Buckley's Chance Page 14

  Death is rarely natural in this world so layered with meaning. You won’t forget the time you travel with a clan when one of its highly regarded men dies after being bitten by a poisonous snake. To you it is one of those unfortunate accidents. Could happen to anyone – particularly men with enormous feet like yours. But every action has a cause and an explanation. The dead man’s body is placed in the branches of a tall tree ‘with all the honours suited to his value’.

  Not long after this you return to your small family group, your so-called brother-in-law and his wife and their children. In the distance you suddenly see a group of about 60 men painting their faces with clay and ochre preparing for battle. ‘We hoped our defenceless position would induce them to treat us mercifully,’ you recall. But there is no such luck. After a face-off across a river where they furiously shake their spears, the invaders cross the water and begin attacking. This is the battle where your brother-in-law is speared, his wife and one of his sons killed.

  ‘The savages then came back to where I was supporting my wounded friend; who, seeing them approaching, sprung up, even in the last agonies of death, and speared the nearest assailant in the arm. My friend was, of course, dispatched immediately with spears and boomerangs … strange to say not one raised his hand against me; had I done so against them I must have been sacrificed instantly; for what could I do, being only one against so many?’

  Turns out that the attack is revenge for the death of the man bitten by the snake. The hostile clan believes it was no snakebite; your brother-in-law had caused his death through sorcery.

  ‘They have all sorts of fancies of this kind and it is frequently the case that they take a man’s kidneys out after death, tie them up in something and carry them round the neck as a sort of protection and valuable charm.’

  The death of your family members has a resounding effect on you. You are no longer a young man. You have been with these people on and off for more than 25 years. These are the people who laughed at your first faltering attempts to learn their language, who encouraged you to do better, to become of them.

  If your arithmetic is roughly correct, you are now close to 50, a lifespan that makes you an ageing man in the oldest land in the world. And you have seen enough.

  ‘I am not ashamed to say that for several hours my tears flowed in torrents and that for a long time I wept unceasingly … of all my sufferings in the wilderness there was nothing equal to the agony I now endured.’

  This grief – and fear you may be hunted down by the rival clan – triggers a decision to go out once more on your own. First, you return to the site of the battle and scrape together the ash and bones of your family, burying them as best you can. Then you leave for your hut near the sea where fish are abundant. You have long forgotten the English language; even the events that led you here are beginning to fade.

  You stare out at the ocean for a glimpse of a ship. Feeling sorry for yourself? As always, you will be able to depend on John Morgan to find the words.

  ‘It is related in the fabulous history of Robinson Crusoe that he was fortunate enough to save a Bible from the wreck of his ship and by that means consoled and benefitted himself. But I, the real Crusoe, for so many years amongst savages in the then unknown forests and wilds of the vast Australian continent, had no such help to mind.

  ‘I beg the humane reader to reflect on this circumstance with feelings of kindly sympathy – for mine was, in truth, a sad existence …’

  No need to feel lonely. There are some people who know how you feel.

  18

  YOU ARE NOT ROBINSON CRUSOE

  You’re not the only one. Hard to believe but there have been – and will be – others just like you, people torn from everything they know and thrust into strange new worlds. Most will never survive for as long as you do, or become so deeply immersed. But some will come close.

  Take James Murrells. He will find himself involved in one of the most poignant and harrowing shipwreck tales in Australian history. Murrells is a boy from Essex who goes to sea at a young age, working his way around the world until he finds himself in Sydney in 1846. He signs on as a crewman on the Peruvian that departs for China in February. A week into the journey a violent storm maroons the ship on rocks at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. As waves crash over the boat the crew hastily put together a makeshift raft using the Peruvian’s mast and side timber. Twenty-one survivors then set off with little food and water in the hope of reaching shore.

  They drift for more than a month. People begin dying at the end of the first week, their bodies dumped overboard. The remaining survivors watch their supplies dwindle. Their cache of preserved meat runs out first and, determined not to resort to cannibalism, those who remain must rely on what they can catch.

  Murrells – just like you – will one day sit down with a writer (in this case, Queensland journalist and government printer Edmund Gregory) and relate his story. ‘Seagulls were caught and their blood was eagerly drunk and the raw flesh eaten with gusto,’ he will recall.

  But the birds are not enough to sustain those who remain alive. The death toll begins to mount. ‘The sucking baby of Mrs Wilmott was the next to succumb; shortly afterwards the other little girl, and next to her Mrs Wilmott herself. Her husband stripped of her what clothing she had on, all but a nightdress, and appealed to us to turn our heads when he threw her overboard and he trusted we would not look at her.

  ‘She however remained floating in company with us longer than the others; she was in sight about 20 minutes … And now they dropped off one after another rapidly, but I myself became so exhausted that I forget the order of their names.

