Buckley's Chance Read online

  But even with fragments of English returning, and with so much to tell these men, you remain cautious. After 32 years of living free, the last thing you want is to return to His Majesty’s custody. Best not disclose your whole story; not yet, anyway.

  Todd: ‘After he had got his dinner he informed us that he was a soldier in the King’s Own, and a native of Macclesfield in Cheshire and was wrecked off Port Phillip Heads. The vessel’s name he has forgot, but she had come from England with transports and was bound for Van Diemen’s Land, being the first vessel that brought prisoners out for there. She struck on a rock and all hands perished with the exception of him and three others, who swam ashore, one of which was the captain of the vessel, who could not swim.’

  Not a bad story, William. So much for all those critics in future years who will complain you are a simple dolt lacking any sort of imagination. If only they were here now, the flames of the camp fire flickering and casting shadows across your bearded face as you hold your audience in thrall. Not a bad feeling, is it? Just hours out of the bush and here you are spinning stories like a man on a stage, something you would never have dreamed of doing in the past.

  That skipper of the boat, the one you were saying could not swim? What did you do when the ship capsized? Why, you placed the captain across those big shoulders of yours and in the pitch black of a swirling sea, began swimming toward land alongside a couple of other survivors.

  It isn’t hard to imagine William Todd in his tent late in the night, candle burning, shaking his head at this incredible tale of courage and strength, making sure he gets down every detail. Folks back home will choke on their whiskey when he tells them this one.

  ‘He was 24 hours swimming before he reached the shore. When they got to the shore they were completely exhausted, with the exception of the captain, whose life Buckley saved. Shortly after, the captain left them, and proceeded where we cannot tell, not having seen or heard of him ever since. The other two died after a few days and Buckley was left to himself to the mercy of those savages, expecting every hour to meet with them and be put to death.’

  Who do you think you are? Daniel Defoe? You tell them in your faltering English how you lived off mussels and roots and spent 40 days wandering on your own – oh, you’re Moses now – before you fall in with a local mob of Aboriginals ‘and has remained with them ever since, never having seen a white man and has only seen two vessels since he has been here. He is quite rejoiced to see his own native people once more, never having expected to meet with any.’

  At 8 pm, Todd reports that a group of natives ‘came running down to our hut and told me that there was a mob of blacks coming down to kill both us and them. Prayed for our protection and made signals for us to shoot them if they came close …

  ‘Buckley cried out “We shoot them. I’ll shoot them.”

  ‘After they were quiet Buckley explained everything to them. It was most astonishing to see how amazed and pleased they were …’

  You have told Todd and Gumm you want to remain with them, at least until John Batman returns on his chartered schooner Rebecca. Part of you wants to meet this man. But you are also trying to buy some time. In the next few days more warriors will arrive as word spreads of the plunder to be had by the shores of the bay. You might be able to stave off an attack by telling them that if they wait, a new ship carrying more riches will soon arrive.

  It’s a tense time. One of the clans spreads a rumour that a vessel has just been seen entering the bay, a false claim Todd notes is for the purpose ‘of getting us all down to the water side so they might plunder the hut. But they found their plan of no avail … Buckley has again told the natives in their own language that we have no more provisions for them and they must retire in the bush until such time as the vessel arrives. They consented and retired for the night well pleased.

  ‘We find Buckley to be a most valuable man to us. He seems to get more attached to us every day. Always keeping a sharp lookout, he is a complete terror to the natives.’

  A week later, Todd writes that you have overheard one of the Aboriginals saying ‘that they should wait for an opportunity to get one of us going for water so that they should spear us. He desired us to be on our guard and keep sentry day and night. We told him we should act according to his wish.

  ‘He then exclaimed “I shall lose my own life before I’ll see one of you hurted.”’

  If they didn’t quite trust you before this, they do now. In Life and Adventures, you take up the story: ‘I told the white men to be on their guard. Arming myself with a gun I threatened in strong language the life of the first native who raised a hostile hand against the strangers, telling them that on the arrival of the vessel they should have presents in abundance. This pacified them and they turned their thoughts from mischief to fishing and hunting.’

