Buckley's Chance Read online

  The pair of you move along the coast during a cold winter, taking shelter in caves and rock crevices, always searching for food. The relationship seems to be a lengthy one. By now your memory of English has faded and you are fluent in the Wadawurrung language. Do you engage in small talk with her, the kind you will always shy away from in the white world? It’s something we want to imagine; the pair of you huddled and smiling beneath a kangaroo skin rug by a small fire, bellies warm and full, the faint sound of waves crashing nearby, the sky above a carpet of glittering gems. Surely you deserve a little happiness, someone to love and care for. But just when we picture you caressing her tenderly and she gazing into your hazel eyes, almost hidden beneath those deep-set and overhanging eyebrows, the scene goes to black. You and Morgan yank that curtain down again by abruptly saying ‘my amiable young lady friend’ decides to return to her clan. That’s it. Nothing more, except further tales of carnage and mayhem.

  It will not be until the early 1880s that the name emerges of a woman who could have been your wife. It will come to us courtesy of a Scotsman, James Dawson, a pastoralist who works his way out of bankruptcy on the Victorian goldfields and settles in the state’s western district. History will remember him as an amateur ethnographer and one of the greatest critics of the way in which Australia’s Aboriginals have been treated.

  Dawson’s unfashionable passion for Aboriginal rights will become legendary. He’s a blunt man who is not afraid to take on the Establishment. On one occasion he will attack an influential Melbourne newspaper editor with an umbrella for not printing allegations about the mistreatment of Aboriginals.

  Dawson will publish a weighty tome entitled Australian Aborigines: the languages and customs of several tribes of Aborigines in the western district of Victoria, Australia. In that book he will include a report from William Goodall, the superintendent of an Aboriginal station at Framlingham.

  Goodall will say: ‘There is, at the Aboriginal Station at Framlingham, a native woman named Purranmurnin Tallarwurnin, who was the wife of the white man Buckley at the time he was found by the first settlers in Victoria.

  ‘She belonged originally to the Buninyong tribe and was about fifteen years old when she became acquainted with Buckley.’

  This already makes sense. Mt Buninyong is an extinct volcano just south of the town of Ballarat in Victoria’s Central Highlands and the Keyeet balug clan of the Wadawurrung has long occupied its surrounding land.

  Purranmurnin Tallarwurnin’s account matches with many of your memories. It supports your claim that as the years pass you learn you have less to fear from the Aboriginal people and even become indifferent when a new group approaches you. One story appears to be set by the Barwon River, a favourite haunting place of yours where the water flows through a series of rock pools and small waterfalls, a place that will be dubbed ‘Buckley’s Falls’ in the years to come.

  ‘One of the natives discovered immense footprints in the sand hummocks near the River Barwon and concluded that they had been made by some unknown gigantic native – a stranger, and therefore an enemy,’ reports Goodall’s summary of what Purranmurnin has told him. ‘He set off at once on the track and soon discovered a strange-looking being lying down on a small hillock, sunning himself after a bath in the sea.

  ‘A brief survey, cautiously made, was sufficient. The native hurried back to the camp and told the rest of the tribe what he had seen. They at once collected all the men in the neighbourhood, formed a cordon and warily closed in on him.’

  When the naked Buckley sees this cordon he takes little notice. ‘They were very much alarmed. At length one of the party finding courage addressed him as muurnong guurk (meaning that they supposed him to be one who had been killed and come to life again), and asked his name.

  ‘You Kondak Barwon?’ (Are you the sap of the tree of Barwon?)

  ‘Buckley replied by a prolonged grunt and an inclination of the head, signifying yes … they were highly gratified and he and they soon became friends.’

  That historian who suggested you might be under-sexed – that you did not participate ‘in the continual warfare caused by the pursuing of women’.

  Could be they got something right.

  Your book with Morgan barely manages to proceed for a few pages without recording another violent episode caused by disputes over the possession of women. At first you struggle to comprehend the meaning behind so much of the bloodshed you encounter, ‘but afterwards understood that they were occasioned by the women having been taken away from one tribe by another; which was of frequent occurrence. At other times they were caused by the women willingly leaving their husbands, and joining other men, which the natives consider very bad.’

