EVERY NOW AND then a sentence pushes through in the Morgan–Buckley account that brings Buckley’s thinking to life. Among them is his quote about how he dealt with growing anger among Wadawurrung tribespeople when they felt that the men at Batman’s camp at the place they knew as Nearnenenulloc (St Leonards) weren’t sharing their goods. Buckley had to think quickly to prevent bloodshed. He wrote, ‘The policy I adopted was to seem to fall in with the views of the savages.’ Buckley told his kinsmen that killing the white intruders now would avail them nothing – it would jeopardise the much better booty that would come in greater amounts later. This stalling tactic worked, but it required Buckley to deceive his people. When the next ship came in, the locals were supposedly so mesmerised by the food, axes, blankets and clothing, they were in no mood to attack. In the back of his mind, Buckley must have known that with the arrival of each boat, the British foothold on Wadawurrung land grew slightly firmer.
The great writer Graham Greene once said that once you enter the territory of lies, there’s no return passport. So much of this story is about lying or, perhaps more accurately, about being two-faced to keep the peace. John Batman’s treaty was a similar stalling tactic. He and his Port Phillip Association members needed to seem to be generous and protective for long enough to see off possible acts of aggression and to assuage government scepticism. Their policy was to keep the locals hooked on European accoutrements while slowly growing in power and strength. When the colony reached the required critical mass, all pretence of magnanimity could be dropped. The coming spate of massacres, dislocation and environmental upheaval, named by some Aboriginal people as ‘the killing time’, was originally designed to look like Christmas.
Even John Fawkner came around to these ideas. At first he espoused fighting fire with fire. He was threatened twice in the first three months of his arrival but survived due to being forewarned. It’s thought that Billibellary was behind the warnings issued through Derrimut, which shows tremendous forbearance on the elder’s part. Lesser men might have had such a recalcitrant and clearly unapologetic invader as Fawkner killed. Why the Kulin desisted has always been unclear, but perhaps the elders were still hoping to form an alliance. It became clear even to Fawkner that to conquer this new world the best weapon was dissimulation – to pay tribute only for as long as that was useful. He and Batman didn’t share very much, but they shared that view and worked to that end.
Therein, for me at least, lies the great tragedy of the Kulin’s dispossession of Port Phillip. I am not naive enough to think there would ever have been an alliance of equals, but I find it shocking that one side gave so much and the other so little. I’m not talking here about the trinkets exchanged by Batman for land. We still talk about European explorers ‘discovering’ and ‘naming’ places in the region, but it was always a Kulin person or Buckley who guided them. This was the same all over Australia: European exploration amounted to continental dispossession. Every single act of ‘discovery’ in the Port Phillip region, in every place that was ‘named’ and later colonised, was aided by Indigenous guides. It was their diplomacy, knowledge and bush skills that enabled white people to reach the parts that would have otherwise been closed. It was in this ‘discovery’ period that the deception had to hold. Buckley knew when he and Gellibrand went travelling to stake out ‘Gellibrand’s country’ he was in a dilemma – the more he helped the colonists to discover, the quicker he ushered in the destruction of his adopted people.
Buckley’s real job was to maintain the lies to maintain the peace. He may have believed that if he could solve all the minor flare-ups with bandages, he could somehow prevent a more calamitous interracial explosion somewhere down the line. But his efforts would never be enough against the squatters’ unrelenting pressure to possess, control, consume and rewrite. They’d said Port Phillip would be different, and predictably it wasn’t. But the tipping point wasn’t when the British government repudiated Batman’s cynical treaty – it was Franks’s murder. War was declared when one of their own was killed. Franks was wealthy. He was one of them. His killing couldn’t be excused because it represented a threat to themselves, the monied squattocracy. It was the signal to excuse the conquest.
There is a view I have heard that by leaving Melbourne for Hobart Town, Buckley sold out his adopted people. I don’t agree. He had been selling them out much longer, for the right reasons. But it was to no avail. Every time he issued a white man’s order in the Wadawurrung language or guided a colonial party through country, he was compromised. He left because he couldn’t continue being Judas. At the heart of it was a wretched self-awareness that his job was to deceive the people he loved.
There are other great stories of white men and women who lived for long periods with indigenous peoples, but none that place the central character so strategically at the heart of the racial divide and at such a critical colonial juncture as Buckley’s story. Buckley was at the sharpest point of competing interests. He must have known that if he had stayed on, he wouldn’t have survived either physically or morally.
Buckley’s family had been driven out of rural Cheshire in a similar way to the ejection of the Wadawurrung from the Bellarine Peninsula. He’d been inducted into the army and then sent as a prisoner to a land that couldn’t have been more alien to him – and yet he survived. He had also, arguably, been inducted into Kulin culture. And he hadn’t asked for any of it. This man had been beholden to others and dragooned into roles for almost all his adult life. He understood dispossession and powerlessness.
It’s why Buckley escaped at the age of twenty-three, and it’s also why he ‘escaped’ Port Phillip thirty-five years later. Buckley’s departure wasn’t a weak capitulation or an act of treachery, it was his way of freeing himself from the egregious narratives of the rich, powerful and aggressive. He simply came to an existential question: was he willing to remain the instrument of forces he could not control? Buckley chose a quiet life with no money or prospects as the only means to be free.
What, then, of the expression ‘Buckley’s chance’? That chance didn’t happen in 1803 or 1835, but it may have happened in 1837 when he left his past behind. What kind of ‘chance’ was ever handed to him? The expression feels ironic to me. Chance was not something William Buckley ever had much of.