Buckley's Chance Read online

  About the Book

  After fighting Napoleon’s army and surviving, William Buckley is transported to Australia for life for stealing two small pieces of cloth. What happens next will become one of the most remarkable survival stories in history.

  On a moonlit night, Buckley escapes and disappears into the Australian bush. Given up for dead by his white captors, he is discovered and adopted by an Aboriginal tribe who regard him as a ghost. Buckley will not be seen again for more than 30 years until he emerges one day – carrying a spear, dressed in animal skins and having forgotten the English language.

  Buckley’s Chance is a profound journey into a turning point in history where cultures clash, bitter rivals go to war and the body count mounts. It is the story of a man who refuses to be held down. A man prepared to defy all odds and take a chance. Buckley’s chance.

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  MAP

  EPIGRAPH

  FOREWORD

  PROLOGUE

  PART I:

  William Enters the World

  1 Sentenced to Death; Reprieved; Imprisoned on a Hulk

  2 Beheaded; and the King Loses His Head

  3 Your Mother, 16 and Unwed

  4 The Scum of the Earth

  5 Fighting the French in the Dutch Rain

  6 A Dour Leader; a Sneaky Boy

  7 ‘The Treatment on the Passage Was Very Good’

  8 A Stopover; the Women of Rio; the Dead Thrown Overboard

  9 Land at Last; Predators and Misfortune; the Natives Appear

  10 Daring Escape under a Full Moon

  PART II:

  William Enters a New World

  11 ‘A Species of Madness’

  12 ‘They Have Seen a Ghost’

  13 William Has a New Family. And a New Name

  14 Tales of Cannibalism

  15 William Adopts a Blind Boy – and Finds Love

  16 The Ones Who Came before You

  17 Words and Things

  18 You Are Not Robinson Crusoe

  19 The Decisive Moment

  20 Coming in

  PART III:

  William Bridges Two Worlds

  21 The Press Breaks the News

  22 John Batman – Hero, Hunter, Murderer

  23 The Back-Room Boys

  24 An Enemy Lurks

  25 Your Name Blackened; Massacre Averted; a Miserable Death

  26 Tears at Family Reunion; Rape; a Nasty Rumour Spreads

  27 The Word of God

  28 Murder Most Foul; Bloodthirsty Revenge; Vicious Calumny

  29 Death, But No Justice

  30 Enough Is Enough

  31 ‘A Yet Deeper Shade of Wretchedness’

  PART IV:

  William Retreats from Both Worlds

  32 William Buckley, aka ‘Giant Hacho’

  33 Assistant Storeman Buckley

  34 ‘A Certain Moral and Intellectual Composure’

  35 Gatekeeper, Author, Portrait Subject

  36 ‘The Original Discoverer of Port Phillip’

  OTHER LIVES

  WADAWURRUNG CLAN NAMES AND LOCATIONS

  THE FIRST PEOPLE

  IMAGES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ENDNOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  IMPRINT

  READ MORE AT PENGUIN BOOKS AUSTRALIA

  Land of the Wadawurrung people

  ‘What is history after all? History is facts that become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end.’

  Jean Cocteau

  FOREWORD

  Tracing the footsteps of William Buckley is not easy and not just because his strides were so long. Few historical figures in this country are shrouded in as much myth and speculation. His illiteracy undoubtedly contributed to this. But it is the nature of his life that has left him stranded in a shadow world. To some, his 32 years living with Australia’s Aboriginals and ultimately becoming one of them is a bizarre footnote in the early colonisation of Australia. Others have embraced him as the early embodiment of reconciliation.

  Part of the problem is that so many people insist on peering into history through a modern lens, applying the standards of the present to the past. Because of this, Buckley’s legacy leaves many feeling uncomfortable, in the same way the man’s imposing physical presence made those around him feel uneasy. He made some awkward observations about the black and white worlds in which he lived. Both societies could be cruel and inhumane. He lived in a time when Indigenous people were labelled savages and their presence seen as an impediment to so-called progress. He also lived in a period when orphaned white children were treated as slaves and where unspeakable atrocities were carried out on the poor and defenceless. Buckley was consigned to a no-man’s-land between these two vastly different cultures. Was he a traitor to the Aboriginal people? Or did he betray white people?

  So much about the man is in dispute. Even etymologists, that diligent band who study the history of words, do not unanimously agree on the true origin of the phrases ‘Buckley’s chance’ and ‘You’ve got two chances – Buckley’s and none’. Some have suggested it may be a play on ‘Buckley & Nunn’ – a Melbourne department store first established in the early 1850s. But the weight of opinion now leans heavily toward the man as its source. By the early 1870s there was a racehorse called Buckley’s Chance and the phrase itself was being used in print by the 1880s to indicate long odds.

