BUCKLEY’S ARRIVAL AT John Batman’s camp caused an enormous stir. Nobody knew quite where he fitted into the scheme of things, but it was clear that this man knew the territory and the people within it. It was just as clear that he would be an invaluable asset to the small group. He spoke only the local tongue, but with a little time he could be coaxed back into English; his vocabulary improved, and over the next week he could reply with increasing fluency. He was given a tent and offered European clothes – how they had clothes big enough for his size was never explained.
Before Buckley there had been Indigenous visitors who had made Batman’s overseer, the Irishman William Todd, extremely nervous. He and his fellows had given these visitors as much as they thought they could spare – everything from trinkets to damper – but the locals kept coming. Todd recorded all the events of his time at Indented Head in his journal. The Sydney blacks would take the locals hunting; the locals showed their love of the camp’s bread; and, all the while, Todd was expressing anxiety that these people, who seemed to want everything they had, would not leave. His journal states that not long after Buckley arrived, an alarm went up that they were about to be raided by the Wadawurrung. It was false, and on 7 July Todd reported that the Sydney blacks had gone ‘Cangarooing with the natives’.
The strong reception the foreign Aboriginal men received from the local clans was extraordinary given that it was known that Aboriginal people from different language groups were generally considered to be mainmait (undesirable foreigners considered untrustworthy) and were often killed.
It may be that the Sydney blacks entered into a reciprocal relationship with the Wadawurrung by regularly hunting with guns and English hunting dogs with the local clans and supplying kangaroo meat for them. They also gave a local clan two of their hunting dogs and distributed large amounts of flour and other Western supplies.
When Buckley felt he was sufficiently capable in English, he told Todd a fairly plausible story about his past. He explained that he had been a soldier, one of four shipwreck survivors from a convict transport that had been heading towards Van Diemen’s Land about twenty years ago. The captain had walked into the wilderness alone, and the two others had died. Buckley said he walked for forty days until he was ‘discovered’ and looked after by the local people.
Buckley’s acceptance by the Europeans was well known by the Wadawurrung and by other groups. In 1865, William Barak would recall: ‘Captain Cook [here he was probably referring to Lieutenant Collins] landed at Western Port. Then Batman came looking in for the country. Looking around the sea he found a lot of blacks other side of Gealong; and found Buckley in the camp. Know [no] trousers, all raggety; he wore oppussum rugs, and he fetch him back to Batman’s house.’ Was this a mild way of saying that Buckley had decided to forsake the people who had looked after him for so long? It seems to comment on this without any form of rebuke.
At the time, Buckley had other concerns. It was clear to him that Batman’s party of eight were in some danger, and he told them so. They were on Wadawurrung land, and no elder of this land had made a contract or ceded land of any form whatsoever.
The locals kept coming and asking for more provisions, and Buckley kept repelling their advances. Todd wrote that only three days after Buckley’s arrival, around ninety locals were milling around and about the camp. Buckley would say the same thing to anybody who nosed about: they must retire to the bush until the next ship came. The locals kept asking, and Buckley kept politely explaining the situation – but he couldn’t contain them forever. Todd wrote that Buckley’s presence was ‘invaluable’. ‘He was a complete terror to the natives,’ he wrote.
In the Morgan account, Buckley said that to keep the peace he had to play a double game. In broken English he informed the settlers of their danger, but to the locals he played the spy within.
Buckley: ‘We could kill them now, but what about the next cargo from the next ship. Do you think these new white spirits would give you anything after you slaughtered their people?’
The Wadawurrung men’s response: ‘They have not been asked on our land. They have not shared their axes. They have not shared their food. There is so much they are not giving us.’
Buckley: ‘I understand, but when the next ship comes in – and they see how many of us are here, they will give us so much more.’
This argument seemed to work. Buckley claimed that his strategy was ‘to fall in line with their views’. The one fault with his type of diplomatic doublespeak was that the more he heightened expectations of great booty, the more the local people kept coming. But he managed, throughout the following weeks, to keep the peace.
Meanwhile Gumm, Thompson and Todd were employed cutting rafters to make a house for Batman, but supplies were running short. On 3 August, Todd reported that the camp was now without flour or meat. They were mainly eating what the Sydney blacks brought back from hunting kangaroos, fishing and mussel-gathering with the locals. As time wore on and less food was offered to the locals, suspicions mounted. These ngamadjidj were invaders, honour-bound to pay tribute. Tools, including knives and tomahawks as well as shirts and potatoes, were being regularly taken.
But Pigeon and his men still seemed to be ingratiating themselves nicely with the locals. They hunted together and performed corroborees by night. The whites thought the corroborees were simply performances, but these ceremonies had a much more important role: the locals were using them to cement relationships with the Sydney blacks – and vice versa. Todd remarked on their diplomatic value; he wrote that Pigeon and others were able to defuse tense situations not just by sharing out food but also by performing their own corroborees, and that the Wadawurrung men were astonished by the ceremonial brilliance of the foreigners. The two groups were establishing trade and friendly relations, and there is also evidence that the spiritual knowledge of language groups increased when they were learning a corroboree from an outside group.
