Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution Read online

  This sneering aside, nothing altered the fact that there were more and more of these Australians, both born to that fatal shore and crossing the oceans to get there to make new lives.

  The inevitable result was that down in the south-eastern part of the continent the 60,000 years of sole Aboriginal occupation was coming to an end. In those mid-1820s, two intrepid explorers, Hamilton Hume and William Hilton Hovell, had successfully trekked all the way from Appin in New South Wales down to Corio Bay in the south-western corner of that massive expanse of protected water named Port Phillip Bay to find hundreds of square miles of what was clearly arable land on its foreshores, stretching into the hinterland, and duly reported their discovery to the authorities. A decade later, the first of those who had settled in Van Diemen’s Land, and had found the going tough, began to venture across Bass Strait - becoming the ‘Overstraiters’ - and found a place where the only thing that lay between them and claiming huge swathes of land were a few easily-dealt-with natives.

  One of the most significant Overstraiters was John Batman. A native of Sydney, born of a convict father of wild disposition - from whom he inherited his passions for drinking and womanising, though not necessarily in that order - he had worked variously as a farmer and bounty hunter, and in 1826 had even captured the infamous bushranger Matt Brady, known as ‘the Wild Colonial Boy of Van Diemen’s Land’. After tiring of farming without any success in an area near Launceston, Batman had thought to try his luck on the mainland.

  In late May 1835, having formed the Port Phillip Association with four other settlers in Van Diemen’s Land, Batman left Launceston with three domestic servants and seven Aboriginal workers and travelled across Bass Strait upon the sloop Rebecca. It was his hope that his Aborigines would be able to act as interpreters with the local Indigenous population so he could conduct the business he had in mind. For Batman did not want to just occupy the vast acreage of land that he knew awaited there. Not a bit of it. He wanted to buy it. And it was for that very reason that he was carrying lots of trinkets, some mirrors and many, many blankets.

  After entering Port Phillip Bay on 29 May, Rebecca anchored in a small bay about twelve miles into the harbour and Batman made the first of several trips ashore.7 Exploring the rich surrounding land on foot, he quickly fell in with fresh tracks of the ‘locals’ before coming across ‘a beautiful plain about 3 to 400 Acres of as rich land as I ever saw’.8

  The following day he saw the local natives for the first time from a distance and was awestruck by this potential pastoralist’s paradise: ‘A light black soil covered with Kangaroo Grass 2 feet high and as thick as it could stand … The land was as good as land could be - the whole appeared like land [laid] out in farms for some 100 years back.’9

  On 31 May, Batman’s Aboriginal scouts made contact with the Wurundjeri for the first time. There were 20 women toting heavy loads along with 24 children and four dingos, their men having gone up river. Batman - trying hard not to look at their naked breasts, though they didn’t seem to mind - gave them blankets, necklaces, looking glasses, a tomahawk, some apples and handkerchiefs (in case they were caught short with a runny nose). In return, he was presented with some spears, a basket and a bucket.10

  Over the ensuing days, Batman continued to sail towards the head of the bay, stopping off each day to walk the country. Each time he was more enamoured with the vast expanses of open land that at times extended 30 miles in every direction. The land near the rivers and creeks teemed with ducks and other waterfowl, and he noticed the Aborigines had constructed stone fish traps in the creeks.

  On 3 June, Batman began an extended trek up the river the Wurundjeri men had followed.11 He surveyed the land and discovered good supplies of fresh water in places away from the river, which itself had good drinking water. On sighting the Keilor Plains, he described it as ‘the … most beautiful sheep pasturage I ever saw in my life’.12 Wildlife was plentiful - kangaroos, emus, dingos and wild geese in glorious profusion. With such vast, open, well-grassed plains and rich black soil, the only deficiency for the grazier was that there were so few trees for firewood - just scattered she-oaks, wattle trees and small gums.