  In this staunchly patriarchal culture the women might be chattels to be passed from clan to clan for marriage, to be treated roughly and even violently. But it does not stop them from joining the heat of battle. There’s a clash you will always recall – a very large tribe you call the Waarengbadawa (possibly the Wongerrer balug people from the Wardy Yalloak River). Their warriors are smeared with red and white clay and ‘by far the most hideous looking savages I had seen’.

  When the major battle begins, you, Murrangurk, are ordered to stay in the background. Dead men do not take part in wars, apparently. They are just the end result. Outnumbered, your people take on their opponents and the battlefield begins to resemble that deep abyss in Greek mythology – Tartarus, the dungeon used by the Titans to torture their prisoners.

  ‘I had seen skirmishing and fighting in Holland; and knew … of what is done when men are knocking one another about with powder and shot … but the scene now before me was much more frightful … Men and women were fighting furiously and indiscriminately, covered with blood.’ The Waarengbadawa retreat after a few hours and that night a group of your warriors, probably from the Bengalat balug clan with whom you spend much of your time, launch an ambush against the Waarengbadawa.

  ‘The enemy fled, leaving their war implements in the hands of their assailants and their wounded to be beaten to death by boomerangs … the bodies of the dead they mutilated in a shocking manner, cutting the arms and legs off with flints, shells and tomahawks.’

  Now this is the sort of material John Morgan craves. None of that romantic nonsense, please. Bad enough the colonial reader should even dare imagine a white man having a black woman as his ‘female friend’. It’s easy to picture Morgan sitting there by the fire, nodding impatiently as you tell him about your relationships and dalliances. Torrid battles between painted savages is what he really wants to hear about.

  Now that’s all good. But back to that battle … what happened when the successful warriors of your tribe returned to camp?

  ‘When the women saw them returning, they also raised great shouts, dancing about in savage ecstasy. The bodies [of the vanquished] were thrown upon the ground and beaten about with sticks – in fact, they all seemed to be perfectly mad with excitement; the men cut flesh off the bones and stones were heated for baking it; after which, they greased their children with it, all over. The bones were broken to pieces with tomahawks and given to the dogs, or put on the boughs of trees for the birds of prey hovering over the horrid scene.’

  These words come to us almost 70 years after James Cook and Joseph Banks, standing on the deck of the Endeavour, make their first observations of this land’s long-time inhabitants. Banks is unimpressed and even Cook will say they live like wild beasts.

  But there is something that catches Cook’s eye, something that suggests he can see further and deeper than just about anyone else over the coming century. ‘They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon earth,’ he will write in his journal, ‘… but in reality they are far more happier [sic] than we Europeans, being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but with the necessary conveniences so much sought after in Europe; they are happy in not knowing the use of them.

  ‘They live in a tranquility which is not disturbed by the in
equality of condition. The earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life. They covet not magnificent houses, house-hold stuff etc … they seemed to set no value upon anything we gave them, nor would they ever part with anything of their own for any one article we could offer them.’

  17

  WORDS AND THINGS

  ‘Snake.’

  Kadak?

  ‘Goanna.’

  Djulin?

  ‘Welcome to Wadawurrung country.’

  Kim-barne Wadawurrung Tabayl?

  Never were a great student, were you? But the clans are patient with you. After all, you have died and jumped up whitefella. Your taste buds, your language, your bush skills – all must be relearned. But you have plenty of time and over the years it comes to you – how to speak, how to throw a 12-foot-long spear with great accuracy, how to skin a kangaroo or possum with a sharpened mussel shell, how to take that skin and stretch it before leaving it to dry in the sun, how to take the sinews and prepare them so they can be used to sew the skins together for rugs.

  There are beehives high in the trees to be plundered for honey, nutritious roots to be dug from the ground and wombats – ngurr-ngurr – to be pulled from their deep burrows (you’re far too large to crawl through their tunnels – that is the job of small children). You learn to become a mimic, luring wildlife with their calls and whistles, and are taught the art of camouflage and patience, standing or even lying motionless for hours in order to trap goannas.

