Buckley's Chance Read online

  Defoe’s novel will be read by tens of millions of people who will see all sorts of parables in its pages. Even those poor, illiterate people on the streets of London and in the rural towns will have heard about its hero, a man who overcomes enormous obstacles with self-belief and tenacity.

  These are the qualities that have really shaped history, from primitive man to castaways and even tiny sea worms with a voracious appetite for wood.

  Stubborn bastards. Where would we be without them? And in time, a writer will look at you and think he has found his own Robinson Crusoe.

  13

  WILLIAM HAS A NEW FAMILY. AND A NEW NAME

  Even ghosts grow hungry and you are by far the biggest ghost these people have seen. They have taken you to one of their huts – a mia mia – and you sit there scoffing a pulp they have made for you from gum and water, served in a bark bowl.

  You’re learning much already. You have a new name. Murrangurk, they call you – a spirit raised from the dead. It will become your name for the next 30 years and as you ponder this they hand you several large witchetty grubs that you also swallow greedily. This food is good. To think that just a day ago the thought of salt pork and slop was enough to bring a tear to your eye.

  You are still scared. For the past few hours there has been a great deal of commotion outside the mia mia but you are too weak to even consider running again. By the time night arrives there is a large fire – a wiyn – burning outside and Murrangurk’s presence is required. A celebration is underway. Naked women carrying their possum-skin clothing surround you as two men lead you toward the fire.

  ‘I expected to be thrown into the flames, but the women having seated themselves by the fire, the men joined the assemblage armed with clubs more than two feet long, having painted themselves with pipe clay, which abounds on the banks of the lake. They had run streaks of it round the eyes, one down each cheek, others along the forehead down to the tip of the nose, other streaks meeting at the chin, others from the middle of the body down each leg; so that altogether they made a most horrifying appearance standing around and about the blazing night fire.

  ‘The women kept their rugs rolled tight up after which they stretched them between the knees, each forming a sort of drum. These they beat with their hands as if keeping time with one of the men who was seated in front of them singing. Presently the men came up in a kind of closed column, they also beating time with their sticks by knocking them one against the other, making altogether a frightful noise.

  ‘The man seated in front appeared to be the leader of the orchestra or master of the band – indeed … the master of ceremonies generally. He marched the whole mob, men and women, boys and girls, backwards and forwards at his pleasure, directing the singing and dancing with the greatest decision and air of authority.’

  Are you joining in? This is a corroboree, a sacred ritual and one of the first a white man has seen in this part of the land. All that marching backwards and forwards. Perhaps it reminds you of a song you learned just a few years ago …

  The grand old Duke of York,

  He had ten thousand men.

  He marched them up to the top of the hill,

  And he marched them down again …

  Time you learned something about these people. For a start they are unlike so many of the planet’s other Indigenous people. They are the oldest continuous culture in the world. They have been connected to the same land for so long, their cultural memory has no recollection of any other place. It’s why their lives are so inextricably bound to the country; for tens of thousands of years they have endured endless, dust-laden summers and crippling Ice Ages. They have seen volcanoes vomiting ash and lava. They have roamed grasslands and forests alongside powerful, flesh-eating marsupial lions and kangaroos bigger than men. They have hunted Diprotodons the size of hippopotamuses and stalked five-metre long snakes.

  But like every other living thing on this ancient land they, too, have come from somewhere else.

  That stubborn group of Homo sapiens sitting around that fire in Africa so many years ago? The Sahara desert was a lot different then. It was a lush and fertile valley that helped propel early humans forward on their march into Europe and then on into Asia. Then, 20,000 years later, sea levels began dropping as the polar caps grew; in some places the oceans retreated by up to 100 metres. This quickly began changing the face of the planet. A land bridge formed between Tasmania and the south-eastern regions of Australia and, as the continent’s land mass increased by almost a third, its northernmost point became linked to what is now Papua New Guinea. The changes were dramatic; the Gulf of Carpentaria was transformed into one of the world’s largest freshwater lakes while hundreds of new islands began to form a necklace in the seas above.

  The Neanderthals and Denisovans – two of just many of humanity’s cousins – began to die out. Homo sapiens continued their march, island-hopping in basic craft, probably in many cases simply clinging to floating tree limbs. But getting to Australia required much more than scant and hazy knowledge of a landmass further to the south. Reaching this place involved a sea journey that, for those still in the Stone Age, might as well have been an attempt to go to the moon. Luck – the sailor’s oldest tool – would be needed. But so, too, would solid sailing craft and real ingenuity; expertly carved canoes and paddles that could withstand a week or more in deep and turbulent water. It required knowledge of how currents worked, and how the stars above could guide you at night. Most of all it demanded forethought so provisions could be stocked and give this small band of travellers a chance of surviving days or weeks at sea.

  They must have been stubborn bastards, too.

