Buckley's Chance Page 12

  ‘They wished much to know what our arms were and their use and did not seem entirely to believe Mr Bowen that they were only walking sticks.’

  The next day Murray sends ashore one of the youngest members of his crew, a boy called Brabyn, to win the confidence of some of the younger members of the tribe. From the deck of the Lady Nelson, Murray watches Brabyn give the young men handkerchiefs and dress them in shirts and trousers. He is soon joined on land by more of Murray’s crew.

  And then things turn ugly.

  Brabyn turns and looks toward a clump of trees and sees a man ‘in the very act of throwing a spear’. Behind him a large group of warriors suddenly appear, also with spears poised.

  ‘The boy immediately cried out to Mr Bowen – who was at that very time in the act of serving out bread to all the party he was sitting among – that he would be speared. But before the words were out of his mouth a spear of the most dangerous kind was thrown at and did not escape Moss by a yard … in an instant the whole of the treacherous body that Mr Bowen and four of our people were sitting in the midst of opened out to the right and left.’

  It is an old-fashioned ambush. There are screams and shouts as long spears hurtle toward the Lady Nelson’s men. One of the crew fires a gun but this only creates a small panic among the warriors.

  And so, says Murray, ‘our party was obliged to teach them by fatal experience the effect of our walking sticks.

  ‘The first fire made them run and one received two balls between his shoulders … the second fire they all set off with astonishing speed and most likely one received a mortal wound. Before another piece was fired Mr Bowen laid hold of one of their number and held on till three of our people came up and also grappled him: strange to tell he made such violent struggles as to get away from all. Now did the contents of the officer’s piece bring him up, although one ball passed through his arm and the other in his side.

  ‘He was traced a good distance by his blood … thus did treachery and unprovoked attack meet with its just punishment and at the same time taught us a useful lesson to be more cautious in future.’

  Murray considers the natives around this bay to be similar in size and height to those he has seen in Sydney: ‘… their understanding better though for they easily made out our signs when it answered their purposes or inclination. When it did not they could be dull enough. They were all clothed in opossum skins … I concluded they live entirely inland and if we may judge from the number of their fires and other marks this part of the country is not thin of inhabitants.’

  Chastened by the encounter, Murray continues the expedition around the bay, avoiding further contact. Three weeks later the Lady Nelson prepares to sail back home. But first, in the time-honoured tradition, Murray assembles the crew on deck at eight in the morning on the 8th of March in the Year of Our Lord, 1802, and hoists the colours of the kingdom of Great Britain.

  ‘… under a discharge of three volleys of small arms and artillery the port was taken possession of in the name of his sacred majesty George the Third of Great Britain and Ireland, King etc etc …’

  Murray adds one more important note: ‘Served double allowance of grog’.

  Collisions between cultures are nothing new. It has been happening throughout millennia, from the time when those stubborn Homo sapiens first came face to face with the Neanderthals, through to Columbus’ arrival in the new world and his subsequent brutalisation of the local people. By the late 18th and early 19th century, encounters between Indigenous people and outsiders have become an even more lop-sided equation; gunpowder against sticks and stones, supported by even heavier artillery of smallpox and venereal microbes.

  The chasm between Australia’s Aboriginals and the British will be vast and almost without common ground. On one side of this gulf: the Dreaming, a universe where time flows in many directions, where tribes of hunter-gatherers live within a land imbued with sorcery and mysticism and the unmistakable signs of their ancestors. On the other: the Enlightenment, with its tribes of scientific rationalists wielding measuring instruments and mathematical formulae and an unchallengeable belief in the superiority of civilised man.

  These two disparate worlds will scrape against one another for the first time in 1770 as the Endeavour under the command of Lieutenant James Cook sails along the east coast of Australia on the final leg of its history-making three-year voyage of discovery through the Pacific.

  Cook is sailing with a set of ‘hints’ or instructions handed to him by James Douglas, the Earl of Morton and president of the Royal Society, which has supplied much of the funding for the voyage. It includes advice to ‘exercise the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the natives of the several lands where the ship may touch … to have it still in view that shedding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature – they are all human creatures, the work of the same omnipotent Author, equally under his care with the most polished European, perhaps less offensive, more entitled to his favour’.

  The Earl also provides advice that, even centuries later, will be remarkable for its time: ‘They are the natural and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several regions they inhabit. No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent.’

  So much for the ‘hints’. The Endeavour has just sailed around New Zealand after visiting Tahiti to record the 1769 transit of Venus across the sun. After dropping anchor near a river on its north island, an encounter with the local Maori had ended with the killing of a warrior with spirals of ‘tattaou’ on his cheeks and nose. The first Australian Aboriginal tribe Cook encounters will be the Gweagal people and that meeting will set the tone for all future conflict – a rock thrown at the English, who have not sought permission to enter tribal land, is immediately answered by musket fire that strikes a Gweagal man on his legs.

