SOMETIME IN THE late 1790s, a young sealer was sitting on a rock shelf overlooking the southern coast of Victoria, smoking a pipe, his clothes spattered with blood and entrails. Around him were ten dead seal pups in various states of dismemberment. The rocks were splashed red, the colour trickling into nearby pools of water. The sealer had a look of contentment.
He did not know it, but he was being watched by Indigenous people. What did they think of this strange pale person? The man could pour forth smoke from his mouth. The men and women who populated this part of Bass Strait had never seen a man made out of fire.
Not long afterwards, they saw another white man. He wasn’t able to walk in a straight line, and he shouted at the sun while drinking from a thin, bright bucket. He vomited all over himself, then peeled his outer layer off and washed it in the sea. This pallid person was definitely a man. Again, the locals kept their distance.
Rumours of the white men’s arrival had come from the north and now moved south from tribe to tribe, speeding along the bush telegraph via the messenger men, the waygeries, who told of the bizarre feats and strange ways of these newcomers. Information was also transmitted via smoke signals and message sticks. It wouldn’t have taken long for news of the white men’s doings in Port Jackson to filter down to the south-easternmost corner of the continent.
Soon, the interlopers were arriving there in greater numbers. Sealers and offshore whalers were beginning to populate the coastal fringes of Bass Strait around Portland Bay, Cape Woolamai and Wilsons Promontory.
Who were these men? Debates were held among the coastal Boonwurrung people, who populated parts of Port Phillip and Western Port. Many believed they were spirits of their own kin returning to country with special powers. The Boonwurrung people of Mornington had heard that the white men could kill someone with thunder from their eyes; they sent invisible spears across great spaces that tore holes in a body.
It was a Gunditjmara tribesman from the Warrnambool area who reported the great white birds swimming on the ocean. Not long afterwards, in 1797, the Krauatungalung people of East Gippsland made the initial contact when they helped a group of shipwrecked sailors cast ashore near what would one day be Lakes Entrance.
As the century turned, European ships began haunting the southern coasts in greater numbers. The Indigenous people still thought they might be huge birds or trees of the sea, with branches that moved and swelled with the wind.
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THE FIRST EUROPEAN ship to formally sight and bring back news of Victoria’s west coast is thought to have been HMS Lady Nelson, a brig under the command of James Grant, who sailed past in December 1800. The ship later returned under John Murray, who traversed Bass Strait and ‘found’ Port Phillip, which the Boonwurrung called Narm-narm, in March 1802. It was not an auspicious occasion. Murray’s men believed they were being ambushed, and a broadside was shot from the deck of their ship into a group of fleeing Boonwurrung. Two local men were wounded – and possibly killed. It was the first recorded incidence of violence on that coast. For the Boonwurrung, it was likely the first time they had seen firesticks shot in anger.
The French arrived a month later and received a far friendlier response. The Naturaliste, one of two vessels in the Baudin expedition surveying Australia’s coastline, had stopped at Western Port. There the Boonwurrung couldn’t contain their curiosity about the pale men, and Captain Pierre Bernard Milius obliged, removing his clothes to show his manhood. They then inspected his entire body, clothes and teeth. Milius sang and danced for them. It was an early show of French-style détente.
Ten weeks later Matthew Flinders, the man who would circumnavigate New Holland and identify it as a continent, arrived aboard the Investigator. He rowed to Mornington Peninsula and climbed up the great granite giant now known as Arthurs Seat (Momo), named by Murray after a set of hills just outside Edinburgh. From here Flinders could see not just the vast spread of Mornington’s coastline, but also the unbroken green meadows of the Bellarine Peninsula across the bay. On the opposite shore he climbed the hills now known as the You Yangs, which look over the place the local Wadawurrung called Djilong – now known as Corio Bay. Here, at the peak he bestowed with his surname, he could see the shape of the harbour ahead of him, and behind him the hinterland stretching for fifty miles to the north-west, as far as Mount Macedon.