  ‘We next began to think about how we should obtain food. Our only fishing line had been broken and carried away by a big fish … there were plenty of sharks about, some of which we tried to catch. The captain devised a plan to snare them with a running bowline knot which we managed as follows: we cut off a leg of one of the men who died, lashed it at the end of an oar for a bait, and on the end of another oar we set the snare, so that the fish must go through the snare to get at the bait. Presently one came which we fortunately captured and killed with the carpenter’s axe. We cut his head off and flayed him.’

  In the days that follow more sharks are taken but it does little to stem the flow of deaths. By the time the raft finally reaches land 42 days later, just south of present-day Townsville, only seven remain.

  Murrells is eventually the last man standing and is taken in by the Bindal clan of the Birri Gubba, who live in the region surrounding Mt Elliott.

  Like you, he is filled with visions of being placed in a pot and eaten by cannibals during one of his first meetings with the locals: ‘They were powerful-looking men and seemed to be sitting in state; they did not move when we came up. Great fear seized hold of me, for I thought they were chiefs; and when they came to lead me up to them to satisfy their curiosity I thought it could be for no other purpose than to be killed, cooked and eaten … they looked at me and observing me shake with fear they warmed their hands at the fire, rubbed them over my face and body to reassure me, seeing which I took heart again.’

  Murrells is immersed in local Aboriginal lore and culture. He masters eight dialects. He learns how to hunt, becoming an expert at snaring birds and fish. He attends corroborees and initiation ceremonies. Time drifts. Months become years. One day when he approaches a hut occupied by three armed kangaroo hunters he calls out: ‘Do not shoot me, I am … British …’

  He is astonished to discover 17 years have passed.

  His return to white civilisation is difficult, too. Here is Edmund Gregory in a revised 1896 edition of his original pamphlet detailing Murrells’ return to white society: ‘From Port Denison Murrells was passed on to Rockhampton by the captain of one of the steamers, where he stayed a short time, and while there the inhabitants also made a subscription for him. From thence he went on to Brisbane in a similar manner. In each of these places he was besieged by those curi
ous to see the man who lived such a strange and eventful life.

  ‘He was, however, very shy, especially at first, and was not very communicative; this arose mainly from his inability to express himself readily. The knowledge of his own language came back to him very slowly, and it was very troublesome for him to understand what was said to him, and harder still for him to make himself understood …’

  He becomes an interpreter as the relationship between the aggressive pastoralists sweeping through North Queensland and the local tribes grows ever more fractious. And he becomes a man far ahead of his time, a staunch advocate for Aboriginal land rights, suffering harsh criticism for taking such a stand.

  But those years in the bush take their toll. ‘Long exposure to the tropical sun and all weathers had left its marks on him and tanned his skin. He was rather short and thick set, his eyes were sunken and he had a rather wide mouth. His teeth were nearly worn down to the gums and no wonder, they were his only knife for years. He had suffered much from rheumatism … he had large rheumatic swellings on various parts of his body … which he said he believed would ultimately have some connection with his death.’

  Murrells dies at 41, his tales of the rich and complex nature of Aboriginal life largely ignored, even by his biographer. ‘The Aboriginals among whom James Murrells had been living are described by him as being physically superior as to general appearance to any others he had seen in the southern parts of the colony,’ writes Gregory. ‘Nevertheless they are treacherous, jealous and exceedingly cunning … They are not black – they are more of the colour of half-castes. When born they are nearly white but when they are three days old the gins squeeze out their own milk on them and rub it and powdered charcoal into their skins to make them black and shiny. They have sunken eyes, broad flat noses (which are made so by pressure by their mothers in infancy), and very broad mouths.’

  John Wilson is one of the first Englishmen to be initiated into Indigenous culture. A First Fleet convict sentenced to seven years’ transportation for stealing cloth, he joins the Dharug people along the Hawkesbury River after serving his sentence. Settlers view him with disdain, none more so than that melancholic and increasingly depressed judge advocate of the Sydney colony, David Collins.

  Wilson, Collins writes in his diary, chooses to live with the local tribe because of his ‘idle wandering disposition … no good consequence was likely to ensue from it; and it was by no means improbable that at some future time, if disgusted with the white people, he would join the blacks and assist them in committing depredations, or make use of their assistance to punish or revenge his own injuries’.

  Say what you like about David Collins, but don’t say he cannot sense an unhappy ending.

  Wilson, initiated into the clan by having parts of his torso scarified, is reportedly murdered by Aboriginals in 1800 after trying to take an Indigenous woman against her will. Collins is perfunctory in his summary of the outcome: ‘… her friends took an opportunity, when he was not in a condition to defend himself, to drive a spear through his body, which ended his career for this time and left them to expect his return at some future period in the shape of another white man.’

  There are many other episodes; the wildly differing accounts of Eliza Fraser’s six-week stint with the Badtjala people after being shipwrecked off what will become known as Fraser Island; another shipwrecked woman, Barbara Thompson, and her four years living with Islanders and Aboriginal people in Queensland’s far north. And there are tales of many other convicts, including James Davis and David Bracefell, who escape from the harsh Moreton Bay penal settlement and live with the locals on and off for many years.