  Sometimes, when larger groups come together, they will hunt as a pack, forming an immense circle more than a mile in diameter, each man a couple of hundred yards apart. The circle will gradually contract, driving game like kangaroos and rats and possums into the centre, where they will be speared and clubbed.

  Even the insects provide much needed protein. Within minutes you will be able to gather handfuls of those almond-flavoured witchetty grubs, the larvae of moths that can be eaten raw or roasted. To the east of Port Phillip, hundreds of clans will journey to the alps in late spring and early summer to smoke out millions of Bogong moths clinging to rock walls and crevices, a protein feast that, when dried, will last a group for months.

  All those white historians in future years will never understand just how deep you go, how much of your old self you leave behind. You learn how to sharpen the head of your tomahawk, your kallallingurk, grinding its black stone head with rough granite until you can fell a tree with just a few swings. These black heads of the kallallingurk come from a special quarry you call Karkeen many miles north of the coast where you live. In the language of the Woiwurrung people on whose land it sits it is known as Wil-im-ee Moor-ring – ‘the axe-place’. Over the next couple of centuries it will become a protected site near the modern-day Lancefield, a window into an industrial trading hub that for thousands of years supplies the heads of kallallingurk deep into Victoria’s south-west and into the southern reaches of New South Wales. This quarry of volcanic greenstone has flaking floors and a large rock that has served as an anvil for centuries. Surrounding it are several hundred mining pits – many several yards deep.

  When Cook and Banks stand on the deck of the Endeavour, when David Collins takes one last miserable glance at Port Phillip as he heads to Van Diemen’s Land, when the white wave of settlers and convicts begin their march further inland – they will see and imagine none of this. Suggestions that your people have a deep and intrinsic tie to the land – that there is a strong sense of ownership as well as complex forms of commerce and industry – will be dismissed as flights of fancy. Aboriginals are idle wanderers. Nothing more. A prominent newspaper will describe them as having ‘bestowed no labour on the land’ and to whom ‘this country was to them a common’.

  Burning eucalypt. It is an unmistakable smell, uniquely Australian, and on one afternoon in 1802 its acrid odour begins to fill the nostrils of the son of a French naval officer. Francis Barrallier is an explorer, surveyor and future soldier who has just returned from a journey on the Lady Nelson to the southern reaches of the continent. He is now attempting one of the first crossings of the Blue Mountains and is quite proud to have just heard the word coo-ee (‘come here’), a shout used by the Dharug people. Accompanied by several Aboriginal guides and a handful of convicts, Barrallier can smell and see bushfires in the distance. One of his guides, Bungin, tells him the fires have been purposely lit by ‘a chief called Canambaigle with his tribe who were hunting, and had on that very day set the country on fire’. A month later he sees ‘the country a mass of flames towards the north east, at about five miles from us, near the mountains. Gogy told me it was Goondel, who with his party was hunting bandicoots, lizards, snakes, kangaroo rats etc.’

  Barrallier is one of the first white men to realise one of the greatest tools of the Aboriginal. These fires he sees are controlled burns, not the intense conflagrations that will rip through the Australian bush in centuries to come, feeding off endless ground fuel ignored for years by the descendants of European settlers, growing so fierce they will burn for weeks. These are fires that might begin with a man crouching low to the earth. He might spy a group of white ants carrying their eggs out of a creek and placing them on higher ground. Rain, surely, is coming. So with a handful of fire sticks he will begin burning small patches, sometimes along the crest of a hill, keeping it contained and only allowing it to flare when he is certain a deluge is near.

  The reason Cook and Banks had seen so much grass interspersed with woodlands is that Aboriginals had constantly applied a blowtorch to the land. This is also something you come to learn, William. Setting fire to much of the country every few years promotes grassland that draws more grazing animals like kangaroos. A small blaze restricted to just a few trees can drive sought-after prey into clearer territory, making it easy to hunt them down. The ash enriches the soil, encouraging the growth of new plant life. Native trees and plants like the eucalyptus grow more exposed to disease and insects without regular burning. Hot flames also weaken hard seeds like those of kangaroo grass, another food source that can be ground and turned into bread.