  This is a time when Europeans, confronting a new era of machines and technology, cling to a romantic fantasy of naked brutes uncorrupted by modern civilisation, the ‘Noble Savage’ who lives in harmony with the land and whose soul is untainted by material ambition and the accumulation of wealth. The closest the crew of the Endeavour has come to finding this pure breed of man was in Tahiti. What specimens they turned out to be: graceful and lithe and ever so lusty, their libidos no doubt driven by the tropical heat and their Garden of Eden surrounds. At the urging of his young botanist, Joseph Banks, Cook had taken on board a man called Tupaia, said to be the most gifted of all Tahitian navigators. If these white-skinned men and their marvellous ship fascinated Tupaia, he felt in no way inferior.

  He was … well … noble.

  ‘He was a shrewd, sensible, ingenious man,’ Cook writes in his journal, ‘but proud and obstinate which often made his situation on board both disagreeable to himself and those about him.’

  Tupaia proves invaluable as an interpreter and diplomat during the journey around New Zealand. But he is as mystified by Australia’s Aboriginals as the white men. Unlike the Maori, whose songs, traditions and language share Pacific ties with the Tahitians, Tupaia finds Australia’s Aboriginals almost as unknowable as the rest of the Endeavour’s crew.

  From the deck of the Endeavour, Banks watches an old woman and three children emerge from the woods and make their way toward several huts near the beach: ‘She carried several pieces of stick and the children also had their little burthens; when she came to the house three more younger children came out of one of them to meet her. She often looked at the ship but expressed neither surprise nor concern.’

  Banks is flummoxed. He is a man of science, a true son of the Enlightenment, a collector and identifier of new species, a rational fellow constantly in awe at how the good Lord has clothed nature in such a complex manner. His role in life is to uncover God’s signature, to show how His hand has forged this world. Surely this sense of wonder, this air of inquisitiveness, is a trait of all civilised people. Yet these Aboriginals seem to be l
acking as much in curiosity as they are in clothing – ‘the women did not copy our mother Eve even in the fig leaf’.

  But the watchers are being watched. The English do not know that their arrival is already being recorded, not in journals or written form, but in an oral tradition that has existed for more than 50,000 years, long before the first modern humans had ever reached Britain. Stories are already being passed from clan to clan about the arrival of a ‘big bird’ filled with small scampering creatures crawling all over its body; other tales tell of a large canoe carrying the spirits of ancestors, white figures they will call Murrangurk or wawu-ngay.

  The gulf between the two worlds will be too large for any shared understanding. ‘We thence concluded not much in favour of our future friends,’ writes Banks, a sentiment mirrored throughout the next century in the journals and reports of explorers and early settlers on the Australian frontier. To them, the Aboriginals are indifferent and even lazy, preferring to lie about rather than be industrious and tend to the land.

  The land. The Australian soil, more than language and customs, will become the starkest difference between the two cultures. To the British, this new world will bring to mind a saying that becomes popular in London society in the early 1800s. The Prince of Wales is one of the first to employ it: ‘Girls are not to my taste,’ he will say. ‘I don’t like lamb, but mutton dressed as lamb!’

  From the deck of the Endeavour the eastern coastline offers a tranquil vista that reminds many of the patchwork quilts of fields and cultivated lands back home. ‘The woods are free from underwood of every kind and the trees are at such a distance from one another that the whole country, or at least a great part of it, might be cultivated without being obliged to cut down a single tree,’ writes Cook in May 1770.

  Moving north he sees little to dampen his enthusiasm, noting in August that ‘the mountains or hills are chequered with woods and lawns’.

  Banks, never one to avoid a clumsy metaphor, will write that ‘the country tho in general well enough clothed, appeared in some places bare. It resembled in my imagination the back of a lean cow, covered in general with long hair, but nevertheless where her scraggy hip bones have stuck out further than they ought, accidental rubs and knocks have entirely bared them of their share of covering.’

  The view from the Endeavour is largely optimistic. But the British will soon learn that this fertile coast is simply a green curtain disguising a dry and arid heartland. It is mutton dressed up as lamb, an ancient crone with some hurriedly applied make-up. Within days of the arrival of the First Fleet, Englishmen are stunned to discover that much of it will defy the plough; the unyielding clays and sandy soils are enough to make the most stubborn bastard cry. It will be a difficult lesson to learn: the earth did not yield to brute force; you had to find a way to live and work within its limits. And those limits are severe. Even the four predictable seasons back home that English farmers could rely on arriving almost to the day defy prediction.

  When the Calcutta arrives in Port Phillip on the cusp of a new summer its passengers are astonished by the severe and abrupt changes in the weather; days of unrelenting heat driven by dry northerly winds broken within minutes by bursts of bone-chilling Antarctic air and squalls of icy rain. It was so typical of the luck of David Collins that he chose to enter Port Phillip Bay and turn right to find poor sandy soils and little water. Had he simply gone left by pushing to the west and further north he would have found more water and some of the most fertile land in the world, enriched 40 million years earlier by constant volcanic eruptions.

  But that was the story of this unpredictable country. Water becomes such a lottery that a man, moving inland in some places, will find that annual rainfall can drop by an inch for every mile he travels. And so the British quickly conclude that Australia’s Aboriginals remain locked in a Stone Age with little hope of progressing toward an agricultural state for a very simple reason; they are far too primitive and managing this land requires a sophistication far beyond their means.

