IF THERE WAS a day that changed the fortunes of all those living in the new colony, it was 1 September 1836. On that day the convict ship Moffatt, carrying four hundred felons, narrowly missed being dashed on the rocks at North Head in Sydney. It also carried a letter from Lord Glenelg to NSW Governor Sir Richard Bourke. The colony at Port Phillip would go ahead, the letter stated, but all those who had decamped at the Yarra and around Geelong would now have to purchase the land from the Crown.
By this time, John Batman was living in a whitewashed house, his men cultivating the twenty acres around it with vegetables, pigs and cows. At the same time, he was grazing 3650 sheep on the block north of the Yarra along the Maribyrnong. Gellibrand had a man looking after his sheep, and Wedge at Werribee was establishing himself as stock agent for an association member, James Simpson, alongside the flocks that Charles Swanston and other partners had sent over.
The association had argued that it deserved its lands to be granted – not paid for – owing to its ‘civilising and protecting’ influence on the Indigenous people. In return for a small quit-rent, it had expected free land. But Glenelg denied that any deal had been made and declared all land would have to be bought at auction, starting at the minimum price of five shillings per acre. The association men would be forced to contest their land grabs.
Glenelg had granted Governor Bourke the discretion to offer auctionable land at ‘an upset price’ of less than five shillings per acre, but this was meaningless: an auction meant any price could be offered for the best land. Bourke decided, however, that he would recompense any expense that a pastoralist had incurred before its members were declared trespassers – as in, before his proclamation of September 1835. That meant only Batman and Fawkner might receive something they had obtained before officially breaking the law. To them it wasn’t much, but it was the best concession the association was going to receive.
The Port Phillip Association had little future now. John Batman was just another settler, as were his cohorts Wedge, Gellibrand, Simpson and Swanston. It seemed a big setback for them, but they could comfort themselves with the knowledge that as they had been the first to lay their claims, their stations were well advanced. By the end of 1836, Geelong and its environs were becoming clogged with sheep.
Of all the Kulin people, the Wadawurrung had been the most heavily encroached upon. Now that the colony was officially recognised, there was talk of a new El Dorado. Men and beasts were preparing to come in their thousands.
There were, of course, some logistical difficulties. Livestock might be lost in a storm over Bass Strait, and many of the animals arriving at Port Phillip killed themselves by drinking salt water. Sheep that had been herded in hot pens below decks died of shock when they hit the cold currents of Port Phillip. Wedge had done well, only losing fifty of his first thousand sheep, Thomson had lost a quarter of his livestock, while Swanston the banker had fared a lot worse: he’d lost 1300 of his first 2000. A certain number of sheep would also be lost to Indigenous hunters.
Generally, however, there was nothing but optimism. The sums were all working in the pioneers’ favour. People could sell their properties in Van Diemen’s Land, use the proceeds to buy more stock and take themselves – or their managing agents – to the new settlements. Batman himself had sold five thousand of his acres in Van Diemen’s Land for £10,000, while Wedge had sold three thousand acres for £11,000. The costs of carriage weren’t high either: only around £500 to bring a thousand sheep over the water. Being forced to pay for the land by the government, it turned out, was a trifle compared to the profits earned in a wool industry enjoying enormous demand.
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BY EARLY 1837, Bearbrass was bustling. William Lonsdale, the police magistrate, had been in office for several months, and now the town would be given the services of a man of the cloth. George Langhorne had arrived to minister to his Anglican flock, and everybody believed he would be at the forefront in the effort to ‘civilise’ the Aborigines. He had a great deal on his plate. When he opened the colony’s first school, it was said that around seven hundred Kulin – men, women and children – arrived, all expecting handouts.