Flinders was mesmerised. He had seen more of the continent than most but never land of this type. The English, of course, counted their own island as pristine, and anything that resembled it was considered to be of similar high calibre. This landscape was closer in appearance to an English park than the tangle of wattle and eucalyptus Flinders had seen elsewhere, and he reported his findings to London with great enthusiasm. He knew he was looking at perfect grazing land.
Flinders met with the Yawangi, a clan of the Wadawurrung – who greeted him cheerfully. He noted that one had a piece of metal in a bag. These people, he thought, had probably traded with white men before.
In late 1802, HMS Cumberland arrived, bringing NSW Surveyor-General Charles Grimes. He was unimpressed by Port Phillip until he rowed up a great river in the north, which would one day be known as the Yarra. In his opinion the northern end of the bay – more populated, more fertile and with abundant fresh water – was the obvious choice for a colony.
By the time the old merchantman Ocean arrived on 7 October 1803, the many-winged birds, with their crews of ghosts, were well known to the coastal people. Two days later, in came HMS Calcutta, a 1100-ton monster more than twice the size of the Ocean and the largest ship ever to have sailed to New Holland. She was a former East Indiaman, built of teak, which had been converted into a convict transport. She was carrying over 400 people, including 299 male convicts, 30 wives and children of convicts as well as a large contingent of marines, crew and civil staff.
While the locals may have been awed by her size, the Europeans on board were equally in awe of the landscape. They had come from Portsmouth via Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope. Nine convicts had lost their lives on the six-month journey, but in the early days of convict transportation this was considered reasonable ‘attrition’.
Now gazing out at their new world, passengers rich and poor, free and unfree, convict and settler alike were of one opinion: this was El Dorado in the South Seas. ‘Upon entering this spacious harbour, nothing could be more pleasing to the eye than the beautiful green plains with lofty trees which surrounded us,’ wrote Third Lieutenant Nicholas Pateshall. ‘In short, the country appeared more like pleasure grounds than a wild savage continent.’ First Lieutenant James Tuckey also waxed lyrical, describing the scenery as ‘nature in the world’s first spring’. ‘The face of the country . . . is beautifully picturesque, swelling into gentle elevations of the brightest verdure and dotted by trees as if planted by the hand of taste . . .’
Among the convicts was William Buckley, who also marvelled at the landscape. To its port, the Calcutta had passed Point Lonsdale (Gowaya) and to its starboard, Port Nepean (Boona Djabag), then cruising past the Bellarine Peninsula, Buckley must have felt he had crossed the Earth and found himself in an alternate England, a version cleaned of its vice and corruption, stripped of its industrial decay.
Buckley hadn’t been mistreated on the voyage, even if his transportation for handling stolen Irish cloth (an offence considered punishable by death) was – in his opinion – grossly unfair. En route he had been invited on deck to work with the sailors and officers, who weren’t overly harsh towards their convict charges. ‘It was as far from suffering as could be expected,’ Buckley would later write in his memoirs. ‘At a time when prison discipline was generally carried out by coercion, and the lash and the rope were, in too many instances, considered too good for all who had been convicted.’
In those days, a man of around five feet seven inches was considered tall, so Buckley was gargantuan, standing just shy of six feet six inches. He had a head of bushy black hair and a low forehead with eyebrows overhanging his disproportionately small eyes. He had a short snub nose and a face scarred by smallpox, typical of his generation. His stature was of ‘erect military gait’; he was strong, powerful and highly athletic.
In every other way, he was the archetypical convict: a former tradesman from Cheshire with no literacy skills, and with an almost unquenchable desire to escape. He was a true ‘liberty or death man’, the convict’s credo that many uttered and others had scratched on their bodies – but relatively few acted on. We know something of his feelings because he committed them to print many years later with the help of a newspaper editor, John Morgan, who added much of his own voice to these memoirs and many of his own predilections to those of Buckley. But Buckley’s character shines through. Like every other convict he had no qualifications for escape. The quiet giant was fresh off the boat with no backwoods experience. He was, by trade, a bricklayer and former soldier who had seen action against the French in Holland. Growing up on a farm in England hadn’t bestowed bushcraft.
