Over the following weeks, as his mother tongue slowly returned to him, fragments of the stranger's history were revealed. His name, he said, was William Buckley, and he had been living with the Aborigines for so long he had lost track of time. At first he claimed to be a shipwrecked sailor, but then admitted he was a runaway convict and begged for a pardon. What he told of his life in the Victorian bush so amazed those who heard him that he soon became celebrated as "the wild white man". He was, according to his contemporary and biographer James Bonwick, one of the most "wonderful characters" that Australian history has produced.
Buckley's sudden appearance astonished many because for the previous 32 years he had been presumed dead. Yet all the while he had been living with the Aboriginal tribes of western Victoria. With them he had traveled hundreds of miles into the hinterland, experienced tribal wars, witnessed mysterious ceremonies, and even claimed to have seen the fabulous bunyip.
When The Life and Adventures of William Buckley was finally published in 1852, 17 years after he had wandered in from the wilderness, it was with the patronage of John Morgan, a Tasmanian newspaper editor who had convinced Buckley to collaborate in producing the book. It is difficult to determine just how much influence Morgan had in shaping this remarkable autobiography; but there are reasons to assume that his editorialisng was extensive - for Buckley was only semi-literate, and he agreed that Morgan would share in the profits from the work.
Buckley's fascination has proved enduring. His survival against the odds, both among his own countrymen and the Aborigines, does seem astounding. Because of his height, he fought as "pivot man" in the King's Own Regiment of Foot against Napoleon in the Netherlands, where he was held in high esteem and was wounded in action. His military career was blighted, however, when, on August 2, 1802, he was convicted at Sussex Assizes of knowingly having received a bolt of stolen cloth. He was sentenced to transportation for 14 years, and in April, 1803, was shipped aboard the Calcutta, which, along with the supply ship Ocean, comprised Victoria's "first fleet". The vessels were bound for Port Phillip Bay, discovered just the year before by Lieutenant Murray or the Lady Nelson. The 300 convicts were under the command of colonel David Collins of the Royal Marines.
The location chosen for the settlement was Sullivan Bay, near present-day Sorrento. Despite its beauty the choice proved to be a disaster, for the soil was barren and sandy, and the water brackish and hard to procure. Within a couple of months, Collins and most of the convicts were preparing to desert the place, and it was at this critical moment that William Buckley made his life-changing decision to escape.
Buckley was no the first convict to attempt to abscond, for 12 others had earlier tried, all of whom, Nicholas Pateshall, a lieutenant on the Calcutta tells us, "had been taken and severely punished". Buckley and his five co-conspirators were much smarter. They chose Christmas Eve 1803, when the officers were presumably well lubricated with spirits and dead to the world in their stretchers, to pilfer critically needed goods - a gun, boots, and items from the hospital tent. A coupe of days later, at 9 PM on December 27, they made their break, all succeeding except Charles Shaw, who was shot and severely wounded. And this was the last, for 32 years, that the wider world heard of William Buckley. When Collins, in no doubt of his fate, proclaimed him dead, it was probably just what Buckley wanted.
Buckley traipsed around virtually the entire circumference of Port Phillip Bay before he found his future home on the Bellarine Peninsula. Dew parts of Australia can boast such rich resources.
In one way, Buckley's story of life in this abundant region is deceptively simple. It tells of his adoption by, and life among, the Aborigines of the Wallaranga tribe of the Wathaurang people. They called him Marrangurk, believing that he was a man that had been killed shortly before and who - in the shape of William Buckley - had returned to earthly life. The belief that whites were Aborigines come back from the dead seems to have been widespread during the early contact period in Australia, so Buckley was hardly exceptional. His experience thereafter, however, was unique, for no other European lived among Aborigines in a pre-contact situation for so long, and none gained the status in Aboriginal society that Buckley eventually enjoyed. His narrative, therefore, reveals Aboriginal life before it was so greatly disturbed by the European invasion, it provides a precious insight into an ancient and vanished world.
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It might also surprise the reader to discover Buckley's sighting of the bunyip in a lake at Waurn Ponds (on what is now the outskirts of Geelong). In an eyewitness account that perhaps helped the creature enter Anglo-Australian folklore as a credible entity, he reported that the beast was "covered with feathers of a dusky grey colour about the size of a full grown calf".
When reading about the bunyip and Pallidurgbarrans, we need to remember that Buckley was a rural Cheshireman who doubtless believed implicitly in the faeries and hobgoblins of his homeland. Likewise, the Aboriginal people who were educating Buckley about their environment made no clear distinction between myth and reality; instead both were interwoven in a seamless view of the world.
I think that in his discourse on the Pallidurgbarrans and the bunyip, Buckley is describing life through the experiential eyes of his Aboriginal family - and this includes the phenomena at the edges of their social universe. Their is not the slightest impression that Buckley is reporting anything but what he sensed was true, yet for the modern reader there is equally little doubt that bunyips and Pallidurgbarrans are mythical beings.
This aspect of his narrative is something that makes Buckley special, for in a very deep sense he entered into Aboriginal life and understood it as did no other outsider, revealing it to us in that light. It also means, however, that we must be cautious in our approach to interpreting the text.
The more fundamental problem in coming to terms with Buckley lies in reconciling the two versions of his life, neither of which the barely literate man penned himself.
The accounts by George Langhorne and John Morgan were written 17 years apart, and while similar in general outline they differ vastly in tone. This is because they were recalled under remarkably different circumstances, and were written for very different reasons.