  On 6 June, Batman was indeed able to make contact with eight elders of the Wurundjeri clan.13 The three principal chiefs were brothers, all with the name Jaga-Jaga, and two of them were notably superb physical specimens, ‘six feet high and very good looking’ as Batman recorded in his diary. Many of their companions had daubed their faces with red, white and yellow clays.

  An enormously significant exchange ceremony soon took place by the bank of a small stream, as the sounds of the Australian bush pressed close. Through sign language - for, of course, the language of the Aborigines from Van Diemen’s Land was entirely different - Batman succeeded in making their elders understand that he and his people wished to settle on the very land in which the natives could trace their own origins to the Dreamtime. Furthermore, in return for the land stretching from where they stood to all natural barriers in view - amounting to 600,000 acres of land and delineated by marks made upon trees - he was prepared to give them many of the ‘treasures’ he had with him, which he was quick to display.

  To make them properly understand what the deal entailed, Batman had the elders put some dirt in his hands to signify that the land now belonged him, while he physically put the treasures in their hands - 20 pairs of blankets, 30 tomahawks, 100 knives, 50 pairs of scissors, 30 looking glasses, 200 handkerchiefs and 100 pounds of flour and six shirts - to make them understand that this was a swap. A yearly rent of 100 pairs of blankets, 100 knives, 100 tomahawks, 50 suits of clothing, 50 looking glasses, 50 pairs of scissors and five tons of flour were also included in Batman’s treaty.

  The eight elders seemed to agree - although it is possible that they thought the deal was simply to allow Batman and his men safe passage across the land - and applied their marks to the treaty that Batman presented to them.

  And so it was done. To celebrate, once it was all completed, the Aborigines who had come with Batman danced in a corroboree with the Wurundjeri, their joyous cries and stomping causing the kookaburras and other birds for hundreds of yards around to take flight in fright. Or was it that they sensed what was about to overtake the superb natural habitat in which they had made their home?

  On 7 June 1835, Batman took up his quill and carefully transcribed in triplicate copies of the deed of his land purchase from the Wurundjeri. That accomplished, he wandered over to another meeting by a nearby creek with the tribal elders to deliver more of the promised ‘property’.14 In turn, the two handsome principal elders presented Batman with a chieftain’s mantle and took no small delight in his modelling the garment before them. Then, encouraged by the example of one of Batman’s Aborigines who had (away from the women, as this was men’s business) made his Sydney clan’s mark upon a tree, the principal elder of the Wurundjeri inscribed the mark of his own country and tribe. This Batman excised and adhered to a copy of the deed.15

  Business and pleasure concluded, Batman’s party began their return trek by a different route, crossing and naming the creeks and valleys as they progressed towards the mouth of the river, where his vessel was waiting. Soon after rejoining the Saltwater River, he came upon a fecund march he quickly named Batman’s Marsh, recording in his diary, ‘I think at one time I can safely say I saw 1000 Quails flying at one time, quite a Cloud. I never saw anything like it before I shot two very large ones as I was walking along.’16

  At one end of the marsh lay a huge space of open water - a small lake of near-perfect oval shape - at the other end of which the incoming river had turned into a large waterfall. Notwithstanding the myriad mosquitos and flies that were also here in abundance, the whole place looked at first blush as if Adam and Eve could happily have made their home there, and probably did once upon a sunlit time.

  The Saltwater River they were travelling on now joined a much larger river from the east, that which the Wurundjeri call Birrarung: ‘river of m
ists and shadows’. Two of Batman’s Aborigines swam the seven miles to the head of the river to retrieve Batman’s small boat. However, foul weather the following day prevented them heading down the Saltwater River. Instead, Batman recorded, ‘The boat went up the large river … and … I am glad to state about six miles up found the River all good water and very deep. This will be the place for a village.’17 He decided to call the whole place - what else? - ‘Batmania’.

  When Batman left on a brief trip to Launceston to gather his wife, Eliza, and seven daughters, he left behind his three white domestic servants and several of his Aboriginal workers, effectively to hold the fort. By that river, in the middle of that scrub, those white men felt that they were the only members of their race for many hundreds of miles in any direction.