  What is not in dispute is that this man led one of the most extraordinary lives imaginable. Which is what this book is about. Even by the standards of the 18th and 19th centuries, when epic feats of endurance and courage were commonplace, his tale still borders on the unbelievable. He fought against Napoleon’s army. He endured the hell of England’s festering prison hulks. He was shackled for six months while being transported to Australia. He escaped and was adopted by the Wadawurrung people. And then, more than three decades later, he returned to live among white people as they set about seizing Aboriginal lands and doing their best to erase from existence the world’s oldest continuing culture.

  I grew up in Geelong and heard tales about the so-called Wild White Man. But they were just stories. No-one I knew had any real idea who he was or that he had ever really existed. I have no memory of learning about him in school, which is no surprise given the unimaginative and embarrassed manner in which Australian history is often imparted in our classrooms.

  All I knew was that a huge and immensely strong man with a long beard and a spear in his hand had apparently spent decades roaming the nearby countryside.

  Family outings sometimes found us at Point Lonsdale, staring up at the gnarled, wind-whipped sandstone cliffs where Buckley’s Cave sits beneath the lighthouse, its tantalising entrance barricaded to discourage vandals and amorous couples. The site has long been dismissed as nothing more than an imaginative attempt at attracting tourism. But recently my uncle, Ken Bell, came across a letter written by the Irish botanist William Henry Harvey when he was in Australia in the early 1850s. Harvey writes about finding a small cave at Point Lonsdale and ‘it is said that Convict Buckley, who first explored these parts, lived there when he first landed as a runaway’. There were no tourism spruikers in 1853, so it seems probable that the cave actually was used by Buckley. Let’s hope they take down the iron bars protecting the cave and look at opening it to the public.

  William Buckley seems to be riding a new wave of respectability he could never have imagined. In 2018 several original documents relating to his discovery by John Batman’s party sold at auction for more than $40,000 – far more than papers written by Batman and other more prominent e
xplorers. He has had a beer dedicated to him and numerous trails and locations in and around Geelong now carry his name. Why, all the man needs now is an Instagram account …

  In life no-one ever quite knew where William Buckley stood. In death we have no idea where he truly lies. In Hobart, a small grove of maple trees and newly laid lawn form Buckley’s Rest, a quiet corner in a busy section of Battery Point. He was buried around there in 1856. But a large primary school now sits on the site of the old bone yard and the small park commemorating his life is about as physically close as anyone will ever get to him.

  Which brings us to this book. Buckley’s Chance is not a conventional historical biography. William Buckley’s life rubbed up against events and characters that changed human history. I was staggered by just how many there were. Along the way I fell in love with the 19th century. Despite its cruelties and racism it was the last true epoch of human exploration on this planet. It produced an unprecedented array of the brave, the stupid, the reckless and the appalling. It also inspired mountains of excessive verbiage, which is why some have dubbed it the ‘Era of Windbags’. Read many of the memoirs and journals of the day and you will discover writers who relentlessly hurled commas at their pages like darts, who capitalised every noun with compulsive obsessiveness and were skilled in the unfortunate art of telling any short story long. Because of this I have made some grammatical changes to quotations in order to make them easier to read by 21st century standards. Any conversations quoted directly have either been sourced in the text or in the Endnotes.

  There are more than one hundred variations on the spelling of ‘Wadawurrung’. I have chosen to use the most commonly accepted form, along with other Indigenous words and phrases.

  A book like this leans on the work of many. But my biggest thanks must go to my wife, Maria. Patient as ever, she was always there, even when I wasn’t. And when I was there, my mind was often adrift in the first half of the 19th century. William Buckley certainly took his chances. But Maria took the greatest chance of all and I love her for it.

  Garry Linnell, October 2019

  PROLOGUE

  December 1803

  There is a full moon in hell. It hangs low in the western sky on this warm night, casting shadows with its dull light. The seeing is good. There is a trail of snapped twigs and bent undergrowth that leads down to the beach where his enormous feet have gouged large holes in the sand.

  Can’t be too long now before they corner the ungrateful bastard.

  What to do then? Put a lead ball through his back or head? Or drag him back to camp and have him flogged so hard next morning the hot sand will turn red and he’ll never be able to straighten that huge frame of his again?

  Perhaps they can manage something crueller. Trying times always motivate men when it comes to devising new methods of inflicting pain on others. He is not a man known for his words. Brooding silent type, he is. A man his size doesn’t really need to say much, after all. But by God, once they finish with him the bush will echo with his pain. They will have him crying out for the mother he barely knew. And maybe the father he never knew.

