William Buckley was one of four convicts who escaped from Sullivan’s Bay (Sorrento) in 1803, the original penal colony in the region that was later to become the colonised state of Victoria. He lived with the Wathaurong people and returned to European colonial society in 1835. It is only because William Buckley, a white man, survived his escape into so-called wild, unexplored and highly desirable terrain that so many would be inclined to tell and retell his story.

This chapter is a small part of a much larger research project in which I examined issues of historical truth versus fiction and myth, which I found to be concurrent themes in representations of William Buckley over time.1 The representations I discuss in my larger research project come from a range of different sources.2 For this chapter, I am

141looking specifically at the period between 1835, when Buckley first returned from the ‘wilderness’, and the 1860s, after he died in 1856.

Although there is a wealth of primary material about Buckley, it has become apparent that because of his mythological appeal, he is not easy to pin down. During this phase, he has been moulded variously into a John the Baptist figure, an untrustworthy savage, a noble savage, and a captive or castaway. In his earliest incarnations, Buckley is spoken of in colonial journals and diaries, government documents, legal treatises, and missionary reports. Later, in the 1850s, he is also reported in newspapers, examined in colonial histories and anthropologies, and written about in fictions and life stories. I will demonstrate that these early representations of Buckley are often characterised by their contradictions and unspoken anxieties, which are particularly noticeable in the efforts of colonial players to make Buckley serve purposes he did not quite fit.

In the past 50 years, there has been relatively little historical scholarship examining William Buckley’s entry back into colonial life and his confusing role as a go-between of colonial and Indigenous cultures. The work that is available has informed my approach to examining how historical fact and fiction are entwined. An exhibition held at Geelong Gallery in 2001, William Buckley: rediscovered, generated a catalogue containing a collection of essays in which Buckley is discussed mostly from a literary and artistic perspective.3 In his useful essay ‘Jump up whitefellow: the iconography of William Buckley’, art historian Andrew Sayers looks at the changes in artistic images of Buckley over time, and

142what they might reflect about the period from which they came.4 Lyn Gallacher’s 2004 ABC radio documentary on William Buckley contains historical insights from scholars Tony Birch and Tim Flannery, but mostly incorporates excerpts from professional storyteller Jan Wositzky’s one-man play about Buckley.5 As we can see from these main sources, analyses of Buckley’s story are more situated in the realms of fiction and artistic enterprise than in historical fact.

Nonetheless, I have also found many references to Buckley in scholarly articles about colonial history in Port Phillip/Victoria.6 Although all of these sources are useful in piecing together a contemporary scholarly landscape around Buckley, I found that I needed to draw upon other relevant areas of scholarship in order to ground his story within a more suitable analytic framework. Many of the early sources that I will discuss in this chapter contain fundamental contradictions when observing Buckley’s inauthentic ‘whiteness’ and inherent ‘blackness’, with all the slippery implications that abound in such descriptions. Hence, Buckley’s ‘ambivalent’ qualities call for a postcolonial analysis in order to discern how issues of power, race, and

143land ownership imposed on Indigenous cultures by Europeans functioned.

Over the past 20 years, postcolonial scholars like Homi Bhaba and Robert Young have explored ideas of colonial ambivalence (and about race in particular), seeking to illustrate the instability of the commonly held, normative, empirical colonial narratives.7 Postcolonial theories provide perspectives which point to the possibilities of resistance to colonialism, the instabilities of colonial power, and the profound problems of colonial nationhood and identity. On ambivalence, Robert Young observes that:

The more contemporary field of whiteness studies offers useful scholarship with which to tackle Buckley’s problematic appearance as a white/black man.9 These approaches have assisted me in thinking about the politics of whiteness in representations of Buckley, as well as the way

144whiteness is constructed in the social world around him. Lynette Russell and Margery Fee, for example, draw upon Homi Bhaba’s postcolonial theories to articulate a need to ‘think through problems of essentialising binaries and rigid identities’ in the highly politicised spheres of ‘Aboriginality’ and ‘Whiteness’.10 Also relevant to Buckley’s problematised position is Sara Ahmed’s discussion of the ‘Politics of Good Feeling’, a hypothesis about how racialised subjects are seen as getting in the way of public happiness because their politicised presence reminds us of the injustices of the social world.11

