A Sunday morning in early March 1837 and it is time for the good reverend to tend to his flock. What a flock it is, the greatest gathering of important people the settlement has seen. NSW Governor Richard Bourke is here, along with the rest of the senior crew of HMS Rattlesnake, which has just arrived from Sydney. Also pressed into this small weatherboard building is William Lonsdale and a group of soldiers. Someone has ordered a gang of convicts to fill the spaces and make sure it is standing room only. And of course, who can miss the towering figure of William Buckley?
Governor Bourke is about to make another adept career move, officially naming the settlement Melbourne, after Lord Melbourne, the current British Prime Minister, William Lamb. It is time for the Empire to officially seize this land from the likes of Batman and Fawkner.
Bourke’s face has a large and vicious scar along his jawline. Another veteran of that ill-fated campaign against the French in Holland in 1799, Bourke was shot through the jaw, and while the skin and muscle eventually healed, it still gives him pain and affects his speech.
The Reverend George Langhorne looks out at the crowd and prepares to speak. Bourke has sent him to Melbourne to establish a government mission for the Aboriginals. The Governor has a favourite theory he wants proven. Take all your lower-class whites – you know, the convicts and servants and the rest of the great unwashed – and get them together with the Aboriginals. Before long you will have a new race and all those problems both creeds constantly create … why, they will disappear, replaced by a new breed of more civilised men.
Langhorne isn’t too sure about this idea. But Bourke is the Governor, after all, and the man who has sent him to help protect the Indigenous people. There is already a dispute going on about where this mission should be located. Some want it close to Melbourne. Langhorne presses for it to be established down at Western Port, perhaps on French Island.
‘Such nonsense, young man,’ Bourke will tell him. ‘You will have your throat cut.’
Langhorne opens his Bible and looks up. Pressed against the windows of this makeshift church are more than a hundred black faces, staring in at this strange gathering of white fellas. Just a day or so earlier, Interpreter William Buckley had made sure Bourke’s arrival in Melbourne was accorded the appropriate pomp. All those natives, lined up in neat, orderly rows with no idea the man they were greeting had issued a decree 18 months earlier that effectively wiped away any notions they were the traditional owners of the land. It was Bourke who had introduced the concept of terra nullius – in large part to stymie the plans of the Port Phillip Association. But his proclamation in October 1835 – that Australia belonged to no-one until the British Crown seized it – would resonate for almost two centuries.
One of those travelling with Bourke, Captain Phillip Parker King, will write that a ‘small tribe of natives, headed by Buckley, were drawn up on the road side, who stared with all their eyes at the “Gubernoz”. Compared to Buckley they appeared to be of diminutive size, but are fine looking men, and by no means so short, for Buckley measured 6ft 6in. He acts now as interpreter for the commandant and is a very useful person in that capacity.’
So how appropriate is it that Langhorne should look out at what he will later recall as his ‘motley congregation’ and turn to Luke, 15:3–7. It’s the parable of the sheep, one of the most memorable passages in the good book. What other lesson could Langhorne choose? The sheep is the only reason why everyone is crammed into this makeshift church.
Langhorne begins his reading and tells them how Jesus had turned to his followers and asked them: ‘Which of you men, if you had one hundred sheep, and lost one of them, wouldn’t leave the 99 in the wilderness, and go after the one that was lost, until he found it?’
Langhorne stares at his flock. He has their attention. ‘When he has found it, he carries it on his shoulders, rejoicing. When he comes home, he calls together his friends, his family and his neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!” I tell you that even so there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over 99 righteous people who need no repentance.’
Every time Langhorne glances at his audience he sees you looking miserable and downcast. ‘Often as I glanced at his desponding countenance, contrasted with the excitement and glee manifested in the faces of his former sable companions at the windows, I would have given something to have read his thoughts and theirs.’
Sermon over, the crowd shuffles from the church. You follow Langhorne out of the door and pull him aside. You want to discuss that passage from the Book of Luke.
‘I could not help thinking,’ you say to Langhorne, ‘I was so like that lost sheep in the wilderness.’
You’re not the only one. As you unburden yourself to the reverend there are growing fears for the safety of one of the most important men to have helped found this settlement.
Joseph Gellibrand had landed in Geelong in late February with his friend, the solicitor George Hesse, and the two had set out to inspect a new sheep station before heading to Werribee and on to Port Phillip a week later for Governor Bourke’s arrival. According to their stockman, William Akers, they have missed a crucial river junction and continued riding west into largely uncharted territory. Gellibrand, the notoriously hopeless bushman with no sense of direction, had insisted they continue west but Akers, now fearing for his safety, had refused to go any further and left the pair to find their own way to Melbourne.
Bourke will delay his departure for Sydney for a couple of days, hoping to meet Gellibrand. In the meantime, having overseen the drawing up of street plans for new Melbourne, Bourke heads out for a tour of the country and, of course, he takes Interpreter William Buckley as part of his expeditionary force. In Geelong the party will travel down the Barwon River and visit Buckley’s Cave and Buckley’s Falls.
