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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.’
    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.
    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’.
     
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    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’, 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.’
    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