Australian postcolonial scholarship on ‘Wild Whites’ is also helpful. Buckley was sometimes represented as a captive of the Wathaurong, rather than as their guest or as a refugee of colonisation. Kate Darian-Smith’s work on captivity narratives has therefore proved extremely useful as a starting point in my analysis of Buckley’s colonial ambivalence.12 Further, Kay Schaffer examines the links between captivity narratives and the idea of nation in her work, and Susan Martin has gone on to identify the significantly different historical contexts between American and Australian captivity narratives, pointing out that many people who lived with Australian Indigenous groups for long periods were never captives, but castaways or escapees from colonies seeking assistance for survival.13

145We are fascinated by the wild white man, but cannot place him within a stabilising framework characteristic of empirical history. I hope to convey Buckley’s ambiguity by discussing how he is a figure who never appears as one image, but as Chris Healy puts it, as a figure that ‘does not stand at the centre of a stable narrative but is rather a multiple figure, an “event under description”’.14

Buckley’s appearance at a camp at Beangala/Indented Head in July 1835 is a repeated representation, and it is this image which has become one of the main ‘events’ of his life. The first person to record Buckley’s ‘return’ was William Todd, an Irish ex-convict and servant to John Batman, who had been given the task of recording a journal at the camp.15 In early June 1835, after an 11-day land evaluation at Port Phillip, Batman decided it was right for settlement and made a ‘treaty’ with ‘chiefs’ for the land. He left his employees Todd, two other European servants, and five Indigenous men from Sydney at Indented Head to keep up friendly relations with the locals and to assemble a hut and garden.16 They remained there for approximately two months before John Helder Wedge’s arrival in early August and it is clear from the journal that—for

146the three white servants at least—there was an atmosphere of both communal living with, and dread of, the Indigenous people. Todd reports his fears of growing numbers of people at the camp and his constant wish that they would leave. The Europeans jealously restricted their food ‘rations’ to these strangers, but ironically they also agreed to look after all their children at camp while the men, women and ‘Sydney Blacks’ went to procure food, which would then be bought back to camp and shared with the Europeans in the evenings.

In the diary entry of 6 July 1835, we get a great sense of excitement and relief from Todd when a ‘White man came walking up to the Native huts … clad the same as the Natives’.17 This written appropriation of Buckley narrates an event in which whiteness is recognised, marvelled at and swiftly re-inscribed as European:

The speed with which Buckley was snapped up and appropriated in Todd’s narrative is very telling. It seems fitting that the three white servants, who never felt entirely comfortable at Indented Head, would latch onto this ‘Wild White Man’ and suckle some sense of stability and authority from his potential to mediate between the Indigenous people and themselves. Despite this, they also swiftly attempted to erase his appearance of ‘savagery’ by clothing and shaving him, and giving him bread.

This journal entry is similar to the written appropriation of Barbara Thompson, a shipwreck castaway on the Cape York Peninsula who was

147cared for by an Indigenous community for five years. The 1849 journals of the surveying crew who recorded her appearance reflect similar tropes to Todd’s diary entries; the edifying recognition of her whiteness and a swift move to wash, clothe and feed her with proper food. Furthermore, there is an effort to disconnect her from the people who had cared for her. Although the Rattlesnake crew all acknowledged that Thompson was well cared for after the shipwreck, the contemporary narratives of the event were framed in the language of her ‘escape’ from her life in ‘captivity’ with black men, and her ‘liberation’ by white men back into the folds of European society.19

In 1837—two years after Buckley returned to settler society—missionary George Langhorne took a short dictation from him which strongly suggests that Buckley was not a captive:

As we will see, constructions of Buckley as a captive serve to reinstall him to a superior civilisation. His contemporaries utilised his ‘civilised’ whiteness, as well as his ‘authentic’ Indigenous links to the land.