  A view that you, William, quickly discover is mistaken.

  16

  THE ONES WHO CAME BEFORE YOU

  Ahem. A delicate matter has come to our attention, and we need to deal with it. You have been spending more of your time on your own at the Karaaf, that shallow, slow-moving stream that begins in the Barrabool Hills a few miles away and lazily makes its way toward the coastal sand dunes next to the ocean. You have your hut and plenty of fish and the isolation you desperately crave whenever life with the Wadawurrung gets too hectic. Truth is, these people are not that different to the white ones you left behind, are they? Same old jealousies and petty disputes. And talk … they love to talk. You not being that mad about words means the Karaaf has become your fortress of solitude. But that doesn’t mean you don’t get lonely …

  Sex, William. That’s what needs to be discussed.

  The months and years are passing and you’re still a young man and, well, we know you enjoyed scenes of ‘riotous dissipation’ during your years as a soldier. It’s the reason you’re here now. And you surely know that in the years to come there will be an army of armchair psychologists analysing your life and how you manage to survive against such insanely long odds.

  But surely this one beats them all. It comes from an historian writing more than a century later.

  ‘One of the possible reasons for his survival is that he could have been under-sexed and, accordingly, did not participate in the continual warfare caused by the pursuing of women.’

  Under-sexed? Say what you like about William Buckley but don’t say this man munching fish and roots at the Karaaf has sworn a lifelong vow of celibacy. For a start there will be several accounts of settlers coming across Aboriginal children with pale skin in the years to come. A grown daughter of yours will be pointed out one day – ‘an exceedingly tall and handsome young woman of lighter hue and European countenance’ – while other claims will surface of you fathering several children. The Reverend George Langhorne will write that: ‘Buckley says he did not live with any black woman but I have doubted from the circumstances which came under my notice the truth of this assertion, and also I think it probable he had children.’

  This is where you get caught telling fibs – and fibs to a man of God, no less. That interview with Langhorne takes place in early 1837. We know that 15 years later you publish Life and Adventures, and in it you include a couple of admissions of dalliances with women.

  The first begins when you are visited at your hut by a clan that so admires the life you have made for yourself they invite themselves to stay. Very soon they decide you need a wife.

  You will recall you have no say in the matter when you are given to a 20-year-old widow, ‘tolerably good-looking, after a fashion, and apparently very mild tempered’. Morgan will note that there are none of the trappings of an English wedding – no fees to pay a piper for music, no ceremony or the added costs for a dress and a celebratory feast.

  Instead the pair of you simply adjourn to your hut. You remain together for several months until you discover that your ‘dearly beloved played me most abominably false … one evening when we were alone in our hut, enjoying our domestic felicity, several men came in and took her away from me by force; she, however, going very willingly’.

  She moves in with another man and for this slight, this show of disrespect, you are urged by your clan to take revenge. But there is no need for that; she is soon speared by the man ‘with whom she had been coqueting and to who she had also played most falsely’.

  Another fight will ensue – there are so many it is hard to keep track of them – ‘in which many heads were broken … I took no part in these, excepting assuming the defensive and threatening them with punishment if they interfered with me, being now quite as expert as any of them with the spear and boomerang.’

  And that, as far as you and Morgan are concerned, is almost the end of the matter. By the 1850s the curtain of Victorian prurience has been lowered; dear rea
ders are to be protected from lurid accounts of sexual escapades and conquests lest their blushing lead to heart palpitations and impure thoughts.

  The other intimate encounter you hint at takes place decades into your life with the Wadawurrung and is the most intriguing. For some time you say you have been caring for the daughter and blind boy of your brother-in-law who has been slain in another dispute. You have grown attached to them, taking them on your frequent fishing and hunting expeditions, instructing them in the things their father might have taught them. Children seem to warm to you; during your first years with the Wadawurrung they often slept with you in your hut, listening to your tales about the great battles fought by the English against Napoleon. Easier to talk with children, is it not? So less demanding.

  The blind boy becomes your shadow, completely reliant on you for food and warmth. It is an unusual relationship for the time. Children with disabilities are rare; not only are they believed to be cursed but anything that slows the movement of a family clan is seen as a hindrance. But when a young man from another clan staying with you falls ill and dies, his family blames the blind boy who had been sleeping in the same hut. Sorcery and bad luck doing their work once more. The family of the dead boy kills your blind child in retribution. Heartbroken, you give up the boy’s sister to her intended husband and then depart, once more, for the Karaaf and another stint of solitude.

  But it always ends the same, that desperate need to be alone quickly turning to despondency. One day you are ‘unexpectedly joined’ by a young woman who has fled while her clan is engaged in a battle with rivals. She stays with you ‘for a long time’. At one stage you kill a seal for the two of you: ‘We found the flesh very good eating and my female friend enjoyed the repast with great gusto; greasing herself all over with the fat after we had made the most of the carcass, which might well be compared to bacon.’