Julia Buckley never fully recovered from her ‘temporary aberration of mind’ or her fading eyesight. She moved to Sydney in the years after William’s death to be with her daughter Mary Ann and son-in-law. She died in the Hyde Park Asylum on 18 August 1863. She was 49.
Mary Ann Jackson also died at the age of 49 on 17 May 1883. According to a death notice in the Sydney News, she passed away from ‘cerebral apoplexy’ – what doctors now call a stroke. She was buried in the Balmain cemetery and was survived by her husband and 10 children. Her two eldest daughters were married in the months after her death.
John Morgan lived for another 10 years after the death of his friend William Buckley, passing away in April 1866 at the age of 74. He was married and had one daughter. According to the Tasmanian Morning Herald: ‘In late days Mr Morgan had fallen into considerable pecuniary distress in consequence of his having been unable to obtain settlement of certain claims for a remission order for land.’ One of his biographers, Peter Bolger, would write: ‘He died in 1866 as he had lived – lonely, annoyed and frightened.’
John Batman was 38 when he died, effectively broke after borrowing heavily to buy land. He was buried in the old Melbourne cemetery but was later exhumed and placed in the Fawkner cemetery, named after his nemesis. His home on Batman’s Hill was taken over by the government shortly after his death and used as administration offices. By 2018 a social movement to erase his name from public places and monuments culminated in the federal seat of Batman being renamed Cooper in honour of an Indigenous rights activist. Several ‘Batman’ parks around Melbourne were also in the process of being renamed. Bronze sculptures of Batman and John Fawkner were also removed from the streets of Melbourne by the city council and placed in storage. Despite its flaws, his formal agreement with the Kulin people in 1835 remains the only treaty ever offered to Australia’s original inhabitants.
John Pascoe Fawkner remains widely commemorated around Melbourne, including the two suburbs Fawkner and Pascoe Vale. Several parks and a private hospital also honour his name. He hand-wrote the first nine editions of Melbourne’s first newspaper, the Port Phillip Patriot, and, after weathering financial problems in the 1840s, emerged as one of the city’s most influential and controversial figures. He never lost his hatred for the Port Phillip Association and made rancorous speeches in the Legislative Council against squatters. While regarded as a liberal who pushed for greater rights for married women and a relaxation of divorce laws for deserted wives, he unsuccessfully opposed moves to introduce universal manhood suffrage – the concept of ‘one man, one vote’. A year after his death in 1869, Fawkner’s 70-year-old wife Eliza married 44-year-old John Walsh. She died at the age of 79 and was buried with her husband.
James Bonwick published more than 60 books and papers, ranging from school textbooks and his biography of John Batman to screeds on Irish druids and the wool trade. He was appointed archivist for the New South Wales government and also transcribed a great deal of original source material for the Queensland government. He dabbled in mysticism and never lost his passion for the temperance movement. He died at the age of 89 in 1906 in Sussex, survived by five children.
David Collins’ wife, Maria, petitioned the Colonial Office several times requesting financial aid after the death of her financially ruined husband in Hobart in 1810. She was granted an annual allowance of 120 pounds in 1813 in ‘consideration of her husband’s services …’ She died in 1830.
King George III suffered a major relapse of his mental illness in 1810 after the death of his much loved daughter, the 27-year-old Princess Amelia. The following year, as George descended into permanent insanity, almost blind and racked with severe rheumatism, the Parliament passed the Regency Act, allowing the Prince of Wales to act on his behalf until George’s death at the age of 81 in 1820. George III fathered 15 children – two died in childhood. His reign continues to divide historians. Some have labelled him a tyrant, others viewing him as a more benevolent leader who steered England through the greatest social and political upheavals in millennia.
Sir George Arthur was recalled against his wishes from Van Diemen’s Land in 1836 and went on to become Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and, in 1842, Governor of Bombay. The architect of Tasmania’s Black War died a wealthy man, in part due to his heavy investments in land during his tenure in Van Diemen’s Land. These investments were described by some critics of the time as a ‘matter of notoriety’.
John Helder Wedge left Port Phillip in 1838 for England. When he returned to Van Diemen’s Land five years later following the death of his father, he married Maria Medland Wills. Wedge was 50 at the time and Maria died in childbirth a year later. He became a member of the Tasmanian Legislative Council and went on to serve in the short-lived ministry of the second Premier of Tasmania, Thomas Gregson. Wedge died in 1872 at his home on the Forth River in the island’s north-west. He was 79.