  Let’s call them the Very First Fleet. We will gain a small glimpse of them through 21st-century technology when a team of researchers studying mitochondrial DNA and using sophisticated mapping simulations estimate this first colonising party to have numbered between 100 and 300 people. That’s all. They most likely launched from Western Timor or a place known as Rote in the lesser Sunda chain of islands off Indonesia. As a feat of exploration and technology, this final leap from Asia into Australia was comparable to anything that would follow: Admiral Zheng He’s fleet of 312 ships and 28,000 crewmen during the Ming Dynasty, Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe in the late Middle Ages, even the Apollo missions to the moon. ‘The settling of Australia represents the earliest known maritime diaspora in the world,’ the scientists will say.

  And once they arrived, they stayed. There may have been a series of landing places but there were no large, successive waves of colonisation, no massive second or third fleets capitalising on the pioneering work of the Very First Fleet. Genetic evidence shows little mixing of the gene pool after that initial landing. But they wasted no time in exploring this new continent. Within a few thousand years they quickly spread out around the east and west coasts, finally meeting up on what will become known as the Nullarbor. And for the next 500 and even 600 centuries – the number keeps growing the more we learn – as the planet once again underwent tumultuous change, as empires elsewhere rose and fell, as other cultures discovered farming and experienced massive population explosions, they remained alone.

  It has only been in the last couple of thousand years that the outside world began to flirt with the edge of theirs. It probably began with Indonesian fishermen and Macassan traders from Sulawesi hunting for sea cucumber to trade with the Chinese. They brought with them trinkets and pottery and smallpox and venereal diseases. Much later, between the 10th and 14th centuries, explorers will leave behind a scattering of African coins on an island just off what will become known as the Northern Territory.

  And then Europeans began arriving. In 1606 Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon made landfall at the Pennefather River on the western shores of Cape York. The Portuguese and others would follow and you know what, William? They always saw the same thing: a vast, untamed and almost unknowable continent inhabited by ‘primitive savages’.

  William Dampier
– a former pirate who will be on the same ship that rescues Alexander Selkirk – meets the ancestors of the Very First Fleet off the west coast of Australia in 1688 and describes them as the ‘miserablist people in the world’. It’s a comment that will echo down the centuries, influencing the views of all those who will follow, all those thousands who will begin spilling from their strange ships to begin their own march across this leathered land, a relentless wave of walking white ghosts.

  You are a ghost – but spirits and ancestors are everywhere; they inhabit the animals and plants and the rocks around you. They help drive the seasons and trigger climactic events that reshape the land. All those reverends and priests are going to shake their heads in the years to come and wonder why you never gave these people instruction about the Good Lord himself. Why didn’t you spread the Lord’s word? Well, you will have an easy answer – you feared for your safety and it was best to stay quiet about Him, because there was little He could do to save you from all those so-called savages.

  Truth is, these people already have their own complex belief system, rich in stories about their origins and their place in the universe. For many there is Bunjil, the great eagle-hawk man who brought life into the world. The Boonwurrung people whose land the Calcutta arrived upon believe Bunjil had prevented a great flood from wiping out the five main tribes known as the Kulin nation who live around Port Phillip Bay. These five groups, who all share a common base language, had been constantly at war and the sea had grown angry and began to rise. Bunjil agreed to make the waters recede if the Kulin made peace with one another. They agreed to stop fighting and Bunjil then raised his spear, Moses-like, and ordered the sea to retreat, preventing a great flood that would have wiped out the entire Kulin nation.

  You have now become part of the Wadawurrung, another language group of the Kulin. Their land runs from the Werribee River down into what will become Geelong and then further south toward the coast. They, in turn, consist of about 25 smaller clans who trade with one another, intermarry and share many of the same burial rites and customs. One of these sub-clans – the Wada wurrung balug of the Barrabool Hills – will be identified as the group with whom you will spend most of your time.

  Among the Kulin every individual identifies himself or herself as either Bunjil (eagle hawk) or waa (crow). The Wadawurrung believe Bunjil – or Karringalabil, as some call him – lives at the end of the earth and controls the world by supporting it with props. In the years to come you will watch as word spreads that unless Bunjil is given a supply of tomahawks and rope to keep those props in place, the sky will fall in and the world will come tumbling down. Your people will consider moving to a nearby mountain range to escape the danger. But Armageddon will be prevented when some settlers – whalers and escapees from Van Diemen’s Land living in the far southern reaches of the Victorian coast – are robbed of their axes and saws and ropes and the tribes forward them, one by one, until they reach Bunjil.

  Everywhere you go the spirits will be with you. Fire comes from the Waa, a crow that one day dropped dry grass near a woman digging at an ant hill; it burst into flame, igniting a nearby tree and gave the people fire, and ever since the people have been cautious about eating the flesh of the crow.

  You don’t know all this yet, but you will. The corroboree is enough of an introduction. It lasts for more than three hours and after it you sleep heavily for the first time in weeks. You rise the next morning to discover the clan already on the move, the women gathering roots, the men spearing eels. You try and make yourself useful, gathering wood and fetching water, a novice among the skilled and experienced. A young man from another clan arrives and the following day leads your people through the bush to where another group of Aboriginals are camped. Murrangurk has been brought to a family reunion – his own.

