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 it 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 12 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?’