That year Langhorne interviewed Buckley as the basis of a small book that would only see the light of day some seventy-five years later. Langhorne’s task as a ghostwriter wasn’t easy: all he received from Buckley was a long statement of unconnected thoughts, but at least it was considered a fair and balanced narrative of the man’s life. ‘I found the undertaking an extremely irksome one,’ Langhorne wrote. ‘I frequently had to frame my queries in the most simple form, his knowledge of his mother tongue being very imperfect at the time.’ Nor did Langhorne find Buckley easy to work with: ‘He appeared to be always discontented and dissatisfied. I believe it would have been a great relief to him had the settlement been abandoned, and he left alone with his sable friends,’ Langhorne commented. In truth, Buckley was apparently having trouble in his dealings with the Woiwurrung – he was, of course, not kin, and this land wasn’t his home.
March was the month everybody had been waiting for: a chance for the town to demonstrate its potential. This was the month Governor Bourke was arriving to make the colony official – Melbourne’s official naming day. By this time, the Bearbrass population was about five hundred, and in the entire Western District there were about a hundred thousand sheep at pasture. Bourke christened the port at the river mouth Williamstown (after the reigning King William) and the township Melbourne after the prime minister of the day: William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne.
Buckley had left Batman’s employ and was now working for Lonsdale as a constable, so he was present when Bourke arrived with great fanfare on 7 March. There were boats of all kinds lining the Yarra, with people cheering and guns being sounded at the NSW governor’s arrival. Buckley was placed in charge of about a hundred Indigenous people ranked up in line, soldier-like, for the official reception. ‘They saluted him by putting their hands to their foreheads as I directed,’ Buckley stated in the Morgan account. Bourke handed out blankets and clothing and a few brass, crescent-shaped neck plates for the senior Kulin. In return, Bourke was given kangaroo meat and, on 8 March, he witnessed a great corroboree.
Buckley’s duties included guiding the governor and the surveyor-general, Robert Hoddle, to the outer provinces. It was a successful sojourn with all the usual promises made by officials: ‘The natives we met with in these excursions, were, through me, assured by the governor that if they came to the settlement and avoided committing any offences against the white people, they should receive presents of all kinds of articles.’
While Port Phillip was waxing, Hobart Town and Van Diemen’s Land were waning. Arthur had written to Bourke at the end of 1836: ‘The rage for Port Phillip seems quite unabated.’ In April 1837, there were fears that Van Diemen’s Land would be drained of all its able-bodied men as they set off for the new colony. A newspaper stated that four vessels had sailed from Launceston in one week, and flocks of sheep were being daily driven into Launceston ‘for exportation’. The consequences of the mass movement were also being keenly felt in Hobart Town: ‘shops and houses in every part of Hobart Town are shut up; a death-blow has been given to building, and hundreds are being thrown out of employment. Capitalists prefer to invest in the settlement, where hundreds of acres of the finest soil in the world may be obtained for nothing, without paying any taxes or being in any wise molested.’ Another article spoke of how ‘our rich men will betake themselves there [to Port Phillip] and the withdrawal of capital will be keenly felt’. It urged those readers of the newspaper who might be infected with Port Phillip mania not to go there without capital. ‘There will be only two classes of people,’ it warned. ‘The great wool growers and their shepherds.’
As Melbourne was being populated, it was also being planned. Bourke and Hoddle had traced out the bones of a city that would follow a standard rectilinear grid plan. Many have considered it to be the most poorly planned of all Australia’s major cities, a case in which the topography was expected to fit the plan, not vice versa. While the streets were wide, there was no public square (those were thought to bring on congregations of the ‘submerged classes’), and the grid was superimposed on a landscape which was naturally irregular, with its knolls, hills and swamps, and the curving riverbank. The plan ignored the fact that settlers’ wattle and daub huts were already in situ, and it paid no heed to Indigenous landmarks. And yet it was the start of a great metropolis that would grow faster than any other English-speaking city in either hemisphere.