Already the legend is growing. There is plenty of time for talk as Bourke’s party covers hundreds of miles. At one stage, with the party camped near Werribee, you tell the Governor your story; how you eked out a pathetic existence for those first few weeks on the run eating shellfish until you were welcomed by one of the clans who treated you with food and kindness.
Phillip Parker King, travelling with the Governor, writes: ‘By degrees he [Buckley] became quite satisfied with their mode of life, clothed in an opossum skin and relishing all their “delicacies” such as grubs and raw flesh. He lived in every way as one of them. Food was always supplied to him and he took no part in procuring it. He meddled not in their quarrels or joined against the enemies of his tribe. In fact, he appears to have eaten, drunk and slept for the space of 30 years, quite happy and contented, and without much desire to alter his lot.’
By the end of March, Bourke is preparing to leave for Sydney and there is now talk that Gellibrand and Hesse must have been killed or captured by ‘hostile tribes’. Two separate search parties have returned with nothing but rumours. So naturally they turn to you. Well, you’re hardly going to decline. You like Gellibrand – ‘his humane considerations for me will never be forgotten’ – and you head out into those endless plains you know so well, taking a small group of trusted Aboriginals with you.
But you return a week later, seething with anger. You had met Gellibrand’s son, Tom, who had a posse of prospective settlers from Van Diemen’s Land with him as part of a search party. They had joined you, following the spoor of Gellibrand and Hesse’s horses until it faded on a plain that had been recently burned. Further west you saw a native camp and ‘having reason to think it was not a tribe likely to receive the white men in a friendly manner’, you asked the rest of the party to remain behind.
At first the Aboriginals ran off. They had never seen a horse before, or a large white man on it wearing white man’s clothing. But just as you began winning their confidence, Tom Gellibrand and his party of white men rode up, frightening the tribe.
Well, that was just about enough. Combined with the Bourke expedition you had just spent close to a month in the saddle, riding hard and putting up with the jibbering nonsense of white men who think they knew better. Back in Melbourne you go straight to Lonsdale, who in turn sends a missive to Bourke in Sydney: ‘He [Buckley] met with some tribes that are not in the habit of visiting the stations. From one of them he learnt that two white men on horseback were seen passing onward to the west when the grass about there was burning … he says he could find no clue to discover that any murder had taken place …
‘Now Buckley appears very much annoyed with some of the people who went out also. He says they paid more attention to see what the country was like, than to pay attention to the search.’
It never ceases to surprise you, does it … that potential pastureland could be more important than the lives of two of your fellow men.
It’s not the end of the matter, though. Far from it. Two men from Van Diemen’s Land – Anglican preacher Joseph Naylor and his associate Charles Parsons – arrive in Port Phillip representing the families of the missing men and demanding assistance for a new search.
Go out again with idiots who know nothing about the land? You tell all this to Lonsdale and he agrees you should instead go out on your own.
But your horse needs to rest; its back is sore from carrying a giant halfway across the state. After a couple of days you are ready to resume the search for Gellibrand when an Aboriginal man rushes into your hut shouting that your horse is bleeding. John Batman is with you and both of you run outside to find the horse has been hamstrung – ‘all the hind sinews of his legs having been cut through by some white, or other savage’.
If you didn’t sense it before, then now you know there are forces at work that want you gone. In the meantime, Naylor and Parsons, disillusioned and angry, have departed for Geelong. They form their own search party and are joined by a war party of Wadawurrung men. Within days they have captured a man from the Colac area, Tanapia, a member of the Kolakgnat clan of the Gulidjan people and said to be an enemy of the Wadawurrung. Claiming to have extracted a confession, Naylor will report that the Wadawurrung then kill a young Aboriginal woman before turning their spears on Tanapia.
It smacks of a revenge killing and even by the standards of the time few people fully believe Naylor. You hear about it when you reach a sheep station in the area after having sailed from Melbourne to Geelong to get another horse. As far as you are concerned the search is now over. ‘It was an inexcusable murder,’ you will say in Life and Adventures, ‘for there was not the least reason to believe that the poor people who had been so mercilessly sacrificed had anything to do with the death of Mr Gellibrand or Mr Hesse, neither was it known at that time whether they were dead or alive.
‘This affair gave me great pain because, from my long association with the natives, I thought such destruction of life anything but creditable to my countrymen; but on the contrary, that they were atrocious acts of oppression.’
That old feeling – the need to escape, to get away – begins to return. The problem is, William, you are no longer a young man. And where will you go?
In September an opportunity to get out of town presents itself: a prisoner needs to be transported to Van Diemen’s Land and Lonsdale allows you to take him to Launceston. After delivering the prisoner to the local jail you catch up with an old shipmate from the Calcutta. Doesn’t take long for news to spread quickly that the Wild White Man is in town.
‘Buckley, the Anglo-Aboriginal of Port Phillip, is on a visit to this island,’ reports the Launceston Advertiser on 14 September. ‘He is a strapping upright fellow, about six feet and a half high, and apparently none the worse for his thirty year sojourn among the savages of New Holland. We understand that he has taken to warm blankets, clothing and good diet, very kindly again.’
You have also taken kindly to this island. Convicts have been trying to escape from here for decades. It might just be the place for a former one to call home.