  This is how it really starts, isn’t it? This is where you will find yourself at the impact point between those two colliding worlds. For the past couple of weeks you have managed to delicately move between them, keeping this uneasy peace. But it will never be easy again.

  There is no doubt in your mind any longer that you will remain with these white men. Your English is slowly returning – it will take a long time before you are fully fluent again – and the longer you spend with them makes you think it might be time to end all these years of wandering.

  But it’s not as though you are not perplexed and more than a little suspicious about the motives of these men. They have told you about this deal Batman has struck with the people of the Kulin nation. Todd and the rest of them say they were there the day the deed was signed.

  It doesn’t make sense. Who are these chiefs who have signed away hunting lands? What man, what warrior, would even dare contemplate giving up his ancestral home?

  It’s a point that will remain a sore one many years later. ‘They have no chiefs claiming or possessing any superior right over the soil,’ you will say. ‘I therefore looked upon the land dealing as another hoax of the white man to possess the inheritance of the uncivilised natives of the forest, whose tread on the vast Australian continent will very soon be no more heard …’

  Say what you like about William Buckley. But don’t say an old convict cannot smell a sham from a mile away.

  PART III

  WILLIAM BRIDGES TWO WORLDS

  21

  THE PRESS BREAKS THE NEWS

  Finally, a decent story. William Lushington Goodwin has been waiting for something like this to cross his desk. He has been editor of the Cornwall Chronicle for only a few months and damned if he is not going to turn his little newspaper into the talk of Launceston and, indeed, right across Van Diemen’s Land.

  This new report – an incredible tale about a giant white man who has been discovered after living among the savages in Port Phillip for three decades – is just the thing he can use to liven up his pages. Launceston, huddled around the junction of the Tamar River at the northern end of the island, is a town of little more than 5000 people, a third of them convicts. Revelations in the Chronicle that a cow has been impounded, or the local vet has just changed premises, have hardly been the stuff to force locals to extract a shilling from their tight pockets.

  Goodwin may be driven by curiosity but outrage is his closest companion. He comes from a sailing family and arrived here after skippering a convict ship from London filled with a mutinous crew and more than a hundred boisterous and despicable female prisoners. But it has not taken him long to find his legs as a cantankerous editor shouldered with the responsibility of protecting civilisation. Everywhere he looks the colony is awash in muck and scandal, its progress trapped by the iron grip of authoritarian government and a toadying class only interested in profit.

  Why, he’s a man just like John Morgan. ‘Liberty with danger is to be preferred to slavery with security,’ wrote the Roman historian Sallust, words that so stir Goodwin’s fighting spirit that he plasters them across the front page of his paper each week.

  But i
t is not only the fight for freedom that drives Goodwin. He worries that the courage, indeed the manliness, that helped forge this great British Empire is also disappearing. ‘We are fast becoming priest-ridden and effeminate,’ he will rail in an editorial. He yearns for the old days when hardened men could right the wrongs of the world with sheer physical strength and determination.

  Men, actually … like William Lushington Goodwin.

  Five years earlier as captain of the 353-ton Kains, Goodwin had steered his convict ship loaded with 120 female prisoners on a slow and tumultuous eight-month voyage from Plymouth to New South Wales. Trouble began within days. The ship’s surgeon, Thrasycles Clarke, was horrified to discover that their human cargo was filled with ‘immoral and abandoned’ women, ‘… some of them by nature and habit were cleanly while others were filthy to the 90th degree’.

  But it was the crew that would prove to be the most difficult. One of the Kains’ able seamen, 20-year-old Charles Picknell, was shocked that just 200 miles out from England, Captain Goodwin ‘began to ill use us’.

  Goodwin, hearing whispers of a mutiny, had six crew placed in irons and tied up on the poop deck – the highest point of the ship. He left them there for two days with guns trained on them. But he was only getting started. Next he had a young apprentice hauled on deck, tied to the rigging and flogged with 72 lashes for making a complaint about the weight of a barrel of wine. Wrote Picknell in his diary: ‘Guard over him, swords, daggers, Captain struck several, women crying.’