  But it is Narcisse Pelletier whose story, like Murrells’, bears such a striking resemblance to the life of William Buckley. It begins, like so many other Robinson Crusoe-style accounts of castaways confronting tribes of savages, with a shipwreck. Pelletier is a 14-year-old cabin boy who joins the Saint Paul in Marseilles in 1857. It stops in Hong Kong, where it collects more than 300 Chinese labourers destined for the Australian goldfields.

  The ship strikes a reef off Rossel Island. About a dozen of the crew ultimately escape in a small boat and spend 12 days adrift on the Coral Sea before landing on the eastern side of Cape York Peninsula. Exhausted and left alone by the others, the young Frenchman meets three Aboriginal women who quickly summon their men. Many years later Pelletier’s experiences will be recorded by a French author, Constant Merland, who describes the boy’s first encounter with a clan group now known as the Wanthala.

  ‘When they were close to him Pelletier tried to make them understand that he was abandoned and that he was dying of hunger and thirst. The two savages were brothers-in-law. The man who was soon to become his adoptive father was not moved by feelings of compassion alone; he also placed certain conditions on his assistance. Pelletier was holding a small tin cup. He asked him for it and, having received it, he passed it to his brother-in-law. Understanding that this was a powerful means of winning them over, Pelletier also offered them his white handkerchief. From this moment the alliance was made: it was never to be broken.’

  Again, there is an initial fear of cannibalism. The next morning Pelletier wakes to find himself alone. ‘Had they left with the intention of enlisting their friends, killing him, sharing the spoils and perhaps using his body to make a great feast?’

  Turns out they have only gone to fetch him a breakfast of local fruit. Pelletier will spend the next 17 years living with the clan. He has an earlobe pierced and extended with a wooden plug; his chest and an upper arm are covered in cicatrices – adornment scars sometimes used as a form of storytelling.

  In April 1875 a group of pearlers discover Pelletier and at gunpoint take him aboard their boat. Within a month he is reluctantly placed on board the Brisbane which sails down the east coast for Sydney and his eventual repatriation in France.

  Lieutenant John Ottley, an English passenger on the Brisbane, is the only person on board fluent in French. ‘When he was put aboard our ship he had to all intents and purposes forgotten his own mother tongue,’ Ottley will recall almost a half century later. ‘It is true he remembered his name and this gave a clue to his nationality but beyond this almost the only intelligible thing he could say was “je ne sais pas”(I don’t know).’

  Ottley begins to speak with the young Frenchman, coaxing him until his language skills improve. But Pelletier is clearly uncomfortable on the ship among white people. ‘We were somewhat surprised to find that though he had gone about stark naked for so many years yet he seemed to feel the cold very much when wearing clothes. He frequently shivered on deck when we were under steam and invariably took refuge on the lee side of the smoke stack … he certainly was never comfortable in his clothes and I fancy he often wished to get rid of them.

  ‘At times I found him a serious nuisance owing to the fact that he had no notion of private property and seemed to think that we ought to hold things in common. Coming down to my cabin he used calmly to annex anything that struck his fancy and shewed his annoyance when I took things from him and locked them up in my trunks.’

  The similarities with Murrells and Pelletier are striking. Do they ring a chord with you, William? Pelletier is reluctant to give any details about the intimate customs and beliefs of the clan he has lived with for so long. And, of course, the usual 19th century obsession with the contents of the native dinner plate is never far from the moustache-quivering lips of these inquiring gentlemen.

  Cannibals, young man. Do these savages eat the flesh of men?

  ‘To this Pelletier gave very vague replies that left us under the impression that he knew more than he chose to confess.

  ‘He appeared to have lost all conception of the deity or of religion in any shape or form. Eventually I managed to make him remember the existence of his parish priest and to admit that he had been confirmed but all this meant nothing to him and were mere words without any meaning. In short his early life and all that it meant had apparently bee
n completely wiped off the slate of his memory.’

  Pelletier returns to France and is reunited with his family, who have long believed him to be dead. The population of his home town, Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, turns out to welcome him home with an enormous bonfire. He becomes a celebrity across France, the young boy who grew up among the sauvages. But he finds great difficulty in adjusting back to white civilisation. At one stage, concerned over his detachment and an apparent desire to return to his former life in Queensland, his family summons an exorcist. He later becomes an object of ridicule; taunted as le sauvage. He goes on to marry and dies childless at the age of 50, a recluse who spends his days staring wistfully out to sea.

  It ends like this so often. Far from grateful for having been rescued and restored to civilised life, these people trapped between black and white worlds pine for the days when they were free to roam, unshackled from the expectations and restraints of industrialised society.

  Your years among the Wadawurrung are coming to an end. You don’t know it yet as you sit there by the ocean, staring out to sea just like Pelletier will in his final days. But this three-decade journey is almost over. You say you have had enough of this life, that if an opportunity to live among white people ever presents itself you will not hesitate to take it.