Melbourne, 1838. Illustrated by Clarence Woodhouse from a model in the Centennial Exhibition 1888. (State Library of Victoria)
By mid-1837, authorities were making plans to give Melbourne lawyers, courts and a military presence. That year there would be the first land auctions: one hundred lots between Flinders, King, Bourke and Swanston streets were going under the hammer. The streets hadn’t even been properly levelled but demand for land was strong. The upset price was £5, but some lots went for as high as £95. John Batman bought up several of them. When Governor Bourke had visited, he’d told Batman not to expect too much in compensation and that he might even lose his house on Batman’s Hill – it, too, was on Crown land. Batman managed to keep it.
As the town grew, the countryside was experiencing increasing ructions between settlers and the Indigenous people. This was where Melbourne’s future wealth largely resided, in the health and productivity of increasing numbers of voracious sheep. The wealthy gentry, many of whom had yet to see their land, hired the toughest men it could find to manage their assets. Many were ex-felons or hard-bitten crofters from Britain, men who understood that the properties were best managed at the end of a gun. Buckley watched aghast as the white men became more aggressive, greedier and more demanding. Strength in numbers meant there was less desire to be beholden to any of the local people’s claims and, after all, Batman’s treaty was now officially defunct.
It was this year that Batman, who now virtually unable to move from his house, didn’t honour his yearly tribute to the Kulin. We don’t know his exact state, but he was probably entering the final, debilitating stages of syphilis. His body may have been wracked with pustules, and his face, once sunburnt and fair, would likely have been stricken with obscene-looking gumma.
Buckley must have realised that his task, though he was still acting as an interpreter, had subtly changed. He was no longer employed by Batman as a peacemaker and go-between, but as part of the fledgling police force whose values weren’t appeasement but control. The association was no longer the power, and Buckley no longer an integral pivot point between the races; he was now more of a cog in an unstoppable, insatiable machine. Langhorne was correct when he said that Buckley wished the white man had never come, and Buckley said as much to anyone who would listen. But in a climate of rabid acquisition and dedication to profit, nobody was listening.
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AFTER FRANKS HAD been killed a year earlier, a single posse of vengeful whites had massacred Indigenous people. In February 1837 when Joseph Gellibrand and his fellow lawyer George Hesse went missing in Wadawurrung country, four parties went out to find the ‘murderers’, although nobody had proved that foul play was at fault. The roving parties brought trackers and tribesmen with little allegiance to the Wadawurrung – the ‘divide and conquer’ strategy was alive and well in Port Phillip.
With time on their hands, Gellibrand and Hesse had decided to do some exploration around the Barwon River before journeying on to Melbourne for the arrival of Governor Bourke in early March. They engaged Robert Akers as guide and were expected to head north to Swanston’s property at the river’s junction with the Leigh, but somehow they went too far south towards the Otways. When Akers told them they must journey back, Gellibrand and Hesse overruled him. Akers returned to his own station, leaving them with what he thought was sufficient food. When the lawyers missed their intended rendezvous at the Swanston station, the alarm went out.
The two men had disappeared into the trackless bush and mountains west of Colac. It was known that Gellibrand had no bush skills at all – a year earlier he had almost died on a walking trip to Melbourne, which he had undergone without guides. Party after party was issued out of town using local guides, and they all came up with nothing. One party was helped by Buckley, who knew that it would have been better to work alone. The Wadawurrung were becoming increasingly coy now when any white intruders approached. He needed the tribes he met en route to work for him, harnessing their own methods of intertribal communication.
Buckley was generally disgusted by the people with whom he was forced to journey – the Europeans were, according to Buckley, more interested in the pastoral prospects of the land than in finding the missing men. A farcical situation arose one evening when Buckley was talking to the Wadawurrung men and gaining their trust: one of his white companions thundered into the camp, thinking he could speak the local language. This act of stupidity destroyed all trust, and the quest got nowhere.
