Ahem. A delicate matter has come to our attention, and we need to deal with it. You have been spending more of your time on your own at the Karaaf, that shallow, slow-moving stream that begins in the Barrabool Hills a few miles away and lazily makes its way toward the coastal sand dunes next to the ocean. You have your hut and plenty of fish and the isolation you desperately crave whenever life with the Wadawurrung gets too hectic. Truth is, these people are not that different to the white ones you left behind, are they? Same old jealousies and petty disputes. And talk … they love to talk. You not being that mad about words means the Karaaf has become your fortress of solitude. But that doesn’t mean you don’t get lonely …
Sex, William. That’s what needs to be discussed.
The months and years are passing and you’re still a young man and, well, we know you enjoyed scenes of ‘riotous dissipation’ during your years as a soldier. It’s the reason you’re here now. And you surely know that in the years to come there will be an army of armchair psychologists analysing your life and how you manage to survive against such insanely long odds.
But surely this one beats them all. It comes from an historian writing more than a century later.
‘One of the possible reasons for his survival is that he could have been under-sexed and, accordingly, did not participate in the continual warfare caused by the pursuing of women.’
Under-sexed? Say what you like about William Buckley but don’t say this man munching fish and roots at the Karaaf has sworn a lifelong vow of celibacy. For a start there will be several accounts of settlers coming across Aboriginal children with pale skin in the years to come. A grown daughter of yours will be pointed out one day – ‘an exceedingly tall and handsome young woman of lighter hue and European countenance’ – while other claims will surface of you fathering several children. The Reverend George Langhorne will write that: ‘Buckley says he did not live with any black woman but I have doubted from the circumstances which came under my notice the truth of this assertion, and also I think it probable he had children.’
This is where you get caught telling fibs – and fibs to a man of God, no less. That interview with Langhorne takes place in early 1837. We know that 15 years later you publish Life and Adventures, and in it you include a couple of admissions of dalliances with women.
The first begins when you are visited at your hut by a clan that so admires the life you have made for yourself they invite themselves to stay. Very soon they decide you need a wife.
You will recall you have no say in the matter when you are given to a 20-year-old widow, ‘tolerably good-looking, after a fashion, and apparently very mild tempered’. Morgan will note that there are none of the trappings of an English wedding – no fees to pay a piper for music, no ceremony or the added costs for a dress and a celebratory feast.
Instead the pair of you simply adjourn to your hut. You remain together for several months until you discover that your ‘dearly beloved played me most abominably false … one evening when we were alone in our hut, enjoying our domestic felicity, several men came in and took her away from me by force; she, however, going very willingly’.
She moves in with another man and for this slight, this show of disrespect, you are urged by your clan to take revenge. But there is no need for that; she is soon speared by the man ‘with whom she had been coqueting and to who she had also played most falsely’.
Another fight will ensue – there are so many it is hard to keep track of them – ‘in which many heads were broken … I took no part in these, excepting assuming the defensive and threatening them with punishment if they interfered with me, being now quite as expert as any of them with the spear and boomerang.’
And that, as far as you and Morgan are concerned, is almost the end of the matter. By the 1850s the curtain of Victorian prurience has been lowered; dear readers are to be protected from lurid accounts of sexual escapades and conquests lest their blushing lead to heart palpitations and impure thoughts.
The other intimate encounter you hint at takes place decades into your life with the Wadawurrung and is the most intriguing. For some time you say you have been caring for the daughter and blind boy of your brother-in-law who has been slain in another dispute. You have grown attached to them, taking them on your frequent fishing and hunting expeditions, instructing them in the things their father might have taught them. Children seem to warm to you; during your first years with the Wadawurrung they often slept with you in your hut, listening to your tales about the great battles fought by the English against Napoleon. Easier to talk with children, is it not? So less demanding.
The blind boy becomes your shadow, completely reliant on you for food and warmth. It is an unusual relationship for the time. Children with disabilities are rare; not only are they believed to be cursed but anything that slows the movement of a family clan is seen as a hindrance. But when a young man from another clan staying with you falls ill and dies, his family blames the blind boy who had been sleeping in the same hut. Sorcery and bad luck doing their work once more. The family of the dead boy kills your blind child in retribution. Heartbroken, you give up the boy’s sister to her intended husband and then depart, once more, for the Karaaf and another stint of solitude.
But it always ends the same, that desperate need to be alone quickly turning to despondency. One day you are ‘unexpectedly joined’ by a young woman who has fled while her clan is engaged in a battle with rivals. She stays with you ‘for a long time’. At one stage you kill a seal for the two of you: ‘We found the flesh very good eating and my female friend enjoyed the repast with great gusto; greasing herself all over with the fat after we had made the most of the carcass, which might well be compared to bacon.’
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 inequality 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.’