BUCKLEY HAD AGAIN retreated to a private enclave on the Karaaf, fearing that he would be besieged by people. Much to his surprise, his privacy was respected for several months. By the time the quiet was broken, he was relieved to see his friends again. Among them were the two remaining children of his slain sister and brother-in-law, a girl and boy aged around nine and ten; the boy had somehow been rendered blind.
Likely wanting Buckley to return from his isolation, the tribe pronounced him able to marry. He was being offered a woman of about twenty years of age who was already a widow, having lost her husband in a fight. She was, he remarked, ‘tolerably good-looking’ and ‘apparently very mild tempered’. He joked that ‘the marriage feast, the ring, the fees for the ceremony, the bride’s dress, my own, and all the rest of it did not cost much . . . I was not obliged to run in debt or fork out every shilling.’
Whatever relationship they had, it didn’t last long – neither party, it seems, was overly fond of the other. ‘My dearly beloved played me most abominably false, for at the end of the honeymoon, one evening when we were alone in our hut, enjoying our domestic felicity, several men came and took her away from me in force, she, however, going very willingly.’ He said that others cajoled him to take revenge on her and the man she had left him to live with, but Buckley, hardly heartbroken, tried his best to calm all parties down. It was to no avail, as she later cheated on her new partner. She was speared – and Buckley believed her to have been killed – for her sins. An imbroglio ensued, and some even threatened Buckley for no stated reason. Buckley, for the first time ever, told them in no uncertain terms that anyone trying to fight him would be met with a show of force; he believed he was just as capable with spear and boomerang as they were. The big man had never shown this kind of aggression before, and the threat of his wrath seemed to end the affair.
In the Buckley–Langhorne account, we get a slightly different version of events. In this, Buckley said he willingly gave up his wife to make sure that no jealousies would occur from other men. He had seen enough trouble over the possession of women and didn’t want to become embroiled. Whatever really took place, Buckley said from that moment ‘he was no longer apprehensive of danger from them’ – meaning, we would surmise, that he was no longer under threat from other jealous men.
After his failed marriage, the clan again tried their best to make him happy, this time by giving him guardianship of the children perceived to be his niece and nephew. He was effectively asked to become their surrogate father. This was an intelligent and far-sighted way to keep him attached to the tribe. It shows the depth of love between the clan and Buckley, and that they valued his presence.
Buckley’s participation in the community and his guardianship of the children lasted for many months before an outsider intruded into their group. This young man had taken ill and needed succour, and he eventually died of an unspecified malady. After the burial, Buckley and his friends left the area, wanting a change of scene.
Unfortunately they soon fell in with the deceased man’s tribe, who may have been looking for him. When informed of his death, they pointed the finger at Buckley’s little blind nephew. The boy had spent time in the wuurn of the deceased man, and so it was argued that he had somehow caused the death.
Buckley’s nephew was prised from his arms and killed on the spot. This death was avenged with the killing of two children in the enemy tribe. Buckley was again left disconsolate.
*
BUCKLEY WENT OFF alone to wander the Port Phillip area, neither wondering nor caring where his footsteps would take him. It was around this time, probably the mid to late 1820s, that he felt a desire to return to white society as a possible way of delivering himself from his troubles. But he remained torn. He realised his mind hadn’t retained a single word of English – after his twenty-plus years with the Wadawurrung, he remembered no other language than theirs. He even dreamt in this tongue.
In the first twenty to twenty-five years since Collins’s failed colony had packed up, white intruders hadn’t stopped coming, they just hadn’t arrived in force or stayed for any significant period. The Wadawurrung had seen them and been visited by them many times, but it seems Buckley either avoided or ignored them.
In November 1824, an expedition led by William Hovell and Hamilton Hume had set off from Lake George, New South Wales, and entered Wadawurrung country. This was the expedition that would fire up John Batman and his friends, but Buckley never mentioned it and perhaps never knew of it.
The relationship between the Wadawurrung and the explorers started haltingly but soon became amicable. The British men realised the clan was intensely interested in European goods – so interested, in fact, that they were among the best thieves the explorers had ever encountered. After spoons, pocketknives, tin cans and other small items went missing from his and fellow explorers’ tents, Hume made a jocular aside: ‘These ancient Australians are admirable adepts in the art of thieving.’ In one technique – observed by the explorers with a great deal of humour – locals would tread softly on a desired article and clench it between the toes, then pass it up their back or between their arms and side to conceal it in the armpit or between the beard and throat.
Hovell was only able to negotiate the countryside in the Geelong region by following numerous paths with the help of a guide. These routes frequently led to clusters of wuurns that were well located on dry land and near water. At one camp, he found the men in possession of iron made into tomahawks, a steel pot and some pieces of cloth. These items could have been obtained from escaped convicts or sealers encroaching on Kulin lands, or perhaps they had been salvaged from shipwrecks.
Hume and Hovell may not have fully recognised the integral role that axes played in the Kulin nation – and far beyond. Hovell deduced that they were used to procure important foodstuffs such as insects, possums and honey, but they were also essential as weapons and ceremonial objects, and for the butchering of meat and the construction of weirs, houses and canoes. The sometimes audacious and fearless behaviour displayed by the Kulin in obtaining metal axe heads from the white intruders indicates the high value placed on these items.