Buckley now pleaded with Captain Lonsdale to let him track the lawyers alone, unfettered by any whites who might cause consternation among the locals. Lonsdale agreed, but before Buckley set out, his horse was hamstrung: someone had cut the hind-leg tendons with a knife, and the animal bled to death. Buckley would never know if this was intended as a threat to his life or was simply a message that he wasn’t wanted – or trusted – in the Gellibrand–Hesse search. But Gellibrand had been his friend, one of the few colonists who had understood him, and he would keep trying. He set out by boat, and while travelling outside Geelong heard that a search party had shot and killed a local man and his daughter en route.
Buckley despaired – he couldn’t get over the fact that these two people had been killed as a reprisal. He’d suspected all along that if white people were involved, Kulin would be killed. ‘It was an inexcusable murder,’ he wrote. ‘For there was not the least reason to believe that the poor people who had been so mercifully sacrificed had had anything to do with the murder of Mr Gellibrand or Mr Hesse.’ The entire affair had given him great pain and enormous effort. ‘I thought such destruction of life anything but creditable to my countrymen; but on the contrary, that they were atrocious acts of oppression.’ Lonsdale also regretted the killings and said, ‘It would keep alive a spirit of ill-feeling and distrust, and identify our customs with theirs of revenge and retaliation.’
Some Cape Otway people later revealed that Gellibrand had been found half dead near the coast. They had tried to revive him, but he had died a few days later. Hesse had died in the hinterland.
It had taken very little time for Batman’s colony, which at least had attempted a semblance of détente with the local tribes, to descend into an ‘us and them’ situation mired by fear, suspicion and reprisals. When the surveyor Robert Hoddle was in the country in July that year, he exemplified the white settlers’ fear and loathing: ‘I am obliged to go armed here, the Shepherds carry a firelock [gun]. The Blacks are not to be trusted. I do not allow any of them about my Tents. If they come after dark, they must expect some leaden Pills. I think I must have been crazy to have brought my single-barrelled-gun in lieu of a double one.’
The subtext of all this was fear – the fear of cannibalism foremost – which was stoked by false reports in the colonial press. One settler, Alfred Clarke, wrote around this time that he had received ‘the distressing intelligence from Port Phillip that the natives had risen on the whites, and had murdered and devoured five women’. Fake news was very much alive in the fledgling colony in 1836–1837.
The conflict, particularly between whites and the Wadawurrung, was intensifying. Squatters spread out from Geelong to the north and west, and in June, William Yuille’s station, Murghebaloak, was attacked by a large group of locals who dispersed the shepherds and ransacked the huts. In August the same group moved in to Thomas Rickett’s home on the Barwon and were said to have taken from it every movable article. The squatters began to organise, and in the climate of hate that had been engendered by the loss of Gellibrand and Hesse, they sought out the band that was causing such havoc.
Later that year George Russell’s Clyde Company, which ran a large pastoralist concern on the Leigh River, would be ambushed by several hundred Wadawurrung. A fierce fight ensued, and two of the Indigenous people were killed and a third wounded.
The Wadawurrung had clearly decided they wouldn’t cede land without some form of compensation – and if that wasn’t forthcoming, they were quite capable of guerrilla warfare. From 1837 onwards, many harboured a growing animosity towards the colonists who were invading the land and denying them the food and water – not to mention important spiritual sites – that had been their birthright for many, many thousands of years. The refusal of the colonists to enter into any kind of reciprocal relationship and share the sheep that wandered on their estates was bad enough.
A worse problem was that the livestock ate or trampled the locals’ staple food. The survival of these people depended on the survival of murnong and other edible plants.
The newspapers of this time often described the rampant sheep stealing by Aborigines as ‘outrages’ without the slightest hint that the ubiquitous sheep were the only possible sustenance for a malnourished people whose land had been despoiled. From the Kulin point of view there was no question what the real outrage was: the uninvited presence on their land of the settlers and their sheep.
In the next few years, local resistance to white people intensified. There was a story around this time that when a drunken white man stole eels from a local man, it ended in straight fisticuffs. When the Kulin man regained his eels, the white man struck him and kicked him several times: ‘the black justly aggrieved put down his eels and said “you too much hit me, now me fight you” and encouraged by some white people near the swamp where they were fishing, a regular fist fight was commenced which terminated in the white man being awfully beaten.’