  There would be several deaths during the voyage, including a number of the convicts’ young children. There would be a close-run encounter with a pirate ship, more floggings, desertions and maggot-infested food. Scurvy would afflict some of the crew and Goodwin would spend much of his time eyeing off the supposed mutineers and confining his chief mate below decks for repeated drunkenness. Another attempted uprising in Cape Town saw Goodwin attack and beat four hapless mutineers with a mallet before putting them ashore in a jail cell. But they finally made it and William Lushington Goodwin knew in his bones that only his discipline and toughness, his preparedness to do the hard thing, had got them through.

  Yet here they are, this colony in Van Diemen’s Land barely a generation old, and just about everywhere Goodwin looks he sees softness and a growing complacency. Thank the Lord that good men like the local pastoralist and explorer John Batman can still be found. Like every other newspaper editor Goodwin has been detailing Batman’s exploits for the past few months, breathlessly highlighting his foray across the dangerous waters of Bass Strait and – defying the warnings of those government dolts! – seizing millions of acres of prime grazing land.

  Brave man, Batman. You want to know about manliness? Look no further. He has provided the newspapers of Van Diemen’s Land with plenty of fodder with his adventures down the years, hunting and capturing bushrangers and Aboriginals alike. But apart from his recent expedition – and thank the Lord for his good sense and intelligence, for what else did Batman do when he arrived back in Launceston but stride straight from the port to the Chronicle’s office to brief Goodwin on his Port Phillip discovery – the pickings when it comes to interesting news have been slim.

  This story, however, has captivated Goodwin and will surely have everyone talking. He may only have fallen into this journalism caper by accident a few years earlier but Goodwin is a man who relishes the unexpected. His top lip is masked by a fashionably thick moustache, his chin heavily bearded. But you can still imagine a broad smile breaking through those whiskers, maybe even a little warmth creeping into those cold, deep-set eyes.

  He has come across a report in one of the Hobart Town papers. They are not to be trusted, of course. One of them, he will sneer, is clearly ‘the paid organ of the government’. He loathes them almost as much as his cross-town rival, ‘our dictatorial contemporary’, the Launceston Advertiser. But this article is worth plundering. For a start, it adds another chapter to the ongoing saga and adventures of John Batman. But even more, it details a discovery so extraordinary it could not have been dreamed up by even the drunkest fabulist down at the bar of the Cornwall Hotel.

  Dated Saturday 5 September, the front page of the Cornwall Chronicle is worth a shilling in itself.

  ‘A most extraordinary discovery has taken place at Port Phillip,’ begins the story. ‘Some of Mr Batman’s men were one morning much frightened at the approach of a white man, of immense size, covered with an opossum-skin rug, and his hair and beard spread out as large as a bushel measure. He advanced with a number of spears in one hand and a waddy in the other. The first impression of Mr Batman’s men was that this giant would put one of them under each arm and walk away with them. The man showing signs of peace, their fears subsided and they spoke to him. At first, he could not understand one word that was said and it took a few days before he could make them understand who he was and what he had been. His story is very remarkable.

  ‘This man’s name is William Buckley, he was formerly a private in the 4th, or King’s Own, he was transported to New South Wales and accompanied Governor Collins in the year 1804 to the settlement of Port Phillip. Whilst the new colony was being established Buckley with three others absconded and when the settlement was abandoned they were left there, supposed to have died in the bush.’

  In case the readers start thinking this astonishing report is nothing but a hoax, the article says Buckley’s story has been confirmed after a couple of Batman’s men sounded out one of the original settlers who was part of David Collins’ Port Phillip expedition.

  ‘The question was put, whether any of the party remained after the settlement was broken up. [He] immediately said that four men were left, one of whom he particularly recollected because he was much taller … and his name was Wm Buckley.