Alexander Selkirk returned to pirating after his rescue by Captain Woodes Rogers. He famously led a crew in pursuit of several wealthy Spanish women who had fled up a river in Ecuador, seizing gold and jewels hidden inside their clothing. He completed an around-the-world voyage as sailing master of the Duke in 1711. Selkirk later joined the Royal Navy and, while serving on an anti-piracy mission off the coast of Africa in 1721, died of yellow fever and was buried at sea. He was 45.
Foster Fyans was an influential figure in the founding of Geelong, a derivation of the Wadawurrung word Djillong (‘land’ or ‘cliffs’). In 1840 he was named Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Portland area pastoral district. Prone to hosting balls with turban-wearing servants, Fyans’ eccentricities also included hiding jewels and diamonds in homemade furniture. He married Elizabeth Cane in 1843. She died 15 years later at the age of 42. Fyans died in 1870. He was about 80 years old.
Robert Knopwood served as a magistrate and clergyman in early Hobart until 1828. He never lost his liking for strong drink and entertaining. His work habits were criticised as ‘dissipation’ by NSW Governor Lachlan Macquarie. He retired on an annual pension of 100 pounds and also received a series of land grants, but his later years were beset with financial problems and bitterness toward Lieutenant-Governor Arthur. Knopwood was at one stage accused by the bushranger Michael Howe of being connected to his gang. The reverend also adopted a young girl, Elizabeth Mack, shortly after the death of her mother. She lived with him for many years and Knopwood was shattered by her death in childbirth. He died in 1838 at the age of 75. His diaries remain one of the few first-hand records of the difficult early years in Hobart.
James Hingston Tuckey was captured by the French along with the rest of the crew of the Calcutta in 1805. During his nine-year imprisonment he married Margaret Stuart, the daughter of an East India Company ship commander. He also wrote a monumental and highly acclaimed work on maritime geography, a 2500-page tome published in four volumes. The captain of the Calcutta, Daniel Woodriff, praised Tuckey in an inquiry into the capture of the ship, saying ‘his courage, cool intrepidity and superior abilities as a seaman and officer … render him most worthy of the attention of the Admiralty’. Tuckey died in October 1816, off the coast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His diaries about his journey into the Congo were published posthumously. His wife and four surviving children were granted pensions by the Prince Regent on behalf of the incapacitated King George III.
William Marmon, Buckley’s regimental colleague who sailed with him on the Calcutta and formed part of the escape party in late December 1803, made it back to the settlement at Sullivan’s Bay suffering from scurvy, just in time to join the Ocean as it sailed for Van Diemen’s Land. He became a free man in 1818 and advertised his intention to leave for England in 1821.
Captain William Lonsdale acted as Chief Magistrate of Port Phillip until 1840 when he became the colony’s sub-treasurer. By the early 1850s he was Victoria’s first colonial secretary and treasurer until he left for England in 1854. He died in London in 1864.
Joseph Johnson married his housekeeper, Jane Baird, 11 months after the death of his first wife, unaware that ‘Baird’ was already married to an Englishman, William Hadden. When Jane left him following the arrival in Hobart of her original husband, Johnson advertised that he was not responsible for any debts she may have incurred. She later made successful claims for much of his property.
Reverend George Langhorne oversaw the establishment of Port Phillip’s first Aboriginal mission, believing he had been asked to encourage the ‘intermixture by marriage of the Aborigines among the lower order of our countrymen as the only likely means of raising the former from their present degraded and benighted state’. The project was an abject failure marked by food shortages, police brutality, political tension and the inability to understand Aboriginal culture and customs. It was closed in 1839 as pressure by white settlers for more land increased. Langhorne became a pastoralist and died in 1897.
William Lushington Goodwin’s constant attacks on the Establishment of Van Diemen’s Land cost him hundreds of pounds in defamation payments. He sold the Cornwall Chronicle after being declared bankrupt in 1842 but continued to act as proprietor. He then underwent a significant rehabilitation, becoming an alderman on the Launceston City Council and being appointed to several senior government positions. He died in 1862 at the age of 64 in George Town, Tasmania. Goodwin’s wife, Sophie, continued to manage the Chronicle until it was merged with the Launceston Times in 1869.