IT WAS SOMEWHERE in these very lands that, a couple of decades earlier, William Buckley was lying close to death. The Morgan–Buckley account says he was half-dazed and unable to move, only just able to perceive that two local women had cautiously approached him. ‘These women went in search of their husbands, with the intelligence that they had seen a very tall white man,’ he wrote. ‘Presently they all came upon me unawares, and seizing me by the arms and hands, began beating their breasts and mine, in the manner the others had done.’
Pastoralist James Dawson, an amateur ethnologist who spoke the Djargurd Wurrung language, wrote an alternative, far less dramatic version of Buckley’s first meeting with the Wadawurrung, Many years later – in the 1860s – an Indigenous woman at Framlingham Aboriginal Station claimed to be Buckley’s wife and described how a giant had been stalked by one of her tribe. The woman, known as Purranmurnin Tallarwurnin, related how easy their tracker had found this task. The white man had left huge tracks in his wake.
The tracker believed Buckley was a transgressor and an enemy but kept his distance for a while, perhaps owing to Buckley’s size. Eventually the tracker approached Buckley with caution. The giant was apparently in rude good health, sunning himself on top of a small hillock after a swim in the nearby ocean. The tracker soon gathered others from his tribe who looked on, puzzled by the white man’s insouciance. Buckley showed no apparent interest in them, not even glancing in their direction; he didn’t even bother to move. According to Tallarwurnin’s account, ‘They were very much alarmed. At length one of the party, finding courage, addressed him as Muurnung gurk (a man who had died and now returned to his kin). The man asked his name: “Are you Kondaak Baarwon?” Buckley replied by a prolonged grunt and an inclination of the head, which those assembled around him took to mean yes. They made a wuurn (small hut) of leafy branches for him, and lit a fire in front of it, around which they all assembled. He was then recognised as one of the tribe.’
Buckley had been rescued by the Wadawurrung Balug clan of the Barrabool Hills, one of twenty-five clans that formed the Wadawurrung people. The Morgan–Buckley account says that Buckley was immediately seen as a ngamadjidj: a word understood by all the people of Western Victoria to mean a ghost of one of their dead kin who had returned. The first group of men he had met months before had almost certainly seen him this way, and it is this perception that was almost certainly the key to his survival. In many of the tribes of southern Australia, the elder men used to say that the forms or spirits of the dead went westwards, towards the setting sun. When the tribes saw white men arriving by sea from that direction, they surmised they were dead relatives, reincarnated, coming home.
Others were more precise about the movements of the reincarnated. Katherine Kirkland, who lived at ‘Trawalla’ station in Wadawurrung country with her family from 1839 to 1841, recalled that the ‘natives have some strange ideas of death: they think, when they die, they go to Van Diemen’s Land, and come back white fellows’. Near Melbourne, William Thomas observed that at the death of Rubertmuning on 25 April 1840, his kinfolk came to his deathbed and comforted him, saying ‘he would soon be at Van Diemen’s Land and come back again’.
To the Wadawurrung, it seemed Buckley was one of their own, returned to them from the south.
According to this interpretation of events, without knowing it Buckley had plucked the spear from the grave of a great warrior, who had been killed along with his daughters by a rival group. The presence of the spear was proof enough to the tribe that their man had come back from across the seas to revisit them. This may have been normally considered a desecration of a grave, but Buckley was one of their own returned to them, and this was not an issue. He was, after all, desecrating his own grave. This heralded a great rejoicing – it was one of the strangest moments of Buckley’s life.
In the Morgan-Buckley account, he was so physically weak that men had to carry him to a spot where they could adequately treat him. The men in particular were touching and grasping him, sometimes beating his chest and sometimes beating their own; all the while, they were emitting what Buckley described as a ‘hideous whine’. The women cried and wailed, tearing at their faces and pulling out tufts of their hair.
