Buckley's Chance Read online

  Come in, Mr Buckley. May I call you William? Please, take a seat. Rest those big feet on my desk, by any means … whatever makes you comfortable. Now tell me all about it …

  Morgan is a newspaper editor who has been battling bankruptcy for years. Born near Portsmouth in 1792 he had seen action while serving with the Royal Marines in Spain and had moved to Perth in the late 1820s as a government storekeeper. There, he issued credit notes to those who were starving because of a shortage of supplies. The notes were never honoured and he would go on to spend more than 20 years dodging the British Treasury who hold him liable for the debts.

  Morgan moves to Van Diemen’s Land, finds works as a police magistrate and as a farmer before trying his hand at journalism as the founding editor of the Hobart Town Advertiser. Here, finally, he finds his true voice, an outlet for his deep dislike of British Tories and rampant government excesses. He condemns the state of the local hospital as nothing but a ‘slave ship on shore’. He pleads for higher standards for lawyers and judges and calls for an end to capital punishment.

  John Morgan is the workingman’s friend. If he lived a century later he might have been bequeathed the ultimate Australian tribute – the title of shit stirrer. He sees threats to the liberty of common people everywhere. In editorials he rails against the ‘moral leprosy’ of the colonial powers in Hobart and sneers at the Bunyip aristocracy – that collection of settlers, freed convicts and wealthy, upper-class twats from London – who act as if they own the town.

  Morgan will grow more resentful as he ages, snubbed by polite society whose acceptance some believe he secretly craves. It probably doesn’t help when the Establishment does its best to discredit his – and your – finest work.

  Life and Adventures will garner a wide audience, be translated into several languages and eventually lead to an improved pension for you. But it will also leave you in familiar territory – your name and reputation caught between rivals with strong egos and reputations to uphold.

  It’s the perfect showdown. John Morgan, cranky firebrand who has also served a stint as secretary of the local hotelier’s association, up against James Bonwick, a highly religious teetotaller who campaigns against the evils of drink and regards himself as one of the eminent historians of this fledgling nation.

  Bonwick has been living in Hobart for the past few years and has seen you ‘slowly pacing along the middle of the road with his eyes vacantly fixed upon some object before him, never turning his head to either side or saluting a passer by. He seemed as one not belonging to our world.’

  It clearly never occurs to Bonwick that he might approach you himself, perhaps ask you a few gentle questions. Instead he remains on the other side of the road, nervously watching you, no doubt intimidated by your huge figure and those vacant eyes. Perhaps you saw him – a serious looking man with one of those strange beards where the chin is completely shaved, leaving a ring of whiskers from ear to ear like a lion’s mane. No wonder you kept walking …

  ‘Not being divested of curiosity we often endeavoured to gain from some of his acquaintances a little narrative of that savage life but utterly failed in doing so,’ Bonwick will write. ‘Several newspaper folk tried repeatedly to worm a little out of him through the steamy vapour of the punch bowl; but though his eyes might glisten a trifle his tongue was sealed.’

  So clearly Bonwick, a colourful writer from the James Hingston Tuckey School of Prose, had his own plans to write about your life but Morgan beat him to it. It’s a pity because Bonwick, despite his paid-up membership of the temperance movement, is in some ways a man ahead of his times. Born in Surrey and taken under the wing of a Baptist minister in his late teens, Bonwick is already disturbed by the fate of his adopted country’s original inhabitants. He will write a book, The Last of the Tasmanians, that will become a paean to a lost civilisation and its demise at the hands of a ruthless society that pushed it relentlessly toward extinction. He will also spend time on the Ballarat goldfields – not very successfully – and walk away with a scene forever embedded in his memory.

  ‘We saw a party of natives plied with drink by Englishmen until their bestial manners and coarse speech excited the brutal mirth of their cruel temptors,’ he will recall. ‘Throughout the night the bush was disturbed with the mad yells and quarrels of the poor creatures.’

