Buckley's Chance Read online

  And there is only one topic for discussion on this night.

  John Batman. Just when you think the man has peaked, just when it seems he has finally achieved his crowning glory by negotiating a treaty with the blacks of Port Phillip, he comes up with something else. What was it he had shouted just a few weeks ago when he’d stormed through the hotel doors, arms raised victoriously in the air, after returning from his journey across the Strait?

  ‘I’m the greatest landowner in the world,’ he’d announced, and there wasn’t a man in the bar who could argue with that. Surely this son of a convict, effectively run out of Sydney, had no need anymore to prove himself as an equal among men. It was true that some of the men who formed the Port Phillip Association that Batman led – wealthy pastoralists, former politicians and surveyors who had provided the patronage and funds to bring such an outlandish idea to fruition – saw their man as a blunt instrument. But who among them could disagree that he had delivered everything he had promised? More than 600,000 acres, prime grazing lands leased from the local tribes for a pittance!

  Not only that but he’d seized the land in defiance of government orders. Now that surely had to win the respect of even his greatest critics. And let’s not forget there are a few of them scattered around this island. That painter and neighbour of Batman’s over at Mt Ben Lomond – John Glover – he’s no admirer. How will he sum up the man? ‘A rogue, thief, cheat and liar, a murderer of blacks and the vilest man I have ever known.’

  Well, every man has his faults and Glover is an artist, let us not forget. A painter of landscapes, an old man who ponces around the countryside with brush and easel by his side, delighting in the ‘remarkable peculiarity of the trees’. He might be well known back in London but is anyone speaking in admiring tones in the bar tonight about his use of subtle colours and delicate tones?

  No, all anyone wants to hear about is Batman and the news of this giant striding in from the bush. See what happens? No-one mentions your name for 32 years and now it’s all they talk about. The news is stunning: a towering white man, dressed in skins who has lived with the savages since before the founding of Van Diemen’s Land? If true, and if this Hercules now stands by Batman’s side, advising him and helping him deal with the always troublesome natives, then who can stop Batman?

  Everyone wants a piece of Port Phillip now. There are millions more acres to be grabbed. The reports of a land just waiting to be plundered are almost as endless as the grassy plains Batman and his party have described. The best sheep country God ever put on this earth. Even that short, slightly stooped and pasty faced man who built this hotel, wants in.

  Johnny Fawkner.

  Little Johnny Fawkner. William, you were warned about that 10-year-old boy who spent six months clambering about on the Calcutta all those years ago, watching everyone, eavesdropping on conversations, the sort of kid you could always find lurking in a corner.

  Well, not much has changed. Hasn’t grown much, has he? Fawkner had been in the Cornwall Hotel on that night back in June, doing what he does best, listening and making mental notes, as Batman boasted about how he had found the perfect place for a village; a deep river that would supply endless fresh water and the pasture land … why, the man was in raptures. The plains were so level and lush ‘a horse might run away with a gig for twenty miles on end without fear of upsetting from irregularity of the ground’.

  In fact, Fawkner should already be in Port Phillip, seeing it all for himself right now, if it were not for the small matter of some debts a group of local creditors had … err … requested he attend to. He was even on board his schooner – the Enterprize, the boat taking him and his settling party to this promised land – when he’d been forced to disembark and trudge back home to go through his finances. He might have been burning with embarrassment that day – and little Johnny has known more than his share of humiliation over the years – but don’t think such a trifling matter like this is going to stop him. The Enterprize, without Fawkner, has already negotiated the rip guarding Port Phillip Bay and has made it all the way to the Yarra River. In just a few weeks, his debts sorted out, Fawkner will join its crew and help start a new settlement.

  He’ll go to war with Batman, of course. To Fawkner, Port Phillip promises more than just land and wealth. There are legacies to be won across Bass Strait, reputations that might endure down the ages, opportunities to rewrite history and even wipe away the stains of his past. And if you happen to be a Batman ally, then he’ll go to war with you, too.