  ‘It appears Buckley has never seen a white man for upwards of thirty years. He has been living on friendly terms with the natives and has been considered as a chief … curiosity induced Mr Batman’s party to measure this Goliath, his height is six feet five inches and seven eights; he measures around the chest three feet nine inches, the calf of his legs and the thick parts of his arms are eighteen inches in circumference. By all accounts he is a model for a “Hercules” – he is more active than any of the blacks and can throw a spear to an astonishing distance …

  ‘This man may be made most useful to the new settlement; and, we trust, every precaution will be taken to conciliate the blacks and bring them by degrees to industrious habits through the medium of this man.’

  Surely this is a story to get Goodwin’s readers talking. A spear-throwing wild white man, in from the bush, his hulking frame making even Batman, himself a tall and powerfully built fellow, look small in comparison. And now the prospect of the two of them working alongside one another, guarding each other’s backs as Batman and his intrepid band of explorers forge onwards into one of the greatest acreages God ever set forth on this earth? Surely this is enough to restore Goodwin’s faith in the qualities of manliness and courage.

  But William Lushington Goodwin isn’t quite finished yet. This edition of the Chronicle might be his best yet. Buried in the column next to the story about Buckley’s miraculous survival is a letter signed, simply, ‘A. Mariner’.

  It can only be Goodwin himself. The writer wants it known that his attention a few nights earlier was drawn to the ship Kains, now just a shadow of its old self, its hulk sitting in a specially designed dock attached to a wharf at the end of Charles Street. The ship Goodwin had almost single-handedly steered around the world in the face of so many obstacles was now nothing more than a hollow shell leased by the Customs department to store alcoholic spirits and liqueurs.

  In the middle of 1831, having unloaded his cargo and crew in Sydney, Goodwin had set out for Launceston in the Kains, only to encounter horrendous weather. Two men and two horses were lost and Goodwin had to return to Port Jackson to repair broken masts. Still, it was just a hiccup compared to what he had endured over the previous 1
2 months. He was soon making his way down the east coast again and came painfully close to Launceston, only to find himself becalmed in the Tamar. The Kains then struck a rock and had to be beached before ultimately being turned into a novelty store.

  ‘A. Mariner’ is alarmed for he has seen a man running across the old ship’s deck at night lighting the lamps with a flaming torch in his hand. Do people not understand that the Kains is now a veritable bomb, filled with all sorts of flammable spirits set to ignite from the slightest careless spark?

  The Kains may have been transformed but so, too, has William Lushington Goodwin. The hardened and crusty sea captain has turned himself into a true newspaper editor with a flare for the unusual and an instinct for scaring the daylights out of his readers.

  ‘… should the Kains take fire with the prevailing wind at NW the whole town of Launceston must fall sacrifice to the devouring element … and should the flames be directed that way who can tell where they will stop and who … could arrest their progress?’

  You can sense that the warmth in those deep-set eyes of Goodwin has turned cold, his smile buried once more beneath a mask of whiskers and sternness. The ruthless man of the sea is never far from the surface and his disdain will resonate through the pages of the Chronicle almost two centuries later.

  ‘Oh when,’ he writes, ‘shall we have a change of men and measures in this fine but mismanaged island?’

  22

  JOHN BATMAN – HERO, HUNTER, MURDERER

  Early evening at the Cornwall Hotel in Launceston, the air thick with pipe smoke and sour whiskey breath. There are men in waistcoats and hats murmuring in the corner; others with sweat-stained shirts huddled in small groups. It’s as if the essence of Van Diemen’s Land has been distilled into this one room, a place where William Goodwin could stand quietly and just soak it all in and forget everything he’d ever said about this island turning soft and effeminate. He might even feel the urge to shout the bar because despite the tobacco haze and body odour, what you can inhale above all else is manliness. This is what life on a real frontier should look and feel like; settlers and freed men alike, wealthy and poor, all of them schemers and dreamers, real men of action, cradling their drinks in coarse, chapped hands, even the quietest among them listening intently and joining the conversation.