  Bonwick rises early next morning and discovers the cause of the moaning near his tent. Nearby lies a ‘wretched man in the mud, with nothing upon him but a shirt thoroughly drenched with a night of cold wintry rain. While his limbs shook with the inclemency of the weather his brow was wet with the sweat of agony.

  ‘In answer to questions he groaned out: “Me killed – Long Tom did it – him drunk – him stab me knife.”

  ‘Lifting his shirt we beheld a large gash in his side, out of which part of his bowels were protruding and mingling with the grit of the muddy soil. The doctor arrived and pronounced the case hopeless – the poor fellow must die …

  ‘Why should the black race pass away? There was no apparent diminution of physical force, moral power, mental activity. The signs of their decrepitude suddenly fall upon them as the curtain of night in the tropics. With diseased frames, with hopeless feelings, homeless and childless, the present generation will soon glide away from us. Like the leaves of an English autumn they wither and fall; but, alas! There is no spring for them. The Sheoak hangs its mournful, weird-like appendages over their tombs; and on its knotted, leafless strings, the passing breezes play their solemn requiem.’

  Tuckey could not have rhapsodised any better. The problem with Bonwick is that he likes to be liked. Unlike Morgan, you won’t find the man storming into a room, waving his arms around and not caring whose toes he treads upon. When Bonwick walks into a room he gets straight down on all fours and performs pedicures. There’s a deep strain of sycophancy through much of his work. And he can’t help showing his jealousy over Morgan beating him to this new country’s very own version of Robinson Crusoe.

  A few years after Life and Adventures is released, Bonwick hits back with his own book: William Buckley, the Wild White Man and his Port Phillip Black Friends.

  Funny how someone can write a book without consulting the subject, isn’t it, William?

  Bonwick opens with guns blazing, condemning your book because ‘there are weighty reasons of objection to its authenticity … all those with whom we have consulted, who knew Buckley both in Port Phillip and Hobart Town, repudiate the book. They all agree in saying that he was so dull and reserved that it was impossible to get any connected or reliable information from him.’ And that is just the start of it. Bonwick has a long list of eminent people of the era – just the sort of Establishment figures that make Morgan grind his teeth – ready to dismiss the accuracy and relevancy of Life and Adventures.

  The problem with all this is that all these prissy white critics who have had their toenails clipped and buffed by Bonwick have no idea what they are talking about. You’ll be happy to hear that over the next few decades there will be a greater appreciation of your work. Historians will say that while Morgan has clearly exaggerated here and there – and let’s never forget he has written the book for an 1850s readership – many of your experiences with Aboriginals will ring true. Your descriptions of everyday life with the Wadawurrung people and other language clans – sometimes unpalatable – will give ‘a truer account of Aboriginal life than any work I have read’, according to one prominent historian.

  Another historian will dismiss all this talk about you being a simple buffoon. ‘In order to exist at all he must have had qualities of shrewdness, courage and endurance of a higher order.’

  But John Morgan wants you to spice things up a tad. So there must be some unpalatable claims, too. You know what he needs. Tell him about the patriarchal society where a man whose brother is slain is entitled to take his dead brother’s wives as his own. If one of the women objects she can face death. We will never quite know how you and Morgan wrote your book. Did the
pair of you sit by a log fire during those cold winter evenings, your legs stretched out, cup of tea in your hands, a flickering candle growing shorter by the hour as Morgan scribbles in his notebook? Or did the man employ the ‘steamy vapour of the punch bowl’, plying you with whiskey in a bid to extract the juiciest morsels from your time with the Wadawurrung?

  Morgan never left behind drafts or notes; his impulsiveness usually saw him leaping frenetically from one project to another. But you came through for him because Life and Adventures is filled with stories of battles and murderous revenge killings as well as that subject the English obsess about whenever they encounter a new culture – cannibalism.

  ‘They have a brutal aversion to children who happen to be deformed at their birth,’ you say in the book. ‘I saw the brains of one dashed out at a blow and a boy belonging to the same woman made to eat the mangled remains. The act of cannibalism was accounted for in this way.’

