white hairs, an appropriate black cape swung over his shoulders, never missing an opportunity to remind everyone that they would not even be here if it were not for him.

  What’s that phrase of his? ‘The country is (cough, cough) something indebted to me.’ Little Johnny’s asthma is never good in the summer with all those swirling hot winds and pollen flying through the air and when the Council moved to give you that 40 quid in early January, Fawkner must have been wheezing like a broken piano accordion.

  The motion was eventually shortened and the ‘original discoverer’ line omitted. But that wasn’t enough to appease Fawkner. He had stood there in the Council and loudly opposed any payment to you because you had ‘injured’ the colony. Then he brazenly claimed that when Charles Franks had been murdered back in 1836, ‘it was proposed to form a party to follow and apprehend the murderers. Before this could be done, Buckley rode off and informed the blacks so that they escaped.’

  It’s the sort of slur you have let stand in the past, perhaps only hearing about second-hand. But not this time. No doubt Morgan authors the response that later appears in the Melbourne newspapers where you ‘publicly solemnly deny having done so, although under all the circumstances of my long residence among them and the kindness I had received at their hands for thirty two years, perhaps it would have been a pardonable act of mercy …’

  You demand Fawkner apologise and set the record straight because his claims ‘have occasioned me more sorrow and uneasiness than I can describe … so far from my having at any time acted treacherously towards the first settlers, I solemnly declare I did all I could to benefit and protect them from injury. All persons but yourself readily acknowledge this.’

  Of course, there is no apology from Fawkner. Johnny never says sorry. He will bide his time like a patient sniper for two more years.

  In 1855 the Council will vote to give you a more substantial recognition – an 88-pound annuity. Mr Fawkner, the Honourable Member for Talbot, will then take to his feet again to oppose the motion, saying you were a – cough, cough – thief in your younger days, that you had done everything within your means to turn the Port Phillip Aboriginals against the – wheeze, wheeze – white settlers and that you had even eaten your fellow escapers – those ‘lags’ who ran off with you into the bush just days after Christmas in 1803.

  William Buckley … cannibal.

  The members of the Victorian Legislative Council are used to Fawkner’s barbs and exaggerations. Hugh Childers, the Collector of Customs and a man who will go on to become a key member of the British cabinet, begs the council not to bow to little Johnny’s wishes because William Buckley is now a very old man who is ‘totally unable to provide for himself in his old days’. And then Edward Grimes, the Attorney-General, takes to his feet sensing an opportunity to gain a laugh at Fawkner’s expense. He questions Fawkner’s claim that you had rendered no services whatsoever to the Port Phillip colony and refers to recent legislation preventing ex-convicts from Van Diemen’s Land visiting the thriving Victorian goldfields.

  ‘By the honourable member’s own account Buckley had eaten three old lags,’ says Grimes. ‘Now, if every free man in this community had rendered such services, there would have been no necessity for the Convict’s Prevention Act; nor would the colony have been inundated with old lags from Van Diemen’s Land.’

  According to press reports, the Council’s chamber is filled with roars of laughter and the vote to give you 88 pounds goes through easily.

  But preventing you from receiving a government pension is not the only wish of little Johnny Fawkner that is denied.

  Remember that day all those years ago when he stood in that new cemetery in Port Phillip, peering into the depths of a newly dug grave? There was something Fawkner wanted known. He wrote about it in his journal that night. He didn’t want to be buried down there in the dark moist earth where all those squirming worms were just waiting to eat his mortal remains.

  Fawkner instead wanted his body placed on a burning pyre, the way they used to send those Viking warriors to Valhalla, a display of stubbornness and grandiosity that would forever sum up the man.

  When he dies in his home in 1869, at the age of 76, all those decades of fighting and scheming and doing whatever it took in order to make history remember him will have paid off. Except for one thing.

  Acclaimed as the grand old man of the state of Victoria, more than 15,000 people will throng the streets to watch the funeral procession. Some will no doubt be there in their black top hats and waistcoats just to make sure the coffin lid has been tightly sealed and little Johnny has no way of staging a final act of defiance. More than 150 carriages will form the funeral cortege. Bells will sound and several minutes of silence will be held.

  But at the end of it all there will be no burning pyre for John Pascoe Fawkner. They will lower him into the ground to join the worms like everyone else.

  Stubborn bastards. Where would we be without them? Four days before Christmas in 1855 a single-seat chaise cart makes its way down the steep incline of Constitution Hill, Hobart Town. Where have you been, William? Mary Ann and her husband, yet to leave for Sydney, live in Antill Ponds, about 40 miles north of Hobart, so perhaps you are on your way home from visiting them. These gigs make it easy for an old man with tired legs. But they are not the most stable of contraptions and when your horse suddenly stumbles, the wooden wheels slide and you are hurled violently out of the cart and on to the ground.

  According to some reports you are unconscious for several minutes as passers-by come to your aid. When you regain consciousness you are in pain and cannot move your arms and legs and so they carry you to the nearby Swan Inn and call for a doctor. It does not take long for news of the accident to spread. The man whose name ‘has become almost a proverb from his lengthened and intimate association with Australasia met, we regret to say, with an accident on Friday …’ reports one of the newspapers. ‘Fears are entertained that at his advanced age the accident will terminate fatally.’

  A safe assumption to make about any person in their mid-70s who has been thrown to the ground and paralysed. But they don’t know what a hard man you are. You’re going to fight this all the way. By 8 January the doctors decide there is little they can do to ease your pain, so you are taken to St Mary’s Hospital in Davey Street, an institution for the ‘labouring classes’ who despise the nearby colonial hospital that treats convicts.

  It must be a painful journey, every tortuous bump in the road adding to the agony. You’re going to remain in St Mary’s for 11 days until, at the request of yourself and Juli
a, who is beginning to go blind and can no longer care for you on her own, you are taken to the home of a friend and local baker, William Bridger, where around-the-clock care can be provided. It also won’t cost you anything, will it? The daily fee at St Mary’s is six shillings and by the time you are discharged the amount owing is more than three pounds – a quarter of the annual pension the Van Diemen’s Land government gives you.

  All your life you have managed to find a way out of a difficult situation. But there is not going to be any grand escape this time.

  On 30 January 1856 you take your final breath.

  They bury you the following Saturday at St George’s burial ground in Battery Point. John Morgan is there and Joseph Hone, a former London barrister who has become a friend in recent years, also joins the procession to the grave. But there are none of the surviving members of the Port Phillip Association, that group of wealthy men who used you to keep the peace with the Aboriginals as they set about taking their lands. John Wedge, the author of your successful request for a pardon and now a prominent member of the Tasmanian Legislative Council, fails to show because ‘other imperative engagements prevented him’.

  So it is left to the Reverend Henry Fry to commit your body to the Lord as it is lowered into an unmarked grave. Perhaps there are plans to erect a suitable headstone later when the distraught Julia and Mary Ann and her husband manage to come into some money.