Normally outsiders of all kinds were treated with great suspicion, but not the Sydney blacks. Wherever they went in Kulin territory, they were feted. Todd wrote that they were all being offered wives, which may have been a slight euphemism for the fact that women were being made available to Pigeon and his men.
There was an underlying tension as both parties waited for what the other would do, but no overtly hostile actions. Batman’s men desperately needed the relief boat for provisions and to keep the local people at bay, while the locals were highly impatient for the great gifts promised to them from over the sea. Buckley knew that the mutual goodwill could change to animosity in an instant if there were any contretemps.
The locals expressed surprise that Buckley was dressed in English garb – some were taken aback to see Murrangurk in these clothes. He knew very well some among them suspected he was betraying them. It’s not known if any directly threatened him, but his control of the situation gives the strong impression he had the confidence of an elder who knew the people and their ways. He believed they were angry but not about to commit hostilities, and he also knew that they still held him in high esteem.
Over the following two to three weeks, the locals became more demanding, and Buckley eventually snapped: ‘I threatened, in strong language, the life of the first native who raised a hostile hand against the strangers, telling them that on arrival of the vessel they should have presents in abundance.’ Todd wrote of this moment: ‘After they were quiet Buckley explained everything to them. It was most astonishing to see how amazed and pleased they were.’
On 6 August, salvation came in the form of a sloop whose great white sails could be seen fluttering and billowing towards the peninsula on that blustery winter morning. As the sloop made its way towards the neck, Buckley’s heart leapt. It touched at a sandbank a few miles offshore and, in due course, he noted a smaller boat coming towards the shore. He quickly related the intelligence to both sides.
On board was Batman’s brother Henry and his wife, their four children, John Batman’s two remaining Sydney blacks, and a number of people involved with the association. The most important of the arrivals was the surveyor John Helder Wedge, who, with Gellibrand, was John Batman’s most trusted partner in the syndicate.
Not long afterwards, Todd reported that with provisions aplenty, corroborees and merrymaking of all sorts were again the order of the day. ‘[The locals] are extremely quiet and well satisfied,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘Mr Batman allows them rations of potatoes and biscuits daily.’
A few months after this, John Batman would report to John Montagu, the colonial secretary, that on leaving his small party at Indented Head ‘however sanguine I may previously have been as to the complete success of the undertaking, I feel now infinite reason to be much more so’. Much of this, if not all, was down to Buckley. Without him, Batman’s weak toehold on a strip of beach on the Bellarine Peninsula would almost certainly have been lost. There had been no treaty here. The Wadawurrung knew it, Buckley knew it, and Wedge clearly knew it too. Buckley the mediator, the go-between and the man torn between two worlds was born.
*
THERE IS A STORY, most likely apocryphal, which tells of John Batman’s triumphant return to Van Diemen’s Land. It’s all about the prodigal son, the conqueror of vast lands. Batman stepped off the Rebecca and was said to have walked straight to John Pascoe Fawkner’s ale house, the Cornwall Hotel. He strode into the centre of the pub and looked directly at Fawkner. Batman said it was his shout. He knew Fawkner was a teetotaller, so he proposed the man drink tea.
Batman’s next sentence was like cold water on Fawkner’s face. ‘I am the greatest landowner in the world,’ he proclaimed. There was a stunned silence from patrons. Fawkner, too, was lost for words: Batman had beaten him to the prize.
Whatever really happened that day at the Cornwall, at this point Batman may not have yet realised that Fawkner was a rival, harbouring his own ideas about how to take over land in Port Phillip. But apparently they would soon discuss Fawkner’s ambitions: he wished to return to the area of Sorrento where he had years earlier been part of the first failed settlement. Fawkner was an entrepreneur, a man who had tried just about everything in business, and had never asked for permission or help. He had a bakery and a newspaper, and this ale house where for years Batman, Gellibrand and Wedge had been discussing their dreams of mainland acquisition.
Fawkner wasn’t the only Van Diemonian subjected to Batman’s boasts – in fact, this happened to anybody he came across. Batman now claimed to be the rightful owner of 600,000 acres of the best sheep paddocks in New Holland, if not in the world. From his arrival on 11 June in Launceston, he had been in full-blown publicity mode, believing all would listen in wonder while the great man explained how he was going to start a new colony and govern it single-handedly from his lofty seat in the capital of Batmania.
Boasts aside, it couldn’t be denied that Batman had cracked the mainland. The Cornwall Chronicle of Launceston was the first to publish the news only two days after Batman’s arrival:
. . . Mr. Batman, arrived yesterday from Port Phillip, and reached his own home from thence within little more than forty-eight hours. We are informed that he has purchased from a tribe of natives about 500,000 acres of land, taking his boundaries from a short distance in the rear of Port Phillip. Almost immediately after landing Mr. Batman fell in with a tribe of forty, who at first evinced a disposition to oppose him, but after a short parley the natives he had with him effected an understanding, and he was received by them with open arms, and every manifestation of good feeling.