Morgan's 1852 The Life and Adventures of William Buckley is by far the more famous of the two accounts, and has come to be thought of as the Buckley story. One could hardly expect a book written under the burden of financial penury suffered by both Morgan and Buckley to be entirely candid, and as we shall soon see Life and Adventures has its own distinct bias.
Langhorne's 1835 account suffers from a different problem. At the time it was taken down, Buckley's English was rudimentary, and communication with Langhorne was excruciating and uncertain. Perhaps, as a result, it is brief to the point of frustration, the reader heartily wishing amplification of the many fascinating issues it raises.
The most striking overall difference between the two narratives is the lighter mood of the Langhorne script. In it, Buckley reminisces fondly about his time among the Wallarranga. He also makes an extraordinary admission, reporting that he was quite aware of the visits of European sealers to Westernport Bay but that he kept well away.
He justifies his action by commenting that: "During 30 years residence among the natives, I had become so reconciled to my singular lot - that although opportunities offered, and I sometimes thought of going to the Europeans I had heard were here at Westernport, I never could make up my mind to leave the party to whom I had become attached. When, therefore, I heard of the arrival of Mr Batman and his party, it was some time before I would go down, as I never supposed I should be so comfortable among my countrymen again.
Nothing could provide a stronger contrast to the tone of Life and Adventures. Here we encounter Buckley as an abject Robinson Crusoe, who on several occasions is so miserable with his adopted family that he leaves them to live as a hermit. While there is no doubt that Buckley occasionally suffered in the wilds, particularly before he was adopted by his Aboriginal family, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the stark emphasis on the bad times in Life and Adventures is designed to evoke the sympathy of the reader. If so, it succeeded abundantly, for shortly after the book's publication, the new colony of Victoria granted Buckley a pension of 40 pounds a year.
Reading Life and Adventures one could imagine that Buckley lived as a celibate for much of his time among the Aborigines. He is far more candid about sexual matters in the Langhorne account, perhaps because he is closer to the experiences he is describing and has not yet learned how to cloak them in mid-19th century decorum.
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There is much in Buckley's account of Aboriginal life that may shock contemporary Australian sensibilities. We want to know how much of this information is true, either of Aboriginal Australia in general, or the western Victorian situation in particular.
In Langhorne's narrative, Buckley gives a charming vignette of how he spent his evenings. "I have frequently entertained them when sitting around the camps fires with accounts of the English people, houses, ships, great guns etc to which accounts they would listen with great attention - and express much astonishment. As I always kept up at night the best fire and had the best Miam Miam in the camp the children would often prefer to sleep with me and I was a great favourite among them."
From what we can read between the lines in Buckley's narrative, everyday life must have been good for the Wallarranga. Longevity was similar to or exceeded that enjoyed by Europeans at the time, and sickness was a rarity. Even lesser irritants such as fleas, lice and the common cold were unknown until they arrived with the white man. More significantly, food was abundant and varied.
Buckley never mentions a time of hunger while he was with his adopted tribe. Instead he hints that food was often in surfeit; his people moving on from a lagoon full of eels because they "were tired of the sameness of the food".
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Imagine what it would have been like to awaken on a crisp autumn morning in an Aboriginal camp beside one of the Western District lakes. This is the time when the eels are at their most abundant, and hundreds of people gather for the harvest. The frost on the grass would have had people reaching for their warm possum-skin cloaks and wood to stoke the embers, and perhaps there would have been some cooked eel or yam daisy left over from the previous night.
Then the people would have walked to the great stone eel-traps covering several heactares, to empty the night's catch. If the return was meagre, perhaps some men would wade into the lake to spear the eels they could feel with their feet, or to angle for them with worms tied to a piece of string. Whatever means were used, the hunt would not be long and within a couple of hours everyone would be heading back to camp carrying great bundles of the slippery creatures.
Camp consisted of a collection of tightly waterproof, dome shaped wuurns, each large enough to sleep a doze people in comfort. Depending upon the availability of building materials, they might be constructed primarily of stone or tree branches. In the centre of each was a fireplace to provide warmth. Cooking was done outside.
The camps were kept immaculately clean for the inhabitants believed that if an enemy found anything belonging to them, it could be used in sorcery to harm them. A trip to the dunny necessitated the use of a muurong pole. It was used to "remove a circular piece of turf, and dig a hole in the ground, which is immediately used and filled in with earth, and the sod so carefully replaced that no disturbance of the surface can be observed".
One can imagine that the afternoon was given to cooking, eating and sleeping, or perhaps to the repair of nets and spears. Maybe some women would go searching for firewood, or yams or other food to vary the diet, while those involved in ceremony would prepare at a secluded location; at night, initiations and other social events would take place.
Buckley documents several methods of disposing of the dead, including cremation and exposure on a platform in a tree, both practices of which were widespread in Aboriginal Australia. Describing one tree burial he says, "They selected a strong tree, and in the branches about 12 feet up, they placed some logs and branches across, and sheets of bark; on these they laid the body, with the face upwards, inclining towards the setting sun. The women sat around the tree for the most bitter lamentations. A fire was made all around and at that side which was nearest to the sun at its setting, so that he might have in the morning not only the sun's rays, but the fire to cheer him and warm him. All things being completed, one word was uttered, 'animadiate', which means, he is gone to be made a white man"