  And yet, on 6 July, while gathered around the fire eating their damper, they looked up to see the most extraordinary figure approaching. At least six foot six - perhaps there is something in the water at that extraordinary lake - the fellow was robed in kangaroo skins and carrying boomerangs and spears, but there was clearly something different about him …

  ‘Hello …’ he said, a little uncertainly.

  He was a white man! Yes, a very dark white man and - truth be told - a very ugly one, with a heavy brow and deeply pockmarked face, but a white man nevertheless. A tattoo on his forearm read ‘WB’, giving credence to his claim that his name was William Buckley.

  Little by little over the next few days, as his long-lost ahh-billlitees in the English language started to return, the story came out. Though he at first claimed to have been a soldier who had survived a shipwreck, in short order he revealed the truth of the matter. He had, in fact, been a convict aboard the ship Calcutta that, with the good ship Ocean, had first attempted to settle these parts in 1803, with 308 convicts and half as many officers, soldiers and free settlers. Their troupe had landed on the southern shore of Port Phillip Bay, at a place they named ‘Sullivan Bay’,18 after the undersecretary for the colonies, John Sullivan, and tried to make a go of it.

  The venture had been a disaster from first to last and, just before the settlement was abandoned to retreat to Van Diemen’s Land, he and several other convicts had escaped. Two were quickly recaptured and two others decided to try to walk to Sydney, never to be heard from again. But Buckley had decided to stay in the area, walking around the contours of the bay, at first living off berries and shellfish. One day he had seen what looked to be a spear planted in some freshly upturned earth and used it as a walking stick. Shortly thereafter he had come across native women who recognised the spear as belonging to the grave of their most revered, recently departed tribal elder, and they recognised him as that man’s spirit returned to life!

  ‘They called me Murrangurk,’ he told the fascinated men, ‘which I afterwards learnt was the name of a man formerly belonging to their tribe.’19

  Yes, as a ngamadjid, one returned from the spirit world to which their dead had departed, he had to be cared for, and he soon became part of their tribe, learning their language, customs and ways, taking two wives and fathering one daughter. In return, he regaled them with grand stories about the English people across the seas, the way they lived, the ships they possessed, the guns they fired and so on.

  The newcomers listened, stupefied. What were the chances that a man could have survived and prospered for that long among a people whose ways and language were so foreign to his own?

  The men had an answer that would subsequently become part of Australian folklore: Buckley’s and none.20

  For all that, in the coming weeks and months, Buckley proved more than useful as a translator, managing to explain, to the chiefs most particularly, ‘the consequences which might arise from any aggression on their part’.21

  In the meantime, when Governor Bourke of New South Wales - which had Port Phillip Bay on its southern borders - found out about this so-called ‘treaty’, he was appalled. Despite Batman’s claim that he was ‘the greatest landowner in the world’,22 Bourke knew he was no such thing. For, as he declared on 6 August 1835, the land, as Crown land, belonged to King William IV of the United Kingdom and could not be sold and redistributed. The very notion of negotiating with the natives implied that they had some claim to it, which was outrageous. Batman and his people were nothing less than trespassers. Though Bourke was quick to declare the agreement null and void, by this time it was too late. Batman had merely been at the prow of other settlers and, within months of the natives’ marks being put on the parchment, they had been hunted well away from their traditional lands and the new settlers had taken root and begun to grow.

  One of these was a man by the name of John Pascoe Fawkner, who, after starting life as the son of a convict, had gone on to marry a convict, and then effectively became one himself! For his back was marked by the 500 lashes he had received for having tried to help seven convicts escape - a prelude to being sentenced to three years in gaol himself for ‘committing some atrocious Robberies and Depredations’.