  Fawkner has a vague memory of a big man called Buckley. A convict at the settlement at Sullivan Bay, wasn’t he? Another prisoner on the Calcutta, just like little Johnny’s father. There are some things from your childhood you never forget and the Fawkner family’s six-month journey from England to New Holland is something he has never wiped from his memory – or wanted to. Men are all the same to Fawkner. Big or small, doesn’t matter. You just have to find their weak point. If Johnny has shown a skill over the past three decades it is his ability to persevere, to put up with ridicule and humiliation, to bide his time until an opportunity presents itself and then ruthlessly press home his advantage.

  But all that will come later. There are more urgent issues occupying the thoughts of the dreamers and schemers in the Cornwall Hotel on this night. Questions that rise far above the pipe smoke. How quickly can I get to Port Phillip? How much for a berth to get me across Bass Strait? Is this story of a possum-skin clad Goliath actually true?

  And just who does John Batman think he is?

  James Bonwick has the 19th century version of a man-crush. If you didn’t know the man was a rabid teetotaller you would think he was in the throes of a bender. But he’s just drunk on admiration and awe. The historian who will write William Buckley off as a guileless oaf is infatuated with John Batman. Forget any notions of Bonwick giving the man a pedicure; he’s too busy stooping to kiss the man’s feet.

  Batman, he will say, ‘was a youth of considerable intelligence and vigour, with a merry eye, a handsome face and a flattering tongue to please the other sex’. A flattering tongue, indeed. It won’t be the only appendage of Batman’s to get him into trouble.

  Batman was born in 1801 in Parramatta, just a baker’s dozen years after the founding of Sydney. His father, William Bateman (he dropped the ‘e’ from the surname in 1810), had been transported for 14 years for stealing. By the time John had reached the age of 15 he was apprenticed to a Sydney blacksmith, James Flavell, himself a former convict. But his career lasted barely a year. Flavell and one of his assistants, William Tripp, were arrested for burglary in 1816 and young John gave evidence against his employer.

  The judge was in no mood for leniency, the Sydney Gazette reporting his finding that Flavell, a long-time resident of the colony with a lucrative business, was an ‘almost unexampled case it had been unhappily brought to proof that it was scarcely possible for human depravity more to debase the human character than he had done’. Flavell and Tripp were hanged on 15 November, the Gazette noting that ‘we feel gratified … that the unfortunate men conducted themselves in their last moments in a becoming manner, and died penitently’.

  For the next few years Batman took on an assortment of roles around Sydney before trouble struck. A resident of the local orphans’ home, Elizabeth Richardson, named John as the father of her unborn child. The committee of the institution launched an investigation and suggested Batman marry the girl. He refused and so the committee asked for a donation of 50 pounds to cover her expenses. John’s father intervened – the fee was eventually whittled down by half – and within days of the scandal being settled, John and his younger brother, Henry, were on a ship bound for Van Diemen’s Land.

  The John Batman Cheer Squad – a collection of sycophantic historians and admirers of real manliness – tend to either ignore this episode in his life, gloss over it or explain it away as a youthful indiscretion. Why, who could expect young John to stay around and support a child when he had a
n empire to forge?

  Even as late as the 1970s, C. P. Billot, who writes a detailed biography of the man, will excuse his behaviour: ‘All his life John Batman was a highly sensual man and Sydney would have provided a most exciting and fruitful soil for the sowing of wild oats. Can it be doubted, then, that this handsome, powerful young man was a hit with the ladies of the city? And in a community where these highly desirable ladies would be closely guarded by often violent husbands or fathers, can it be wondered at if the young, virile Batman had to leave Sydney in a hurry as a result of a too-ardent temperament expressing itself in a too-casual manner?’