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THE TWO GREAT WHITE BIRDS, moving north, turned towards the southern end of the bay and came to a halt about eight miles from the heads. For several days, they sat motionless on the water, side by side, moored a fair way offshore, on the lower south-east hook of Port Phillip – present-day Sorrento – which the Boonwurrung called Bullanatoolong. It was the home of the Burinyung-Ballak clan who called the strip of land from Port Nepean to Boneo, Tootgarook. They were now about to look right down the length of Mornington Peninsula, which the people here called Wamoon. From the ships there were a few comings and goings to shore. Then, all of a sudden, they began disgorging huge numbers of people and materiel.
The Calcutta was terrifying in herself, but she brought something the locals had never seen before: the ghost women. This could only mean one thing. Unlike their predecessors, these intruders were not planning to leave.
The tallest and strongest man in the colony had been chosen specifically for tasks like this. Colonisation was backbreaking work, and men like William Buckley were needed to bring in the hundreds of cases of stores, which had to be hauled at low tide. It was difficult and dirty work – men were often shoulder deep in water, carrying large boxes above their heads to a distant shore. Buckley was used to a life of drudgery and must have known it would be like this. Whenever the hardest physical tasks were assigned, he was the first man chosen.
What the Boonwurrung were witnessing was the second-largest land invasion of New Holland ever attempted by the British, led by an experienced officer and administrator with first-hand experience in colonisation. The new colony was to be run by the former Judge Advocate of New South Wales, David Collins, a colonel in the Royal Marines who had been on Captain Arthur Phillip’s first voyage when it arrived in Port Jackson fifteen years earlier. It was Collins who had decided the infant colony should be placed at the south-eastern side of the bay. He named it Sullivan Bay.
A missionary, John Bulmer, later heard a song directly from the Boonwurrung that recorded the tribespeople meeting white settlers or seeing them approach: ‘Mundhanna loornda kathia prappau. Muraskin mundhanna yea a main.’ (‘There are white men long way off with great noise. Guns there sailing about.’)
Within only a few weeks, the settlement took shape. It ran along the beach for about four hundred yards, naturally capped at each end with yellow and white sandstone bluffs. The western side of the settlement was designated convict and soldier territory, where many calico tents had been placed just above the shoreline with sentinels in positions surrounding the convicts. Here also lay the storage tents and a half-built munitions battery. At the eastern side of the beach lay the pens for pigs and other livestock. The officers’ and settlers’ tents were all clustered there, and at the top of the eastern cliff stood Collins’s headquarters: less a tent, more a marquee. Two cannons were looking out to sea, and between them was a large, constantly flapping Union Jack.
Once the stores had been brought to dry land, Buckley’s assigned job was much more to his liking. As a bricklayer, he would mostly be involved in working on the construction of a magazine and a storehouse. He was considered something of a ‘mechanic’ (anyone with hands-on building skills was considered such), and this was where his prowess worked for him; he was classed among the skilled lime-burners, builders and carpenters, and given some freedom of movement as the job required work beyond the main boundaries of the settlement. He could build his own hut and live outside the immediate range of the sentinels – by contrast, the labouring convicts were placed under more focused supervision.
Before too long, settlers were ransacking bird nests, as well as fishing extensively for crayfish; some were even pilfering artefacts from nearby camps. We know that Collins, who had encountered the Eora people in Sydney, was extremely wary of the new colony overindulging in the local people’s resources. He issued what some have described as Australia’s first environmental protection order, along with rules relating to local women. He reminded the colonists that taking ‘spears, fishing spears, gum, or any other articles from the natives, or out of their huts, or from the beach where it is their custom to leave these articles’ was robbery and would be punished as such. He also tackled what might have been the chief cause of frontier conflict throughout the British colonies – any violence towards a local woman was punishable by death: ‘If any of the natives are wantonly or inconsiderably killed or wounded or if any violence is offered to a woman, the offender will be tried for his life.’
