WHEN WILLIAM BUCKLEY met the surveyor John Wedge, they had an almost immediate empathy despite the vast chasm separating their backgrounds. Wedge was an Enlightenment man who prided himself on his knowledge of science, but he also had a love of whatever he saw as exotic. He was that ever-curious type that the nineteenth century produced so often – akin to a taxonomist, he collected samples from his wanderings. His great love was Indigenous artefacts including weapons, utensils and tools.
Like so many of his fellow squatters in Van Diemen’s Land, Wedge had been involved in the war with the Palawa and had taken in one of their children under dubious circumstances. He had appropriated this boy, Wheete, from the Peerapper people after a skirmish in northern Van Diemen’s Land. Wedge then took on Wheete, who had been trying to flee, and in the course of several years ‘acquired’ more Aboriginal children. It was rumoured that his interest in children was disquieting, but nothing could ever be proved of an illicit nature. Many Palawa children were taken in by white settlers following attacks on their parents. Men like Batman and Wedge treated ‘their’ children as no less their rightful property than the land they had been granted. This wasn’t considered abnormal, and most British colonists believed it would help engender a civilising influence on the captured. Wedge would later say that his experiences with Wheete had ‘completely falsified’ the belief that the Palawa were ‘little more than brutes’, and had proved it was possible to train them to become ‘useful’. He also talked about a scheme to transform all the local people in a similar way.
Wedge probably viewed William Buckley in a similar spirit. Here was yet another curiosity: a white man turned native, the opposite of Wedge’s experiment with Wheete. Wedge would be the first highly educated British man to meet Buckley and the first to give a considered view on his character. Wedge realised that the giant convict would be an asset. The association needed someone who understood the language and culture of the locals.
Wedge described Buckley in his diary: ‘Height, 6’5 7/8’, age fifty-three, trade bricklayer, brown complexion, round head, dark brown hair and whiskers, visage round and marked with smallpox, forehead low, eyebrows bushy, hazel eyes: nose pointed and turned up, well proportioned with an erect military gait; mermaid on upper part of right arm, sun, half moon, seven stars, monkey and W.B on lower part of right arm.’
At first Wedge, like Henry Batman and his children, was intimidated by the huge man whose demeanour seemed to them quite basic and simple. Although Buckley was extremely helpful, in Wedge’s sketches he looks withdrawn and alienated. He had an air of despondency; he said little and didn’t always respond to everything that was said to him. Wedge may have been the first to realise that culture shock might be involved – from Wedge’s perspective, Buckley was a Wadawurrung man with a white folk memory, a unique specimen who was understandably confused and consternated.
Wedge made a point of never questioning Buckley too sharply. The surveyor’s style was to engage him in slow and casual conversation, teasing out information as it came. Wedge must have said the right things in the right way, because within a few days Buckley had told him the entire truth about being an escaped convict. There are no records of this conversation, but we can gather that Wedge was the first to explain to Buckley all that had transpired after the camp at Sorrento had been abandoned.
Henry Batman, on the other hand, would fire questions at Buckley repeatedly. As Henry saw it, they were on his family’s land. The Batmans knew they would have competition in the near future, and Henry, who had none of his older brother’s intellectual talents (and was often inebriated), was naturally suspicious. But within a few days he softened and became reliant on Buckley’s advice. When Buckley explained that the local people couldn’t get enough bread, Henry sent for a big load of biscuit to be despatched from the ship and handed it out at a great corroboree that night. Henry then put the locals on a daily diet of wheat and potatoes.
Buckley took Wedge on walks around the bush and along the coast, showing him the areas he knew best and the ways in which the land was used. All of this was Wadawurrung land that had been included in Batman’s treaty without their consent. As a surveyor and draftsman, Wedge consumed as much geographical intelligence as he could. With Buckley’s help he quickly began to understand the landscape around the Bellarine Peninsula and what could be expected further afield. The men travelled with two of the Sydney blacks, as well as two Wadawurrung youths whose names Wedge recorded as ‘Diabering’ and ‘Joan Joan’. Wedge was among the first white men to utilise local guides and was unequivocal about their usefulness whenever he set out exploring and mapping: ‘The reason why we proposed taking them [Indigenous guides] was that in the event of our provisions failing we might avail ourselves of their forest habits and skill in procuring food.’
Their party travelled up the Barwon River until they reached Lake Connewarre (Kulib a Gurrk) on the first night. On the second day they moved up to higher ground, a place Buckley called Booneewang (present-day Fyansford) from which Wedge could see the land for many miles around. Buckley later wrote that Wedge was ‘surprised and delighted with the magnificence of its pastoral and agricultural resources’. In time, Buckley would show Wedge where he had lived, including his beloved Karaaf.