  ‘I was soon afterwards transferred to the charge of a man and woman of the tribe we had come to visit; the man being brother to the [man] who had been killed, from whose grave I had taken the spear; the woman was my new guardian’s wife and the young man who had visited us was their son and, consequently, according to their order of thinking, my very respectable and interesting nephew.’

  Another corroboree follows and when the celebration is over you taste roasted possum. They call it barnong and it is the first real meat to pass your lips since your escape from Sullivan Bay. Your sister-in-law also gives you a possum cloak and so you hand over your tattered and stained convict jacket, cementing the new relationship.

  But all is not well. The next day a fight breaks out and your new family will pull you aside and watch with you as a battle commences. ‘One man was speared through the thigh and removed into the bush where the spear was drawn. A woman of the tribe to which I had become attached was also speared under the arm and she died immediately.’

  When peace is restored you watch as a large fire is made and the woman’s body thrown on top of it. Once it is reduced to ashes the embers are raked over and the stick she used to dig roots is placed at the head of the remains. And then, with that done, you set off with your new family.

  These people, William. Or is it Murrangurk now? What do you see? You will be struck by how healthy they appear. They have beautiful white teeth – nothing like that batch of convicts on the Calcutta and on the prison hulks, where a rare smile from those blackened gums was enough to make you look away. No sugar, you see – not until the white men begin hauling large sacks of it off their boats and into your camps. The only real sweetness will be the occasional raid you will make on beehives. Their bodies are lean, too, thanks to a diet large on fish speared and netted in the tidal flats and estuaries of what will become known as the Bellarine Peninsula. You are going to eat plenty of fish – kuwiyn – as well as barnabil (oyster) and many eels (buniya).

  And this new family of yours, they are not without vanity, either. You will never forget their absolute distaste for grey hair; the women constantly plucking their own and those belonging to their men until ‘old Father Time got the better of them’.

  ‘The tribes are divided into families … or rather composed of them – each tribe comprising from twenty to sixty of them,’ you will remember. ‘They acknowledge no particular chief as being superior to the rest: but he who is most skillful and useful to the general community is looked upon with the greatest esteem and is considered to be entitled to more wives than any of the others.’

  Word of your arrival among the Wadawurrung is already spreading throughout the lands of the Kulin and further north. In central Victoria the Morpor people of Spring Creek hear about you from their elder, Weeratt Kuynut (‘eel spear’). Weeratt is one of those rare men whose presence is tolerated in almost all parts of the land. Once a fierce warrior, he becomes a messenger in his later years, travelling through fiercely defended territories and becoming such a trusted figure that he will be called upon to referee disputes and act as a neutral observer when great battles are staged.

  In years to come Weeratt will say Murrangurk ‘died and jumped up whitefellow’ to become a man treated with consideration and respect, an arweet or ngurungaeta whose counsel will be called upon to settle disputes or to decide if a tribe or clan goes to war.

  ‘I had seen a race of children grow up into women and men and many of the old people die away,’ you will write about your last few years among them, ‘and by my harmless and peaceable manner amongst them, had acquired great influence in settling their disputes. Numbers of murderous fights I had prevented by my interference, which was received by them as well meant.’ There will be many times when you approach the warring parties before a battle and they will allow you to take away their spears and waddies and boomerangs. A true arweet. ‘My visits were always welcomed and they kindly and often supplied me with a portion of the provisions they had.’

  A peacemaker. As a walking dead man you take no part in the battles. And sometimes that is the hardest place to be.

  14

  TALES OF CANNIBALISM

  Caught in the crossfire
of other men’s egos and disputes – that’s always the way it goes, isn’t it? It’s one of the reasons you will finally turn to John Morgan in the years to come to help you put together your side of the story. The Life and Adventures of William Buckley will be published in 1852, and it will be one of the very few accounts of your 32 years living with Aboriginals.

  The book will be a product of its times – a labyrinth of excessive punctuation and tortuous prose, so typical of 19th-century literature. Its chronology will be maddeningly uncertain – perhaps understandable given the time it covers and the memory lapses you will inevitably suffer – and it will give us few insights into your state of mind beyond the superficial. It will frustrate many readers and bears comparison with another man – Neil Armstrong – who also went where no-one else had gone. You may find this hard to believe but Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon and when he returned he just didn’t know how to provide an adoring public with the sort of profound insights they expected. The man who had been the first to leave his home planet and walk on an alien world was a taciturn engineer with a passion for the mechanical, not the mystical.

  But your book will need to be written. You will need the money. So, too, will John Morgan.

  Your first meeting with Morgan – at least a decade before the book is published – must be one of those rare encounters of kindred souls; two men who have lived much of their lives on the fringes, never quite winning the acceptance of those around them. How could Morgan resist the opportunity to write your story? His very own Robinson Crusoe, a man who survived decades wandering through a savage land filled with cannibals! A man, now standing at his door, just waiting to give John Morgan the opportunity he has been due for so long – the chance to make his name as the new Daniel Defoe …