  These 19th-century colonialists lap it up whenever the subject of eating human flesh arises. And if it serves to underline all those ingrained prejudices about primitivism and the uncivilised, they hardly shrink away when it comes to stories of their own kind devouring one another, either.

  Tales of its practice litter seafaring lore. Take the surviving crew members of the Essex, sunk by a sperm whale in 1820 in the Pacific, who drift for three months in small boats eating the remains of their dead, a tale that will be popularised 30 years later by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick. Or what about the French frigate that runs aground off the coast of north-east Africa in 1816? More than 140 survivors crowd on to a makeshift raft; only 15 survive their two weeks at sea after a horrific journey pitted with daily suicides, murders and cannibalism.

  But it is not just mishaps at sea that force early 19th-century Europeans to devour one another. One of the darkest tales to emerge from Australian colonial history takes place two years after the sinking of the Essex when a group of seven convicts in Van Diemen’s Land escape from the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station.

  They had originally planned to make their way to the Derwent River, steal a schooner and either sail home to England or to China, living out their days without chains and the fear of another flogging. Had they succeeded it would have become one of the most remarkable escape stories in history. Instead it becomes one of the most macabre.

  Making their way through some of the world’s most rugged terrain on the island’s west coast, the escaped convicts begin drawing straws using small twigs to see who will be murdered and eaten. According to an account by the only survivor, the first victim is killed by an axe blow and is almost immediately set upon: ‘Matthew Travers with a knife also came and cut his throat and bled him; we then dragged him to a distance and cut off his clothes and tore out his inside and cut off his head. Then Matthews Travers and Greenhill put his heart and liver on the fire and eat it before it was right warm; they asked the rest would they have any but they would not have any that night.’

  Of course, hunger will eventually get the better of all of them. Days and weeks pass trying to forge their way through near impenetrable mist-clad rainforests. Hemmed in by swollen rivers, frustrated by the lack of animal prey, lacking the knowledge to survive off the land and increasingly suspicious of one another, they continue to kill off the weakest of their pack, assigning equal portions of the flesh. Two escapees are found dying from exposure on the shore of the harbour weeks later, the last of the human remains still stuffed in their clothing.

  Eventually it comes down to two – Alexander Pearce, a trouble-prone Irish convict transported for stealing shoes, and a former sailor, Robert Greenhill. For days they eye one another from a distance, perhaps history’s most uncomfortable fellow travellers, until Pearce seizes Greenhill’s axe one evening while he sleeps and kills him.

  Pearce survives, going on to join a small band of bushrangers before being caught several months later. Taken to Hobart in chains, Pearce will be interrogated by the town’s acting magistrate, none other than the Reverend Robert ‘I sleep where I dine’ Knopwood. The reverend cannot bring himself to believe the account – it is too fantastical. He dismisses it as a lie designed to cover for the rest of the escaped felons and sends Pearce back to Macquarie Harbour to be feted by his fellow convicts as the only man to ever make it out of the place and live to talk about it.

  A year later he escapes again, this time with Thomas Cox, a young man who demands Pearce take him with him, despite knowing the older man’s dietary habits while on the run. Pearce is captured four days later holding a piece of Cox’s flesh. He is taken to Hobart and hanged. And then the body of the most celebrated cannibal in Australian history will itself serve another purpose, his skull being sent to the prolific American author and scientist Samuel Morton, who is amassing the greatest collection of human craniums in the world.

  So cannibalism is a practice that can be understood, if not forgiven, as a last, desperate act of survival. But its practice as a cultural rite – however circumscribed and unconfirmed among some Aboriginal cultures – is abhorrent to English senses. Colonial journals and memoirs will be obsessively filled with reports of flesh-eating rituals.

  It will be one of the first questions asked by the Reverend George Langhorne when he interviews you more than 18 months after you return to white society.