Buckley would provide the place names, and Wedge would duly anglicise them onto his map. We owe it to Wedge that as the first surveyor, he kept the names of the places he saw – the best known, of course, being jillong, the Wadawurrung word for ‘bay’, and carayo, their word for the tongue of land leading to it. But in later surveys these words were mistakenly swapped, with Corio becoming the bay and Geelong the township. In this way Moorabool, Gheringhap, Malop, Moolap, Barwon, You Yangs, Colac, Beeac and Birregurra were all noted down and anglicised.
Wedge’s party came to a picturesque point west of Geelong on the Barwon River, which he named Buckley Falls. It wasn’t a great gushing waterfall, but rather a set of low stepped rocks of an ochre colour through which the river teased its way. It then trickled quietly into what appeared to be a deep waterhole bordered by steep banks of gently leaning eucalypts. By naming this peaceful place after Buckley, Wedge was making it clear to him that he was of vital importance.
The going was all very peaceful. When they met with some of Buckley’s Wadawurrung friends, Wedge wrote that he pitched his tent between two families, and the party of eleven local men remained ‘sitting around my fire’ until he went to bed. Wedge appeared fascinated by the people and, with Buckley as translator, set down useful words as well as the names of the people he met. His portraits of individuals are sympathetic and give the impression he was studying them while listening carefully. His field book includes many words and phrases that seem to reflect his good intentions and his interest in collecting: ‘I am your friend – banwadejaie’; ‘will you give me this – gunathianic’; ‘hand spear – carp’; ‘shield – geramb’; ‘Spear for kangaroo – daire’.
One of the more interesting observations Wedge made was that ‘the above families belong to this Ground where we are on’. This was hardly official phrasing – the ‘natives’, as the British saw them, had no rights to Crown land – and Wedge, the surveyor, would have known this. Wedge, the human, would have also known that it was their land.
Although Wedge showed a lot of interest in the locals, he wasn’t always approving towards them. He said they were – as he put it – ‘slaves’ to the food search and treated their women as ‘drudges’, and he mentioned the usual colonial fear that they practised cannibalism (but, he added, only against those they had fought in war). He also claimed that the women practised infanticide if they gave birth while breastfeeding another – he could hardly have found any proof of this and this information, we must surmise, came from Buckley.
It was probably around this time when Buckley began to feel a mild unease that was growing stronger by the day. When he and Wedge toured Wadawurrung lands, the surveyor told the locals that he would supply them with all sorts of gifts, a glib offer that was never honoured. This made Buckley, as translator, the mouthpiece of promises he knew he couldn’t keep.
In a letter to a friend, Wedge wrote that Buckley had told him there was no such thing as ‘chief’ in the tribe. In other words, he and Buckley must have been discussing the land deal, and Buckley explained why it wouldn’t pass muster even among the locals: the elders who’d signed the deal weren’t chiefs and had no relationship with Wadawurrung lands, and thus no authority in this legal context. Indeed, nobody had this authority, as the land didn’t have an owner. Wedge wrote to his friend: ‘This is a secret that must, I suppose, be kept to ourselves or it may affect the deed of conveyance.’ Even then Wedge knew the treaty was false, yet he held out hope that it would be accepted by British authorities.
It’s worth noting that Buckley needed Wedge too – perhaps even more acutely than Wedge needed him. Wedge had promised to petition Governor Arthur for a pardon, and Buckley hoped this would be his ticket to freedom from further incarceration. There’s little doubt that the two men liked and appreciated each other, but this was the unspoken deal: Buckley’s local expertise in exchange for Wedge’s submission for a pardon.
In a few days, the Rebecca had departed again carrying vital letters from Wedge. The most important was his missive asking Arthur to grant Buckley a pardon on the basis of his help in the initial encampment, his part in stalling potential aggression from the locals, and his work fostering good relations. Wedge added that Buckley hadn’t infringed in thirty-two years, and that a free pardon should be granted. Wedge had also written to John Batman explaining why he should agitate on Buckley’s behalf.
For Buckley, the Rebecca carried hope. If the lieutenant-governor granted his wish, he would henceforth feel safe in going to Van Diemen’s Land: ‘For I was resolved not to go there as a prisoner.’ We don’t know whether at this point Buckley actually wanted to go to Van Diemen’s Land or if he simply wanted the option.
While waiting for Arthur’s response, Buckley had much to do – he was now acting as a freelance guide and interpreter for the association. Not long afterwards the Rebecca returned, not with news on Buckley’s freedom but with the intelligence that the party of settlers was to move to the area designated as Batmania on the Yarra. Buckley would be needed for this settlement as a vital component of the association. John Batman, it was presumed, would be arriving soon.