Buckley was soon offered a concoction of acacia gum and water, fed to him out of a bowl fashioned from bark. The men gestured to him not to move as they left him alone for a moment; when several of them returned, he was treated to some large, fat grubs (verring), harvested from the roots and dead parts of trees. These, he noted, were delicious.
Buckley had not quite realised it yet but he was now practically family – or at least made to feel this way. He was experiencing a kind of reverse wake. In the history books he is the first man to have been seen this way, but it wasn’t unknown during the early years of settlement for other Europeans to experience the ngamadjidj phenomenon, as it was backed by some widely held and important beliefs throughout many parts of Indigenous Australia. According to these beliefs, the cosmos was finite and the Kulin could not conceive of other countries, or states. You were either kin or you were not. If not, then you were on what is often described as ‘a cosmological periphery’. This is where the unknown resided.
The people who lived in and around Port Phillip had different words to describe people on this cosmological edge: mainmait, warragull, myali and gulum gulum. These meant ‘wild blackfellows’, people who were foreign, spoke a language they did not understand and with whom there was no intermarriage. Everyone felt a natural antipathy towards all distant tribes.
For Europeans to be here, they must have had some link to or had known of the land in a previous life, because it was impossible for anyone to come to a country they did not know because everyone had strong spiritual bonds to the land. There was no conception that anyone could leave their homeland. So Buckley, recognised as kin, must have resided there or known of it at some point.
Pale skin was also closely aligned with Kulin experiences of death. Bodies were often laid to rest on platforms in trees, where they were gently embalmed with smoke; these cadavers turned pale and, in time, would become chalk-white. Not only did some local Indigenous people believe that white people were resurrected former kin, but also that they themselves might become white people after death. There is a famous story, told by the magistrate William Hull, of a local Indigenous man condemned to death in 1842. Hull told how just before the man was executed, he consoled himself with the expectation that he would come back white. ‘Very good. Me jump up whitefellow: plenty sixpence,’ he was alleged to have said.
It seems that for many Indigenous people to see a white person as kin and not a dangerous stranger, it would only take a small mannerism – a body tic, a certain stance or even just a smile – to inspire recognition. Buckley had the dead man’s spear, so, in the eyes of the Barrabool Hills clan, the Cheshire bricklayer was a deceased clan member returning to country. There would be many other examples of this phenomenon in years to come. One squatter in the 1840s, Charles Gray, was identified as the husband of an Indigenous woman and the father of her three children; he was then called Tirrootmerrie. Another squatter, Colin Campbell, was identified as a man who had fallen from a tree forty years earlier; he became Kerappunnen.
Buckley, mistaken for the man with the spear, was named Murrangurk, and that was how he would always be seen. He recounted that as night fell the wailing and crying abated slightly but never really ceased, and he felt his old fears of savages. He was so deeply out of his depth he wanted to escape, but with so many people fussing around him, this was impossible. There were six men and two women, in all, who continued their jubilation for much of the next day. Still fearful, and dumbfounded by the reaction to his presence, Buckley found it impossible to sleep.
He was left even more aghast by what he saw the next morning, according to the Morgan–Buckley account: ‘The women were all the time making such frightful lamentations and wailings – lacerating their faces in a dreadful manner. [The women] were covered in blood from the wounds they had inflicted, having cut their faces and legs into ridges and burnt the edges with fire sticks.’ This custom, if accurately described, appears reminiscent of the self-flagellation and mortification of the flesh historically practised by some Christian sects; in fact, self-harm has been practised in a variety of contexts by many religious and spiritual groups worldwide. It seems clear that Murrangurk’s perceived return was a deeply spiritual experience for the people around him.
For years afterwards, Buckley would regale his adopted clan with stories about England, trying to explain that he wasn’t a returned tribesman but rather transported from afar to this new land for life. But his explanations never seemed to matter to the Wadawurrung. His British past was what had happened while he was a dead man; now he was Murrangurk, the man who had flown over the southern seas, experienced many things, and rejoined them.
Whichever way you look at it, Buckley had been returned to the land of the living.