  In Launceston, Henry becomes a wheelwright and a drunk; John, ever the restless spirit, takes to the land, immersing himself in bushcraft. He begins amassing land around the slopes of Ben Lomond, beginning with a grant of 500 acres that will eventually grow to 7000 acres. And it is here, in the northern reaches of Van Diemen’s Land, that Batman’s reputation as a man who gets the job done begins. What he does next is almost enough to force Bonwick to break his vow of abstinence and raise a glass to the man who will reshape the southern half of the continent. Instead, he reaches for even higher notes of rhapsody: ‘I learned that this man of nerve, of powerful frame and daring courage, had the manners of a gentleman, the simplicity of a child, the tenderness of a woman.’

  Why, they also happen to be the very qualities supposedly possessed by the man Batman sets out to capture, the ‘gentleman bushranger’ Matthew Brady, an escaped convict whose exploits have been infuriating the authorities in Hobart Town, particularly the Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur. With his high forehead and pinched face, Arthur is a zealous reformer propelled by a deep streak of evangelicalism. But he is also thin-skinned, an autocrat whose patience has been stretched to its limits by Brady’s ability to avoid the law.

  If a growing guerilla war with the dwindling Aboriginal tribes is occupying more and more of Arthur’s time, the bushranger problem is surely one of those issues that can be dealt with quickly. For years absconding convicts have been taking to the bush, plundering local settlements and committing crimes against the poor and the Indigenous people. To Arthur their continued presence is an embarrassment, a corruption of everything a penal colony should be. But without a structured police force the bushrangers have been allowed to roam with little fear of being caught. Convicts have been offered a free pardon if they can infiltrate Brady’s gang and turn him in. But even a bounty of 100 guineas or 300 acres of land has not been enough; Brady’s gang, with their leader’s reputation for being courteous to women and only using violence in self-defence, are, if not quietly admired by many, at least appreciated by a population more accustomed to the ruthless violence of such men.

  Who – except the humourless Arthur – could not appreciate the cheek shown by Brady when he nails a notice to the door of the Royal Oak Inn in Crossmarch.

  ‘It has caused Matthew Brady much concern that such a person as Sir George Arthur is at large. Twenty gallons of rum will be given to any person that can deliver this person to me.’

  But Brady’s two years on the run are drawing to a close by early 1826. A posse led by Batman captures a former member of Brady’s gang, Thomas Jeffries, without a fight and hauls him off to the Launceston lock-up to be interrogated. It’s a scene straight from the Wild West; Jeffries behind bars, quickly turning informant and giving critical information on the whereabouts of Brady’s gang while three-quarters of the town gather outside forming a lynch mob. Brady is apoplectic when he hears the news that Jeffries has been ratting him out and has to be talked out of attacking the Launceston lock-up, seizing Jeffries and flogging him to death.

  Like others, Brady is not just offended by Jeffries’ treachery. There is much more to the man to be loathed than that. Jeffries will forever be remembered as one of the cruellest psychopaths in Australian history. A convict with a history of violent sex offences, he had enjoyed his work as a flogger at Launceston’s jail before escaping with three other prisoners. On the run he had killed and eaten one of his fellow escapers, kidnapped a woman and horrifically murdered her baby. Days later he shot a constable in the head. There was no-one in the colony, even George Arthur, who could disagree with Brady’s assessment of Jeffries as a ‘sub-human monster’.

  But Jeffries had at least provided information on the rough whereabouts of Brady. The Great Western Tiers in the Central Highlands of Van Diemen’s Land are perfect bushranger territory; steep gullies and jagged cliffs broken by open plains gave a man countless places to hide. It is here just weeks after the capture of Jeffries that Batman finds a weakened Brady, limping and supported by a makeshift walking stick. It’s a classic moment, undoubtedly honed and polished by the John Batman Cheer Squad, that loyal band of brothers eager to embrace their heroic figure.