  But that was all behind him now. Like many who had come to this settlement on the edge of the wilderness, he was determined to make a fresh start and, after arriving in the Port Phillip District on Friday, 16 October 1835, he wrote in his diary that evening: ‘Warped up to the Basin, landed 2 cows, 2 calves and the 2 horses.’23

  Yes, in some ways Fawkner and his fellow colonists were far better provided for, and prepared than, the first European arrivals three decades earlier. But even then their hold on this new settlement was so precarious that disaster was only narrowly averted when, on two occasions, ‘Derrimut’ - the headman of the Boonwurrung people - used William Buckley’s translating skills to warn Fawkner of an intended forthcoming attack by ‘up-country tribes’, allowing the whites just enough time to arm and defend themselves.

  ‘The Blacks we learnt intended to murder us for our goods,’24 Fawkner wrote in his diary on 28 October. A further entry on 13 December 1835 was more detailed:

  ‘[Derrimut] came this day and told us that the natives

  intended to rush down upon us and plunder our goods and

  murder us, we cleaned our pieces and prepared for them …

  I and two others chased the Blacks away some distance.’25

  Curiously, Buckley - with his loyalties apparently torn - also mentioned to Fawkner that ‘if he had his will he would spear [Derrimut] for giving the information’,26 though he at least appeared to have faithfully passed on the warnings.

  However close-run those near-disasters had been, with yet more arrivals security improved and the process of colonisation, once begun, could not be stopped. In fact, so arable was the land, so vast the possibilities for settlers like Batman and Fawkner, that within a year the place where the treaty had been signed was unrecognisable, as the trees had been cut down, crops planted and rough kinds of huts constructed. For the first part of this process the key interpreter used by Batman and others remained William Buckley, who had received a pardon from George Arthur, the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land. Buckley did not last long, however. Feeling that he was now distrusted by both the blacks and the whites, he drifted to Van Diemen’s Land to begin the next phase of his life.

  Melbourne, however - for that is what ‘Batmania’ had been renamed by Governor Bourke (in honour of British Prime Minister William Lamb, the 2nd Viscount Melbourne), after going through other incarnations as Bearbrass, Bareport, Bareheep, Barehurp and Bareberp - continued to grow, which was fortunate as this was just in time to begin to soak up the population overflow from Sydney Town.

  ‘This colony,’ Governor Bourke proudly reported to Whitehall in October 1836, ‘is like a healthy Child outgrowing its Clothes. We have to let out a tuck every month.’27

  To help maintain government control of this newly established settlement, Bourke first sent a police superintendent from Sydney down only a few months after Batman and his first settlers had arrived. When the settlement continued to grow, all of it with free settlers only
- no convicts - by the end of September 1836 he had sent 30 Redcoats of the 4th King’s Own Regiment to build their own base.

  And just as many were pouring into the new settlement, so, too, were others pouring into adjoining regions.

  In early 1838, six intrepid colonists in the company of an Aboriginal guide had left Corio Bay - known to the Aboriginals as Jilong, while the land beside it became known to the settlers as Geelong - on the south-western shores of the far larger Port Phillip Bay.

  Having come from Van Diemen’s Land, they had found that all the best land within 25 miles of the coast had already been claimed, and so were obliged to journey farther afield, over hills, through valleys, around swamps and across many arid plains. Just four days and 50 miles later, they ascended the heavily wooded slopes of a small mount subsequently named Mt Buninyong28 - from the local Aboriginal word bunning for knee, and yowang, hill, thus ‘hill like a knee’ - and gazed with wonder to the north-west. ‘An ocean of forest with island hills, was all around them, but not a speck visible that spoke to them of civilisation.’

  Within that ocean of forest they could also see huge swathes of grassy lands, some of it contained in a wide valley, nestled among the hills, which looked particularly promising. And beyond that still, they could see the as-yet-unnamed, far-distant Grampian ranges and Pyrenees. Some very limited exploration was possible, and yet, running out of supplies, they were soon enough obliged to make their famished way back to the big smoke.

  Nevertheless, from January 1838 on, the first settlers migrated in the general direction of the promising country that had been spotted. Two Scots settlers, Henry Anderson and William Cross Yuille, just 19 years old, drove their flocks forward into that particular grassy valley to settle. The kangaroos didn’t really bother bounding away, so placid was this invasion, while the emus barely blinked.