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ESCAPE FOR A British convict in the early nineteenth century wasn’t just about surviving in the wilderness. It was also about overcoming a certain deep-seated, entrenched fear. Out there, the convicts were told, you’d be taking your chances with man-eaters. It was one of the best pieces of propaganda the British – and, indeed, most Europeans – had ever invented, a fear so indelibly stamped into the convict psyche that it was rarely questioned.
A certain word first entered the English language in the mid-sixteenth century by means of Spanish explorers. Christopher Columbus used the word canibales to describe indigenous people of the Caribbean Islands who were rumoured to be eaters of human flesh. The name stuck: ‘cannibal’ became a popular term in Britain to describe any colonised people, whether they were of the British Empire or from the New World.
But in this new southern colony, most of the meetings between the British and locals were peaceable. In only one instance was there any difficulty. A group of Boonwurrung attempted to steal from a boat – however, no violence ensued. From this incident the colony’s churchman, the Reverend Robert Knopwood, divined what everyone thought was obvious: ‘We have great reason to believe they are cannibals,’ he would write later.
This understanding of indigenous peoples would last into the Victorian era, when Morgan was ghostwriting Buckley’s story in the late 1840s. It was this well-promulgated fear that ‘stayed’ so many itchy convict feet. But there were some, like Buckley, who were desirous enough of their liberty to ignore the propaganda. A bolt for Sydney, around six hundred miles distant, was what the convicts called ‘China travelling’: fleeing north without a map. China, it was widely thought, was attached to the top of Australia. Buckley wasn’t quite so naive to believe that China was in marching distance, but he reckoned he had as good a chance as any of making it to Sydney. Where else was possible? In 1803, with the country beyond Sydney barely settled, a ship from Port Jackson was the only way out of New Holland.
The colonists didn’t realise that the local people, who lived in one of the most bounteous parts of the continent, did not need to be cannibals: the land provided them with everything. The Boonwurrung were part of a greater ‘confederation’ of culturally similar Aboriginal tribes south of the River Murray who populated the area around and inland from Port Phillip Bay. Known collectively as the Kulin people (Kulin means ‘man’), they represented forty language groups and clans who had been occupying the region for many tens of thousands of years. The Wadawurrung inhabited the west of the bay, around the Bellarine Peninsula through to the Otway Ranges in the south-west and as far north-west as Ballarat. The Boonwurrung were custodians of the slice of Port Phillip Bay east of the Werribee River, the Mornington Peninsula, around Western Port and as far east as Wilsons Promontory. North-east of the Boonwurrung were the Woiwurrung (many still adopt an alternative name – the Wurundjeri), who populated the area around the Yarra River and its tributaries; together with the Boonwurrung, they were part-custodians of the land that would one day be called Melbourne. There were also the Taungurong to the north of the Woiwurrung, and the Djargurd Wurrung who held sway over land north of the Wadawurrung.
The clans intermarried, fought with each other and did tribal business. One moment there was peace, another there was trouble, but through it all the bush telegraph never faltered. The messenger men, the waygeries, were always given safe passage by all Kulin tribes in all areas, so they could tell their vital news and stories. The coast was always being watched, and smoke signals foretold the arrival of white men to people further inland, many of whom wouldn’t see the invaders for years.
The three tribes around and inland of Port Phillip would first bear the brunt of white incursions: the Wadawurrung, the Boonwurrung and the Woiwurrung. They held sway over significant slices of the bay and many miles into the interior. The boundaries moved and shifted a little over time, but the borders, marked by the Indigenous understanding of their respective country, had been respected for many thousands of years. However, white people ignored territorial protocol, moving without regard for each tribe’s boundaries. There had been the odd skirmish but no one had seriously challenged these ghost-like people – and, until now, the ghosts had never seriously challenged them. But with the arrival of the Calcutta, they may have well believed they were witnessing the coming of a catastrophe.