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AS 1837 WORE ON, it was clear that Buckley, now aged fifty-seven, was coming to the end of his tether. A few months after the loss of Gellibrand, Captain Foster Fyans asked Buckley to accompany him to Geelong where Fyans would be taking up his new role as the area’s police magistrate. In the aftermath of the Yuille attack, the squatters of the Western District had successfully petitioned Governor Bourke for protection. Fyans was ordered by Lonsdale to take on Buckley for help.
Fyans distrusted Buckley from the start, and it wasn’t long before tempers flared. They set out on a wet night with Buckley describing himself as being in a state of extreme fatigue. When Buckley asked if they could rest en route, Fyans said no – he and his party of constables and twelve convicts had to press on. When Fyans ordered Buckley to eat, he refused the salt pork and damper that was offered to him. Buckley told Fyans he was quite capable of feeding himself, and before Fyans knew what was happening Buckley was hacking at an old tree and extracting grubs. He wasn’t only being recalcitrant but also rejecting the white man’s ways. When the time came to saddle up, Buckley simply baulked. As Fyans recorded:
‘Well,’ said Fyans, ‘Are you ready?’
‘For what?’ asked Buckley.
‘For Geelong.’
‘No, no,’ Buckley replied. ‘It is too far for me to pull away there.’
‘Why, Buckley, you must come on with me.’
Buckley refused. When he finally caught up with Fyans and his men, the new police magistrate was mustering the Indigenous people around the Moorabool River and distributing provisions including blankets and clothing supplied by Governor Bourke. Fyans counted just 275 people: already the numbers of Wadawurrung were thinning further, following their diminishment during the smallpox epidemic.
When it was discovered that there weren’t enough blankets to go around, the locals reportedly became angry. ‘I ordered my two constables to load, and my convicts to fall in close to my hut,’ Fyans recorded. Yet again, a situation had disintegrated, and Buckley was ordered to deliver the usual threat of ‘cooperate or be killed’ to the locals, who later dispersed. He could no longer abide his role as mouthpiece of the aggressor, having to underlie every promise with a threat.
After two years in the employ of the colonists, Buckley had had enough. He was clearly defying Fyans, a tough policeman who brooked little dissension. Not long after the Fyans contretemps, Buckley quit his job. His role had become untenable, and he was clearly unfit for this kind of duty. He believed that both sides of the divide hated him. Perhaps melodramatically, he later wrote that his life was in danger at the time: ‘Indeed, I could not calculate on one hour’s personal safety from either one party or the other.’ His resignation brought him a kind of relief.
Here was the clear problem. He could not be a friend of the natives and then pass messages that threatened them or heralded their doom. He could not be the man the white people depended on to communicate and still be widely distrusted.
Lonsdale never criticised Buckley in any of his letters, but he made it clear that the big man hadn’t proved to be a very good policeman. Lonsdale was one of the few who understood Buckley’s predicament, employing him more out of goodwill than necessity. He said privately that he could have hardly expected the man to be a model officer considering his circumstances.
Buckley’s final act in Port Phillip took place in November 1837, when he petitioned Governor Bourke ‘for a grant of land or such other assistance as your Excellency may seem fitting, in order that your petitioner may not in his old age be reduced to distress’. Buckley also asked for a pension of £100 per annum. Both requests were denied.
Thirty-four years after his escape from Collins’s aborted settlement, Buckley found himself finally following the route Collins had intended for him long ago in 1803. It was 28 December 1837, and Buckley was aboard the Yarra Yarra, heading for Van Diemen’s Land. The man once thought by Collins to have perished quietly in the woods had defied the odds and survived everything the alien landscape, the cultural demands of a new people and the distrust of an aggressive new colony had thrown at him. But this had all taken its toll. He had been there at the start of what came to be known as the killing times, and he didn’t want any more of it. William Buckley was sick at heart.