WHEN TUCKEY’S REPORT came back to Collins, he became convinced that the inhabitants of the entire region were incurably hostile, rendering Port Phillip essentially uninhabitable. It was the kind of confirmation Collins wanted. He duly relayed his findings to King in New South Wales: ‘Were I to settle in the upper part of the harbour which is full of natives, I should require four times the force I have now to guard not only the convicts, but perhaps myself from their attacks.’ To wit, Port Phillip Bay, which had some of the most fertile land ever seen on the new continent, was entirely unsuitable for the Empire’s purposes.
When Collins’s about turn became officially known two months after first settlement, convicts and colonists alike despaired. He had selected the least prosperous part of the bay and now, based on a single skirmish, he was abandoning the bay altogether – and yet this landscape screamed bounty. This was a perfect recipe for discontent among the colonists. What had it all been for? The tallest man in the colony now realised some kind of escape had to be planned and executed very soon, or it would become impossible. The seeds of a plan were beginning to sprout.
As Christmas 1803 approached, the colony was in emotional turmoil. Ever since the commandant had declared they would be leaving Port Phillip, rumours had spread of a major breakout of convicts – possibly even a mutiny. While stoked more by fear than reality, there was truth in this gossip. The half-built colony was in the process of unbuilding itself, and in the confusion tensions were heightened.
December brought searing heat. There were flies by the thousands by day and mosquitoes biting at night. Members of all social classes succumbed to sickness, but this had little effect on Collins’s determined quest to abandon the area. He ordered there be no rest days, which meant the convicts were in gangs working from sunrise to sunset. ‘Carry on’ was the message delivered from above. The women were still undertaking domestic work, creating vegetable gardens with the help of their children, but there was a sense of unease.
Like many others, William Buckley watched in dismay as the colony he had helped to build unravelled. By early December he was part of a team ordered to build a 380-foot jetty for the next operation – reloading onto the ships all the stores they had recently unloaded.
To everyone except Collins, this all seemed like an anticlimax. They had been prepared to make this country work. As the wife of one officer, Mrs Hartley, remarked in a letter to her sister, ‘My pen is not able to describe the beauties of this delightful spot.’ The colony, she muttered, was being abandoned ‘at the whim of the governor’. She ended the letter: ‘I parted from it with more regret than I did from my native land.’
With fewer able-bodied men on watch, Collins couldn’t maintain the usual standards of security. Buckley, chafing for freedom, knew he needed to act soon. He decided to bolt for Sydney that month. What did he have going for him? Added to his immense strength were qualities of self-reliance and resilience. When he had fought in the army his height had guaranteed him a position as a ‘pivot man’; in the heat of battle soldiers needed someone to rally around, and Buckley had been that man. He was calm under pressure and battle hardened. While determined in character he was also gentle in nature, emotional and sometimes given to self-doubt. He wasn’t one who found self-expression easy, but underneath it all there was grit, resourcefulness and determination. Buckley was the archetypal gentle giant. He believed – perhaps naively – that whatever this new continent threw at him, he could handle.
All the ‘cavorting’ among the colony’s wealthiest denizens wouldn’t have gone unnoticed by Buckley and his fellow convicts, nor the fact that the officers and their men were frequently drunk. In fact, to improve morale Collins had offered them double rations of grog. The hardworking convicts, of course, received nothing. Across the board, a climate of sickness, despondency and ennui prevailed.
Among the inmates’ ranks were a number of radicals who held their greatest rancour for members of the upper crust. There was one George Lee, mentioned by Tuckey and Collins as a man of ‘considerable education and abilities’, who was granted special dispensation for being something of a gentleman. He was given a hut and light duties, but Lee abused his role, as Collins put it, by ‘misapplying the leisure’ that he had been given and ‘endeavouring to create dissatisfaction among the prisoners’. Lee had apparently written some scurrilous verse about the officers. ‘I would rather take to the bush and perish sooner than submit to the torture to please the tyrants, the ignorant brutes placed over me as slave drivers,’ he reportedly said when asked for his views on colonial life. When Collins asked Knopwood to inquire more deeply into the man’s background and current activities, it became obvious that Lee was a firebrand, influential and dangerous. Immediately he was put in a gang for hard labour. But he was influential, and his punishment did not deter the convicts. It hardened their resolve to flee.
In the end, though, it was just Lee and his mate David Gibson who bolted. Lee stole a gun and made a desperate run for it. He was never heard of again, believed to have (as Collins would describe in his periodic reports to King) ‘perished in the woods’. When Gibson returned a few weeks later, he was unrecognisable. He stumbled into the camp, raised his hands and practically walked into the leg irons awaiting him. The flogging he received was a blessing compared to the rigours of the bush.
Despite their failure, Lee and Gibson had succeeded in igniting the first wave of desertions. Gibson’s wretchedness, after his bush ordeal, did not discourage them. They all knew that if they were transported south to Van Diemen’s Land, escape would be next to impossible. By December, as Buckley and a group of friends were contemplating their breakout, fourteen people had already fled. Anyone who relished liberty, anyone who truly believed the ‘liberty or death’ credo, would make a run for it. ‘I determined on braving everything,’ Buckley wrote. This, he said, was due to his ‘unsettled nature’ and his ‘impatience of every kind of restraint’.
And so it was that William Buckley, Dan McAllenan, George Pye, Jack Page, William Marmon and Charlie Shore plotted their escape, hoping that just after Christmas, with the rum ration doubled, most of the sentinels would be off their guard, if not drunk.
Buckley and his troop didn’t look to abscond across the hinterland. That way, they thought, lurked countless savages. The band of convicts would begin their escape in the backwoods behind the beach and then double back to the coastline. They would then head north for about fifty miles to the top of the bay, and from there they would cut across country and head direct to Sydney. Their greatest hope for survival was a fowling piece – a rather ramshackle gun that McAllenan had secreted – to shoot possums and kangaroos.
Christmas passed, and all was quiet in Sullivan Bay. At nine o’clock at night on 27 December, six men went on the run with a few tin pots, an iron kettle and a second-rate gun. They had just a few days’ rations between them. A green, beautiful but ultimately alien wilderness awaited them.