Whilst Todd and his contemporaries were moved by a need to soothe personal anxieties and fears of coexisting with local inhabitants who may or may not be welcoming, some of the more prominent men of the early

148colonial period in Melbourne actively appropriated Buckley in order to assist their dubious processes of simultaneous possession and dispossession. The Port Phillip Association was made up of ‘noteworthy’ and influential men from Van Diemen’s Land, who planned to colonise Port Phillip against the NSW government’s will, hoping the region would be within the jurisdiction of Governor Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land, who was a supporter of the Association.21 One of the members, John Batman, was later to be lionised as a true hero of Port Phillip’s colonisation epitomised by his natural bush skills and his supposed ease with the Indigenous people he encountered.22 However, in his past Batman had an ominous career in Van Diemen’s Land as a headhunter when Governor Arthur declared martial law on resistant Indigenous people fighting to keep their lands.23 The so-called unavoidable violence he committed in the Black Wars was perhaps what caused Batman to attempt the more peaceful approach of ‘buying’ land from the Kulin peoples in exchange for European material goods. Although Batman’s subsequent treaty was likely made in earnest by both parties, it is clear that it was very unlikely to have been recognised by contemporary Indigenous groups as the capitalist wholesale of ancestral country.24

It is within the landscape of Batman’s precarious entrepreneurial mission that Buckley’s image became connected in some way to the operations of power of men from the Association. Both Batman and surveyor John Helder Wedge quickly set about committing Buckley to text, describing his physical presence, his story, his knowledge of the land

149and peoples, as well as petitioning for his pardon in writing.25 This led to a series of political manoeuvrings and skirmishes in which he was utilised as a wager for anticipated wealth and land ownerships in the schemes of Association men and presented to the ‘authorities’ as both a godsend and as a potential threat, depending on what each player wanted.

John Fawkner is an example of someone who propagated the myth of Buckley as a savage. The son of a convict, Fawkner had travelled as a child with Buckley on the Calcutta to Sullivan’s Bay in 1803. By mid-1836, he was a prominent and ruthless player in the political organisation of the town that would become Melbourne, acquiring considerable land, along with business, social, and political status.

Fawkner mentions Buckley a few times in his journal of 1835; he appears mostly in passing as a mild presence in the general building of the township, as well as the beneficiary of a yearly wage for his interpretive and policing services.26 But in his Reminiscences of 1862, Fawkner becomes more malignant. Referring to an incident that he had briefly mentioned in his 1830s journal in one line (‘The Blacks we learnt intended to murder us for our goods’), Fawkner explains that this isolated sentence actually denoted a plot to massacre the whites.27 The small settlement was supposedly saved by a young Indigenous man, Derrimut, who warned Fawkner via Buckley’s translations: ‘The half savage Buckley

150declared that if he had his will he would spear Derrimut for giving the information’.28 Despite Buckley’s peaceful presence in his 1830s journal, in hindsight Fawkner describes him a worthless, violent mediator who wasn’t to be trusted. This contradictory view of Buckley came at a time when Fawkner probably felt the need to re-assert his position in the history of Port Phillip. It is also possible that he resented Buckley’s affiliation with the association. Aligned with the association, Buckley was at times framed as an Indigenous white man with connections to the land, essentially allied with the Europeans. According to Fawkner and governors in other states who didn’t know him, he was a savage white man, as untrustworthy as the natives, who must be carefully watched. These became prevailing tropes for Buckley.

As we move further from the fledgling settlement of 1835, Buckley’s story begins to be used to represent authoritative histories of the Indigenous people of Victoria. Thus his image was utilised in the ensuing catalogues of misconceived knowledge used to describe, confine and mark the so-called decline of the Indigenous population. In 1856 historian James Bonwick describes his efforts to attract the attention of a tight-lipped William Buckley: ‘Not being divested of curiosity, we often endeavoured to gain from some one of his acquaintances a little narrative of that savage life, but utterly failed in doing so’, Bonwick wrote.29 Bonwick was clearly covetous of journalist John Morgan’s 1852 collaboration with William Buckley, which produced the adventure

151chronicle The life and adventures of William Buckley, thirty-two years a wanderer amongst the Aborigines of the then unexplored country round Port Phillip, now the Province of Victoria.30

When Buckley died in early 1856,31 Bonwick was very quick to follow up with his version of the ‘Blacks as they were than as they are’, and the informant he could never procure.32 This work contributed to his canon on Port Phillip history and reasserted his authority as the foremost historical expert of the region. Bonwick concedes half-heartedly that Morgan’s largely apocryphal Life and adventures was probably the most accurate source pertaining to the main details and events of Buckley’s life, utilising large slabs from the text to support his own more ‘authentic’ and truthful history.33 Unlike Morgan, he prefers not to attribute any intelligence whatsoever to Buckley, calling upon distinguished contemporary players of the early Port Phillip landscape to confirm that Buckley was so ‘dull and reserved, that it was impossible to get any