Around this time in the 1820s, Buckley discovered the wreck of a whaleboat, with its eight oars still intact but half-buried in the sand. The boat had obviously been hastily and badly rigged, the sails made of coarse blankets. Its ropes, mast and some other articles were still intact, and Buckley recognised that the blankets at least had value. He had clearly acquired the local people’s sense of thrift: they rarely let anything of value, no matter how small, slip from their grasp – everything had its uses. Buckley knew of people nearby who would cherish the blankets, so he cut them into equal portions and that afternoon offered these squares to each of the local families he knew. They were ecstatic to see him, as he didn’t often come to visit.
They told Buckley that, some weeks earlier, two men had stepped from the beached boat. The locals had looked after them, feeding them kangaroo and fish, and had tried to tell them about Murrangurk, whom they knew was wandering in the area. But the men hadn’t understood, and when they had recovered well enough they’d headed off to view the lie of the land from the You Yangs. Buckley knew their likely fate. Not much later, he heard that after scaling the hills they had moved east towards the Yarra. Somewhere on the shores of the great river they had been surrounded by suspicious Woiwurrung men who took them to be white intruders and speared them.
Buckley also wrote about how he found a barrel of beer partly hidden in sand that had washed ashore from a wrecked ship. He didn’t care about the contents, he said, but he knew the local value of the iron hoops that strengthened the lower part of the barrel. He dug around it until he struck these hoops at the bottom. When he finally prised open the top, the contents spilt out and ‘disgusted him’. After his years in the bush, any love of alcohol had long dissipated – he found its smell abhorrent. He managed to break the iron hoops and divided the precious metal among his closest friends. ‘It added greatly to the influence I had already acquired over them,’ he wrote.
It seems Buckley was flummoxed as to how he should handle the growing number of white people in the region. Although he implied that the Wadawurrung regularly visited sealers’ camps, he claimed to have never gone there. ‘I always avoided going to Western Port to fall in with the sealers who often came over,’ he wrote in his account with Morgan. ‘During thirty years’ residence among the natives I had become so reconciled to my condition that although opportunities offered, [of leaving his Wadawurrung family] and I sometimes thought of availing myself of them, I never could make up my mind to it.’ When speaking to Langhorne, Buckley was seemingly more direct: he said that he’d avoided Western Port mainly out of self-preservation. He had also declined throwing in his lot with the sealers, he told Langhorne, because these men ‘ill-treated the blacks and were attacked and ill-treated in their turn’.
The presence of the sealers and whalers on the coast was seasonal. Some capital was needed to conduct whaling, and parties were often sent out from bases in Sydney, Launceston or Hobart Town in April, the month when whales started migrating northwards along the Australian coast and did so for the next five months. Around that time the sealers, too, would arrive en masse in Western Port, their quarry’s breeding grounds in the summer months.
There is little on the historical record concerning sealers’ and whalers’ activities until the 1830s. However, the available evidence strongly suggests that they participated in killings and even massacres of Kulin people, and that the sexual exploitation of local women was rife. Women were removed by barter or force, then imprisoned under enormous duress. Most women living with sealers and whalers on the Bass Strait islands, where there was no government, were thought to have been abducted from Boonwurrung clans in both Port Phillip and Western Port. In 1833, nine women (and a young boy) were captured by sealers and taken as ‘wives’ to the islands, according to Derrimut, a highly regarded Boonwurrung man.
One well-known incident occurred around 1833 or 1834 when a harpooned whale broke free near the Portland area and beached itself on the coast. The Kilkarer gundidj clan, who were accustomed to eating beached whale, claimed the catch just as the white whalers arrived to retrieve the huge mammal. As reported by settler Edward Henty to George Robinson, the whalers become enraged, telling the Kilkarer that they would ‘convince’ them by any means necessary that the spoils were theirs. The local people were slaughtered by the whalers’ guns. This incident was later dubbed ‘The Convincing Ground’, the place where the Kilkarer were made to be convinced of their mistake by the whalers. It caused such trauma among the Kilkarer that for years they never returned to the site.
Considering what Buckley told Langhorne, it seems stories like this help explain why he didn’t make contact with white people. He may also have felt it best to avoid them because his identity might have been discerned, and the authorities could have returned him – a convict bolter – to custody. And if he went back, he must have wondered, could he re-adapt to European ways? His native language had been lost. There was also his loyalty to the Barrabool Hills clan, who had fed, clothed and initiated him into their ways – he couldn’t just part from his friends to join a motley crew of whalers or sealers. His alleged wife, Purranmurnin Tallarwurnin, told James Dawson that Buckley simply didn’t want to meet any white people.
His clan no doubt sensed his constant restlessness and by this time may have implicitly understood that he didn’t fit in with them. They may have even guessed that he was feeling the draw of his fellow white people. As the knowledge and sightings of white people became more common in Kulin lands, Buckley must have known that eventually he would encounter them somehow.
My theory is that he may have surmised that new colonists would arrive at some point. The land would be annexed, and his Indigenous friends would be in serious danger. He may have recollected what had been done to his own family so many years ago in Marton. For this reason, I believe, he felt he had to stay: he could be a useful go-between when the invasion came, doing his best to guarantee both his own safety and that of his adopted people. Only he had the ability to engage the white men on their terms. How to handle this situation would become one of William Buckley’s most difficult dilemmas.