  According to Charles White in his first volume of History of Australian Bushranging, Brady sees Batman first, throws down his walking stick and aims his rifle at his pursuer. What follows is a conversation straight from a 20th century comic book.

  ‘Are you a soldier, officer?’ shouts Brady.

  ‘I’m no soldier, Brady,’ says Batman. ‘I’m John Batman; surrender, there is no chance for you.’

  Brady ponders this for a moment before realising the game is up. Batman is the better man, a hero whose ‘powerful frame and daring courage’ are clearly too much for the bushranger.

  ‘You are right, Batman,’ says Brady. ‘My time is come; I will yield to you because you are a brave man.’

  In early May Brady and Jeffries are hanged in Hobart, Brady indignant he should be executed on the same gallows as the monster who sold him out. It is a triumph for Batman, whose standing has risen greatly, particularly in the eyes of George Arthur. When the Lieutenant-Governor requires a trusted hand for the next major problem that crosses his desk, he will turn to the man with a well-earned reputation for getting the job done.

  Batman is a man you will always respect. Not in the way that Bonwick and that grovelling crowd of historians will, but your loyalty to the man will never fade. After all, it is Batman who takes you in, who will help you win your freedom. And let’s not forget that one of his daughters will make you your first fresh shirt in more than 30 years (and won’t everyone talk about how much cloth had to be used just to make it fit …).

  But if you had known the truth about Batman’s encounters with some of Tasmania’s Aboriginals, would you feel the same way about the man?

  If you knew about Batman’s role in their ultimate extermination, if you had been told about the roving parties and the rewards sought by Batman for his part in what will become a mass ‘ethnic-cleansing’ campaign, perhaps it might stifle that sense of admiration.

  Certainly you will never be aware of an article that appears in the Launceston Advertiser on Monday, 24 August 1829. Like dozens of other briefings of local newspaper editors in the years to come, Batman’s fingerprints are all over it:

  ‘We learn from good authority that Mr John Batman is to be employed for some time as conductor of a party of 10 Crown prisoners, part of whom are to receive emancipation and part tickets of leave if they behave well. Their task is to capture all the Aborigines or as many as they possibly can.

  ‘We understand that some of the Aborigines from NSW to the number of five or six with their gins [wives] are to be invited from Sydney to join in this highly useful undertaking. No possible means could ensure the desired effect better than the use of Sydney blacks, their dexterity in the use of the spear, their quickness in guarding themselves from any spear wounds by means of their shield (made of the iron bark tree), their keen sight, both for tracking and discovering living objects … render them the most desirable auxiliaries.

  ‘Mr J. Batman is very well fitted for this office, from his knowledge of the bush from his early habits, and from his great capability of enduring fatigue and privation … we trust he will be successful and we doubt not that Lieut. Governor Arthur will reward his services in his usual generous manner.’


  Arthur has promised Batman a grant of 2000 acres if he agrees to 12 months of ‘zealous service’ as part of a plan to remove Aboriginal people from the mainland of Van Diemen’s Land to an island in Bass Strait. It is the culmination of what will be dubbed the Black War, an escalating guerilla conflict fought between two cultures over land and resources. For years settlers and freed convicts have been encroaching on traditional Aboriginal hunting grounds, depleting stocks of kangaroos and demanding the government protect their rights. Despite his evangelicalism and a history of sympathising with Indigenous cultures, Arthur, who is amassing his own personal fortune on the side by dabbling in land purchases and lending money, has formed the view it is time for the Aborigines to be removed.

  And in the north-east of the island there is one man who can be relied upon. Batman is soon roaming the country and diligently reporting on his progress. His September report explains how, in ‘pursuit of the Aborigines who have been committing so many outrages in this district’, he follows tracks that lead him and his roving party to a group of between 60 and 70 Aboriginal men, women and children.

  ‘I immediately ordered the men to lay down; we could hear the natives conversing distinctly, we then crept into a thick scrub and remained there until after sunset … and made towards them with the greatest caution.’