  This knowledge has been handed down over millennia. Australia’s Aboriginals have encountered few of the outside forces that have influenced and reshaped other Indigenous cultures. Until now there has been no turning point like the one experienced by some of the North American Indians. The introduction of the mustang by Spanish conquistadors in the early 16th century into the arid mesas of Mexico resulted in an astonishingly swift transformation of the Indians of the plains. The Spanish horse was small and light, bred to travel long distances without requiring water, and able to scrounge grass from the most miserly terrain. Within a few decades the Comanche went from being a sedentary tribe to the greatest horse riders since the Mongols, able to unleash 20 arrows in the time it took to fire a single shot from a musket and reload.

  But Australia’s people have encountered few of these outside forces, instead honing their own unique tools and weapons like the boomerang, a remarkably accurate instrument in experienced hands that is the culmination of experimentation over tens of thousands of years.

  It is the same with agriculture. The Europeans will see no animals roaming behind tidy fencing, no crops sown in orderly rows. But the land has been cultivated and fertilised by countless generations. Early explorers will come across fields with huge stacks of millet, intricately arranged so the seeds drop to the middle of the stack to be easily collected and ground into flour for bread. They will find dams and re-routed waterways and wells as deep as three men. In the southern lands there will be swamps enlarged by human hands and elaborate weirs to trap fish and eels. Some of the channels will cover acres of land. Hair and grass are woven into intricate baskets while the always available stringy bark is turned into exceedingly strong rope.

  Large nets hundreds of yards long trap ducks and other low-flying birds. In some places traditional hunter-and-gatherer tribes become sedentary, building large huts with stonewalls that can each hous
e dozens of people. Aboriginal canoes, so often derided by white men as nothing but crude bark contraptions, serve their purpose. They can be created within hours and used for fishing expeditions, the hunter standing calmly and motionless with spear in hand. Once the canoe has served its purpose it can simply be discarded or left on the bank for future use.

  The land is not as harsh and uncompromising as the white men believe. Food is plentiful, from wild raspberries and nasturtium leaves to dozens of other edible fruits and plants. One of the most popular is the yam daisy – you know it well. It is a Wadawurrung staple, a dandelion flower whose tuber-like root tastes a little of coconut and can be roasted or eaten raw.

  Suffering from congestion? A vapour bath can be constructed quickly by creating a small fire in a hole in the ground, covering it with eucalyptus leaves and pouring water over it. With a possum rug placed over their head, the sickly can breathe the steam until wet with perspiration. Rheumatism is treated with an infusion of bark from the blackwood tree; joint pain cured by wrapping the affected area with fresh eel skin; eucalyptus gum stuffed into tooth cavities to treat toothache.

  The people travel great distances throughout the territories they claim as their own, the sky a navigational aid and a calendar keeping tabs on the passing of the seasons. To some, if Canopus, the second brightest star in the sky, hangs just over the horizon at dawn, the time has come to collect the emu’s large, protein-filled eggs; for others, when the star cluster Pleiades is low in the eastern sky just before daybreak, it is time for clans to gather to provide wives outside their marriage group, and celebrate with a corroboree.

  And all around are the spirits. They inhabit the animals and plants, drive the seasons and cause the earth to move and the sky to darken. You are now so embedded in Aboriginal culture, you see all this, even the mythical Bunyip. You catch a glimpse of its back as it moves through the waters of Lake Modewarre ‘which appeared to be covered with feathers of a dusky grey colour. It seemed to be about the size of a full grown calf … the creatures only appear when the weather is very calm and the water smooth.’ And being the stubborn bastard that you are, you unsuccessfully try to spear one on several occasions but decide not to tell anyone: ‘If I had succeeded in killing, or even wounding one, my own life would probably have paid the forfeit, they considering the animal … something supernatural.’ What are we to make of this? You are not so far from Cheshire, after all. The mystical blends with reality.