  ‘It is true they are cannibals,’ you will tell Langhorne. ‘I have seen them eat small portions of the flesh of their adversaries slain in battle. They appear to do this not from any particular partiality for human flesh but from the impression that by eating their adversaries’ flesh they would themselves become able warriors.

  ‘Many of them are disgusted with this ceremony and refusing to eat, merely rub their bodies with a small portion of fat as a charm equally efficient [a practice known as ‘kidney fatting’].

  ‘They eat also of the flesh of their own children to whom they have been much attached should they die a natural death. When a child dies they place the body in an upright position in a hollow tree and allow it to remain there until perfectly dry when they will carry it about with them.’

  It’s not hard to picture Morgan sitting by his candle, working late into the night with visions of himself as the antipodean Defoe, laying out with gusto your macabre tales of the battles and their aftermath around Port Phillip. One instance follows the deadly spearing of a 20-year-old member of the tribe in a dispute over a woman: ‘When we had settled ourselves down there, some of the men went to the spot where we had left the young man’s remains hanging in the tree and brought away the lower part of the body, leaving the upper quarters and head where they found it suspended.

  ‘The usual uproar commenced amongst the women on the arrival of the part of the corpse, lamentation succeeding lamentation, burning with fire sticks and all the rest of it, until at length the mangled remains were roasted between heated stones, shared out and greedily devoured by these savages. Again I was pressed to join in this horrid repast but I hope I need not say that I refused, with indignation and disgust.’

  After that, you will be determined to return to living on your own. It’s something you will do frequently, particularly at the Karaaf just to the west of what, more than a century later, will become the coastal town of Breamlea. You have built a hut just where the river runs into the sea and not only is there plenty of food – an unending supply of eels (buniya) and fish (kuwiyn) and duck (bernarr) and yam daisy (murnong) – but the low, flat land will give you a perfect lookout to see any approaching clans. However, these moments craving solitude never last long. Within days or weeks you will see their outline on the horizon and before long you are on the move with them again, back into a world where you will encounter for Morgan plenty more episodes of gothic horror, Herculean bravado and near-death experiences.

  And, of course, a mandatory touch of romance.

  15

  WILLIAM ADOPTS A BLIND BOY – AND FINDS LOVE

  How often does it start with gifts and lies? One of the first encounter
s between Port Phillip’s original inhabitants and white men takes place just a year and a half before the Calcutta sails into the bay. The Lady Nelson is an 80-ton brig sent from Port Jackson to explore the still unknown lands to the south. She is an odd-looking ship constructed to work shallow waterways, commissioned ‘for the purpose of prosecuting the discovery and survey of the unknown parts of the coast of New Holland’. As a result she sits low in the water, in part because of four extra brass guns fitted shortly before her departure in early 1800. On her way to the colony she had sailed out of Dead Man’s Dock and into the Thames and so strange did she look sailors on nearby ships ridiculed her as ‘his majesty’s tinderbox’.

  But despite her looks the Lady Nelson proves to be a rugged and reliable explorer. She has already mapped much of Bass Strait and its islands and acting lieutenant John Murray, a Scotsman who had been the mate on her original voyage to Sydney, has now been ordered to return and investigate the large bay and its surrounding country.

  It does not take long for the first encounter between Europeans and the Kulin people to go wrong. In early 1802, a month after its first attempt fails, the Lady Nelson manages to navigate the turbulent rip at the mouth of the bay and Murray finds himself in a ‘fine harbor of large extent’. On one of his first nights Murray sees fires burning on nearby land and decides to send a small boat and crew toward shore in hope of making contact.

  They take gifts of white dress shirts, wrapped with a fib. ‘I sent the launch with Mr Bowen and four hands armed to see if any natives were here,’ Murray will write in his journal. ‘… before the boat was halfway on shore we had the satisfaction of seeing 18 or 20 men and boys come out of the wood and seat themselves down on a green bank waiting the approach of our boat, with which I sent some shirts and other trifles to give them. The boat accordingly landed in the midst of them and a friendly intercourse took place with dancing on both sides …