Unbeknown to the settlers, others were on the move. The Batmans had ‘taken’ the land and Wedge surveyed it, but they hadn’t counted on another party of settlers leaving from Launceston.
*
JOHN PASCOE FAWKNER was no stranger to Port Phillip. When the Sorrento encampment had been abruptly abandoned when he was a boy, he had been plainly upset. Since then, it seems, his heartfelt ambition had been to return.
When Batman had arrived in Launceston with the news that he had done a deal with the Woiwurrung, Fawkner must have realised he had little time to reach his goal. His great rival had won the first battle, but in Fawkner’s mind this was a full-blown territorial war. Batman had miscalculated – caught up in his own braggadocio, he’d never considered that anyone would seriously challenge his new-found hegemony over the mainland. Fawkner not only eschewed the deal with the Indigenous people, but he also eschewed Batman’s right to invoke it.
Their rivalry went back several years. Fawkner once described Batman as one of Arthur’s ‘toadies’, who had ‘gotten a large grant or two of land prior to this’. The clear implication was that Batman was ‘in thick’ with the government, doing Arthur’s private bidding in return for favours. It was also rumoured that Fawkner had applied to be part of the association and been rejected by Batman. Fawkner was evidently not their kind of man – he had too much of the commoner and the convict about him – and probably had nothing to offer that Batman didn’t already have.
When Batman’s treaty was unveiled, Fawkner would tell anyone who would listen that it was a joke. He also rubbished Batman’s talk that he and the locals had walked the entire course of the land he had bought, marking the trees along the way. ‘These falsehoods,’ Fawkner wrote, ‘were too transparent to blind an old colonist on the spot.’ He would later write that Batman’s treaty wasn’t even read to the Woiwurrung elders, nor was it interpreted or explained. ‘Not one of the Sydney blacks knew the language of the men of the colony, not one of the Sydney blacks could read, except Bullett . . . any man of sense must know that to translate a deed to anyone of a different tongue requires a real knowledge of both languages, and these Sydney blacks could not read, much less translate writing.’
If Batman’s treaty was seen as a fraud, this would be to Fawkner’s advantage: a fraudulent treaty would in no way preclude his own attempt to settle in the new lands. Fawkner, the teetotaller who didn’t drink with the right people, wasn’t suggestible and took no heed of others’ opinions. Van Diemonians with far more wealth and access to power dithered on the Batman claim, adopting a wait-and-see approach. Fawkner didn’t ask or wait for government sanction – he simply set about going there.
Fawkner was his own man, and was said by some to have a ‘partiality towards disputation and argument’. In recent years he had become what was loosely termed an ‘agent’: a bush lawyer with no official legal qualifications at a time when there were virtually no real barristers or solicitors on the island. ‘Fawkner was glib of tongue, choleric in disposition; and it is therefore, not much wonder to hear of his having practised as an advocate in the old public Court of Launceston,’ the historian James Bonwick wrote in 1883. Fawkner clearly saw himself as a defender of the oppressed, representing convicts as their agent and pleading their causes.
Fawkner had once known the other side of the dock. In his early twenties he’d been accused of aiding and abetting a convict to escape. When sentenced in 1814, he was handed five hundred lashes and three years’ gaol time in Newcastle, but he somehow managed to get released in 1816. From then on he hated the powers that be and convictism.
A few years later he’d taken a cart from Hobart Town to Launceston and started afresh with his convict wife, Eliza Cobb. They married in 1822 and together established a bakery, timber business and bookshop. In 1826 his reputation as a teetotaller didn’t stop him from becoming the proprietor of the Cornwall Hotel. Three years later he launched the Launceston Advertiser. In 1830 his newspaper criticised Governor Arthur’s Black Line by exposing the waste of £30,000 of government funds on this failed attempt to round up and incarcerate all the Palawa on the island. Batman, by contrast, had ardently taken to the Black Line.
Fawkner was said to relish his role as the common people’s champion. He was no Batman, even if their ends were practically identical. Fawkner was less a bushman, more a businessman; an outsider, not an insider. Both were the sons of convicts, but Fawkner, who had experienced penal servitude himself, felt the stain keener than Batman. And there was another difference: Fawkner wasn’t interested in sheep runs – he wanted to grow wheat.
In the mid-1830s Fawkner had trouble chartering a boat to emigrate to the mainland. He finally purchased the Enterprize, a topsail schooner of fifty tons, in April 1835, but couldn’t take possession of it until June. Then his plans to reach the mainland were thwarted by legal entanglements. At around the time Batman’s Rebecca was anchored off Indented Head in early June, Fawkner was in court accused of assault and was forced to plead his case for the next two months. By the time he was ready to take the schooner north, he was in trouble again, this time presented with a restraining order for a debt claim.
