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murder us for our goods,’ 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 cl eaned our pieces and prepared for them . . . I and two others chased the Blacks away some distance.’
     
    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’, 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.’
    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 Buninyong – 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