  No punishment can be fitting enough for a man who decides to escape in the days over Christmas, forcing the King’s men to put down their rum and pick up their muskets and pursue him through this wretched scrub. They have only been here for two months but already they have come to know this as the devil’s land, parched and crawling with snakes and bugs and hostile tribes. The only drinkable water has come from wooden casks sunk in the sand – and even that has been making them sick. The heat scalds, the dry winds from the north leave even convicts, grateful to have escaped the horrors of England’s prison ships, pining for home. It is an ancient land, this one, its bones so old you can hear them crunch with each step. They will leave this world very soon and search for sanctuary elsewhere, a better place where a free settler won’t wake in the morning looking like a sufferer of the pox from all the mosquito bites, a land where a true colony can be founded and have a decent chance of surviving and even flourishing.

  But first they must capture the big bricklayer and the others who have escaped into the bush.

  Heavy boots thud on dry soil. Shouts drown out the gentle lapping of waves on the nearby beach. Nearby, the sound of a musket being fired. Not long after, a whiff of acrid burnt powder. And then silence, broken only by the odd curse. The trail has turned cold and lifeless. William Buckley is long gone.

  He will always be a hard man to find. No wonder the Aboriginals will call him a ghost.

  Decades later he will be easier to find. There he is, walking down the street with his Irish wife, Julia. You don’t need to listen to the whispers of passers-by or follow their furtive glances. How could you miss them? He looms so large, she so tiny, the tips of their fingers barely meet.

  He has come up with a solution for this, of course. A lifetime of being forced to adapt does that to a man. He might not be able to make up the age gap separating them. But this? He has looped a handkerchief around both their wrists so they can remain connected. She has already lost one husband and in these lean times, when money and food are scarce, she cannot afford to lose another.

  Particularly an extraordinary man like this one.

  And William is extraordinary, even if he is finally beginning to feel and show his age. He is now in his 70s – more than 30 years separate him from his bride. She has nursed him through a battle with typhus, cooling his fevers and tending to the painful rashes. It was the first time he could remember falling ill and for a time there it was touch and go. But once again his remarkable strength and constitution pulled him through. It may have weakened him but when he strolls down the streets of Hobart Town, with Julia by his side, he insists on carrying himself straight and erect. Like the soldier he used to be. Like the free man he has become.

  He has no wealth, the pair of them barely getting by on his paltry pension. But he has been a good husband. A patient man, devoted to her and her daughter. Look at how he steps slowly, shortening his stride so Julia doesn’t have to run to keep up.

  She knows what they say behind their backs. She has seen the fingers pointing, heard the snide laughter, registered the wry smiles. There are men who regard her husband as stupid, a simple buffoon no smarter than the Aboriginals he lived with for so many years. Others are not so sure. They suspect William Buckley knows far more than he lets on.

  He is, after all, the great survivor, perhaps the greatest of them all. His name is known from Sydney to London. Even now, so many years after his escape and his disappearance, the newspapers still refer to him as the Wild White Man. See the modern Hercules who survived for 32 years among the savages! Be amazed at how long he went without ever seeing a civilised white face! Ponder the depravities he endured, the loneliness he suffered!

  Who could have imagined that a boy from a village whose people never journeyed more than a few miles in their lives would one day travel the globe? Who would have thought a child from rural Cheshire, cast out by his mother and stepfather, destined only for the chapped, coarse hands of a bricklayer, would go on to fight Napoleon’s army? Who could even begin to imagine the horrors he experienced while shackled on a stinking, filthy prison hulk? Or the long and rough sea journey to the other side of the world and, soon after that, all those years living with Aboriginal tribes, becoming one of them until he forgot his own language?

  It’s true. No other man has seen or experienced anything close to that. No man has been tried and tested like William Buckley.

  Yet his silence and reticence baffles and exasperates. What man does not want a hand in his own epitaph? What man who makes history would prefer to vanish from its pages? There was an offer once to put him on stage and take the plaudits of the crowd. A stupid man might have walked straight into that trap, dazzled by the lights and applause and all those eyes gazing upon his big frame in admiration and awe. There was no way William Buckley was becoming an exhibit in a freak show. What many don’t understand is that all t
hose years without seeing a white face or sleeping on a soft bed were easy compared to what happened when he came back. He has been used enough, torn in so many directions and pummelled by the motives of others so often that he wants no part of it.

  Besides, he has already had his say. Didn’t he sit down with a newspaper editor, John Morgan, and allow him to write his story? Not the full story, of course. But enough to at least feed those inquiring minds a few morsels and tidbits about his life. God knew both of them needed the money.

  But even in these, his last remaining years, a time when so many men feel the urge to remind the world they lived and did things that deserve to be remembered, he will shy away from marking his place. And all those frustrated souls who never get to really know him, let alone understand him, will be left with the memory of this big lumbering man, joined to his tiny wife by a small handkerchief, his heavy face staring ahead, ‘aimlessly walking the streets … with eyes fixed on some distant object’.

  Centuries later, after all the extraordinary facts and lies and myths have merged into one, when historians sift through the torpid memoirs of men who did far less than Buckley, searching for a hint of his character, a small trace of his personality, he will remain that distant object.