But Fawkner didn’t wait any longer, even though he couldn’t go personally. On 21 July he sent out a party to prepare the way, the Enterprize setting off from George Town. He hadn’t yet decided on where he would make his settlement, and he told his man, Captain John Lancey, to have an open mind. The Enterprize would reconnoitre Western Port seeking suitable landfalls; if none were satisfactory, Lancey would move on to Port Phillip Bay.
Only a few days after Henry Batman had docked with his wife and children at Indented Head, Lancey’s ship entered Port Phillip Bay. It was 15 August, and on board with Lancey were George Evans, builder; William Jackson and Robert Marr, carpenters; Evan Evans, servant to George Evans; and Fawkner’s servants, Charles Wyse, ploughman, Thomas Morgan, general servant, James Gilbert, blacksmith and his pregnant wife, Mary. The boat was under the command of Captain Peter Hunter.
The Enterprize was close to today’s Queenscliff and had just passed Shortland Bluff, the little outcrop to the south of the Bellarine Peninsula, when Hunter spied a whaleboat coming towards them out of nowhere. As it drew closer he saw it was manned by one white man and two Indigenous men. ‘What is your news?’ the white man hollered as the boat came close to port side. ‘Where are you from and where are you going to?’ When Hunter told them they were settlers, there was some hesitation from the boat. The man then declared, ‘Mr John Batman is the King of Port Phillip. He has desired all trespassers to keep aloof.’ Lancey no doubt ignored this piece of information, and when the three men came aboard, they were friendly. The Indigenous men were two Sydney blacks, Pigeon and Bungett, who handed over fish as a gesture of welcome. There were reportedly no hard words or contretemps.
The Enterprize spent the next few days examining the bay. While exploring its eastern side, some of the men took the whaleboat up the Saltwater River (now today’s Maribyrnong). With no fresh water in sight, they deemed it not worth following and soon returned. On the way there, however, they’d seen the junction of the Yarra, and on 22 August they pushed up the river. Within an hour of rowing, they came to what was unanimously agreed to be perfection: the Yarra’s basin, an area of deeper water that Batman had encountered and declared to be the future site of Batmania. To the eyes of the colonists, this was an Eden they had never expected. The water was entirely fresh, and the surrounding grass was velvety and light green, decked with flowers of many hues and spread liberally across the banks. This was lowland country of the most idyllic kind, with picturesque knolls around a number of lagoons. They saw ducks and swans and all manner of birds.
There was no debate: they had reached their goal. A few days later the Enterprize was taken up to the junction of the Saltwater River and then hauled by the whaleboat up the Yarra. The captain reported the river at about three fathoms as they progressed and nearly eight fathoms at its deepest around the basin. On 29 August the schooner docked in an area where the Queens Bridge now stands between present-day William and Market streets. The next day, planks were brought out to assist the colonists’ landfall. With the arrival of the party on this turf, a hamlet was born.
Four days after the Enterprize’s docking, John Wedge had crossed over the Werribee River from Indented Head, forded the Saltwater River and was now in a party being guided by Wadawurrung up the Yarra. He came to the basin – known later as the turning basin – and expected to look on the falls, a ledge of rocks strung across the river, known by the local Woiwurrung as the yarro yarro, which physically divided the salt water from the fresh. The falls were the highest point a ship could reach – and there, just before the rocks, was a decidedly European encampment. Wedge happened upon a large schooner; evidently, with the help of Woiwurrung workers, the Enterprize had been winched up the river against the prevailing winds and currents by men pulling on ropes attached to trees.
Wedge noted a number of white men milling around a small camp that consisted mostly of calico tents and timber piles. Fawkner’s party had set up directly on Batman’s most treasured site. The surveyor, who had already sketched out a proposed town for Batman, was rudely shocked. The land he wanted to plan was already being cleared for vegetable gardens, and the settlers were laying the foundations of a store for provisions and equipment.
Wedge was said to have spoken with Lancey and iterated Batman’s claim, trying to deliver it not as a threat but more as advice. Lancey took this in with relatively good cheer. There were no more troubled words between the two men, and Wedge stayed a night with the party. But his heart must have sunk: this would be heavy tidings for Batman, who had known of Fawkner’s ambitions for some time.
The self-proclaimed king of the Yarra had been unseated before even taking his seat. The tiny village that would one day be a major metropolis was at this point being contested by two absent landlords. Melbourne was definitely going to be different.