The Chronicle also spoke of the
. . . peaceable disposition shown on the part of the holders of the new country which enabled Mr. Batman to execute the object of his visit effectually and speedily . . . A fine, athletic fellow – the chief of the tribe – after being made acquainted with Mr. Batman’s wish to purchase land, and his means to pay for it, proceeded with him and his party, accompanied by his tribe, to measure it off. At each corner boundary the chief marked a tree, and tabooed it, and at the same time explained to his tribe the nature of the treaty, and the positive necessity on their part to observe it inviolable.
The paper had no doubts about the brilliance of the deal: ‘A horse might run away with a gig for twenty miles on end without fear of upsetting from irregularity of the ground.’
If Batman needed any more reassurance, he would receive it from just about everyone. On 26 June, the Hobart Town Courier described how he had induced ‘above a dozen of our wealthy and influential capitalists’ from both Hobart Town and Launceston to be part of the venture. All of these men were spirited individuals ‘willing not only to explore and bring out the resources of a hitherto almost unknown country’ but were capable of creating ‘an amicable discourse between the graziers and their black associates’. ‘Happy had it been for Van Diemen’s Land if the same step had been taken with the aborigines on its first settlement by the English,’ the paper pronounced.
Some immediately concluded that this was all no more than typical Batman bravado, but there’s no doubt the news had charged the normally stilted atmosphere of Hobart Town and Launceston with electricity. The Reverend John Dunmore Lang, a prominent politician, educationist and writer in the colony, wrote to the Hobart Town Courier saying that throughout his travels in Van Diemen’s Land he had never seen anything like the reaction to Batman’s bold move across the water. ‘I found almost every respectable person I met with – either individually or in the person of some near relative or confidential agent – anxious to occupy the Australian El Dorado.’
Batman’s lofty ambitions were brought down to earth by his now very noticeable illness. A canker was eating away at his face, and his body was beginning to fall apart. He would work hard on his dreams in the morning, only to collapse semi-depressed and disconsolate for the rest of the day. He was losing his famed stamina, but his brain was still working at breakneck speed. There was so much to do. He needed to apprise all the appropriate government authorities of his land deal and organise stock to populate the land. His family would have to remove itself from Kingston in the north-east and resettle in Port Phillip. His partners also had to be ready to bring their stock over so that grazing allotments could be organised.
People throughout Van Diemen’s Land and in New South Wales were hearing the name Batman. He was being hailed as the local version of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, who had been granted around 45,000 square miles of territory west and south of New Jersey by the English monarch, Charles II. In reality Batman’s deal was more reminiscent of that negotiated between the Dutch and the Canarsie Indians to buy up the island of Manhattan in 1624 – prime New York real estate acquired for about $24 worth of trinkets and beads.
Charles Swanston was busy praising Batman’s efforts while acquiring capital from his group of investors. It was the opportunity of the century, and men were told to roll up and be part of the association’s membership – even better, put all your money with us as investors!
Gellibrand, meanwhile, was busy on the lobbying front formulating formal letters to persuade the authorities on Batman’s behalf. He sent a report of Batman’s trip to both George Arthur and the colonial secretary in Hobart Town, John Montagu. The Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, was also sent a copy – he was a humanitarian and Whig, someone whom they believed could be amenable to the treaty and who might conceivably lobby for it on their behalf. Gellibrand emphasised the treaty’s humanitarian status, barely mentioning the commercial enterprise. The treaty was equitable, he wrote, and not just to those people who owned the soil; there would even be statutes and by-laws that stated clearly how the Kulin would be compensated on a yearly basis. It would therefore be madness, he argued, for the British government not to ratify this treaty.
The Port Phillip Association said its aim was to create a nucleus ‘for a free and useful colony, founded on the principle of conciliation, of philanthropy, morality and temperance . . . calculated to ensure the comfort and well being of the natives’. The association, in other words, claimed that it would be bringing decent British morals and principles to a supposedly backward people, as well as the restriction of those things (notably alcohol) ‘which might have a baneful effect on them’.
Everyone who wanted to believe in the association reassured themselves that this colony wouldn’t be like Sydney or Hobart Town, both of which had been established with rough convicts and enforced by military brutality. This would be on a higher plane, a colony of free settlers only. And that idea was what would drive white people to Kulin lands – the idea of freedom, the kind that populated the American West, the kind where men could assert their status as freeborn Britons, unshackled by the intervention of metropolitan authorities. This was the dream of settler self-rule, unfettered by intrusive big government and driven by respectable intentions. Batman had done it all on his own, in defiance of the law and the authorities, and in the face of incredible odds. Others felt they could do this too – and chief among them was the man who resented Batman’s success more than any other, John Fawkner.
And so the lie was spread: that in taking away an entire nation’s land and freedom, the association would be giving back most liberally and kindly. Nobody would be uprooting the local people but rather embracing them, offering them the delights of reason and education and Christianity. First in line to offer such gifts would be the generously minded landed gentry of Van Diemen’s Land, quickly followed by the altruistic and selfless local experts in business, politics and the law. What more could anyone want, and what more could they be offering the people they dispossessed? A better class of people was coming to Port Phillip. This time it was going to be different.