152connected or reliable information from him’.34 Despite this, Buckley is also a ‘wonderful character’ whose very presence in his writing supports Bonwick’s authoritative constructions of the ‘Port Phillip Blacks’.35 Thus William Buckley exists in Bonwick’s texts as a figure of profound ambivalence. After all, Bonwick’s primary aim is not to provide a detailed portrait of Buckley, but to fill the majority of his chapters with his specialist knowledge about the ‘primitive days of Port Phillip, and the savage state of the Aborigines’.36

This aim is reiterated in the second edition of his history in 1863, when he faithfully tells the truth of Buckley’s story, legitimising it ‘in the very language of the authorities, at the risk of seeming somewhat dry in detail’.37 Once again, the opening chapter on Buckley stands in for the remaining 26 chapters discussing the ‘Blacks of Victoria’ from ‘Physical Appearance’ to ‘Infanticide and Cannibalism’ and, finally, their ‘Decline’. In addition, he reveals a scathing disdain for a man who did not impart Christianity or civilisation to the Indigenous people with whom he stayed for so many years.38 Yet, in a fit of further ambivalence, he reveals his own desires when he gives himself licence to transpose a romantic and entirely imagined longing for Victoria’s ‘primitive’ state, mediated via the figure of Buckley:

153Bonwick’s main competition was Tasmanian editor John Morgan, who constructs his version of the ‘truth’ about Buckley in a fictive history. In his preface to Life and adventures, Morgan notes that as a weathered newspaper writer, he was aware that ‘all his labours will be scattered to the winds, as old gossip’, and that he must therefore engage in a succinct and straightforward writing style.40 In this manner, he cobbles together his own authentic version. Written in the first person from Buckley’s perspective, it is nonetheless difficult to gauge what the extent of Buckley’s involvement was; or, indeed, why he chose Morgan as a confidante.

One possibility, openly declared in the preface, is their mutual need for finances.41 Morgan guarantees the authentic nature of their venture by declaring the existence of a trusteeship from which both would receive equal shares of the financial rewards. Morgan is thus seen to carefully avoid the fate of Daniel Defoe, who was accused of living off the great profits of his fictional history of Robinson Crusoe, which was widely believed to have been pilfered from the diary of a ‘real’ castaway, Alexander Selkirk.42 Morgan thus plays on this public desire for the literary genre that writer/historian Tony Birch ironically describes as ‘My time amongst the savages’. Further, Birch warns that we should be sceptical about the historical value, and especially the Indigenous ethnographic value, of such narratives, which tended to produce highly embellished tales, were after a strong commercial outcome, and attracted

154a populist readership with a desire for risqué and melodramatic material.43 Nevertheless, Morgan relied on the attraction of the ‘true story’ of a ‘real life’ castaway to ensure the saleable authenticity of his text.

This manufacture of Buckley in the mould of the Robinson Crusoe genre is interesting because it depends on the belief Bonwick held so dear: that the role of a castaway in foreign lands was to stay true to European ideals of religion and civilised life, thus proving the eternal strength of such principles, even in isolation.44 Says Bonwick: ‘How he might have signalised himself in the councils of the tribe, and astonished their savage minds with the prowess of civilisation!’45 Yet, as writer Barry Hill points out, Morgan had to strain to fit his version of Buckley in to this Crusoe mould.46 There was one major difference between these two figures, says Hill: Buckley was not alone. Unlike Crusoe, Buckley’s Other was not a solitary, convenient and pliable Man Friday. He lived within many societies of Others. Says Hill:

155In this sense, Buckley was a threat. He knew too much about the real lives, country, cultures and humanity of the inhabitants of this highly sought-after land, and was in danger of articulating what many settlers didn’t want to hear. If so, when Morgan and Bonwick took up the story of an ‘illiterate’ man, they were sure to make it more palatable to European audiences by reiterating the captive theme and by utilising Buckley to substantiate their own constructions of Indigenous life. Representations of Buckley have thus come to illustrate the depths of colonial anxieties and desires, which were projected onto the Indigenous Other. They lent authority to the labelling, categorisation and naming of Indigenous peoples and culture from a white colonial perspective. These were the roots of misconceptions, ignorance and prejudices about Indigenous peoples which still exist today.