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another meeting by a nearby creek with the tribal elders to deliver more of the promised ‘property’. 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.
    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 re-joining 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.’
    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 mosquitoes 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 mists 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.’ 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-billl-itees 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’, 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