Ghost Blood

[khiemtran]

We follow William Buckley now, on his lonely trek into the unknown. From Swan Island, he headed west, back across the Bellarine Peninsula, but soon ran into trouble...

From The Life and Adventures of William Buckley by John Morgan:

During my first day's lonely march, I saw, at a distance, about a hundred natives, in and about some huts built of back, and boughs of trees, and others of the Tribe making toward me. Being greatly alarmed, I took to the river, and swam across it with my clothes on, and in so doing extinguished my fire-stick, so that I was deprived of the means to cook my food.

It's not clear which river this was, but it may have been the Barwon. Buckley escaped otherwise unharmed and made it to the sea, where at least he could find food.

As it was low tide, I found a considerable supply of the shell fish before mentioned, which the natives call Kooderoo; it is the same as the English describe as mutton fish. Its shape is something like that of the oyster, but it is tougher, and larger, and consequently not so digestible. The shell is inlaid with what appears to be mother of pearl.



Have you guessed what they were? Abalone! These days a rare delicacy, although you can still find them on the shore.



Back to Buckley's account now...

These fish I was now obliged to eat raw, and having no fresh water I suffered exceedly from thirst until the evening, when I reached the river Karaaf, a stream of considerable width and depth, I there laid myself down for the night.



From there, Buckley continued along the coast, following the route that is now the start of the Great Ocean Route. He suffered terribly from thirst, the rivers all being brackish, and stuck mostly to the beach where he could gather shellfish. After several days without food or water, he had made it to a place called Mangowak (now known as Aireys Inlet), where, barely able to walk, he had a stroke of great luck. The local Koories had been burning off the bush and he was able to light a fire stick from a smoking tree. He also found a natural well and discovered a new food source in native berries.

The Almighty indeed, appeared that day to favour me--especially, as I thought, in pity to my my sufferings, for I found also a great supply of shell fish: so that I had now food, and fire, and water.

Buckley's luck began to turn and he had many adventures on the rocky coast. For a while, he was able to live on seafood and berries and gradually discovered more and more plants that he could eat.



It was here that he also had his closest encounter yet with the "natives", when two men surprised him in the hut he had made. Despite his apprehensions, they gave him food and led him inland, apparently in order to meet more of their tribe.

After a warm discussion by signs, and, to both parties, by sufficiently significant sounds, they apparently consented that I should remain; but, as they wished me not to leave until their return; my old and nearly worn-out stockings were required by them as an assurance offering. This I steadily declined complying with, so that after sundry striking of the breasts, and stamping with the feet, they were content to leave me unmolested.

The men, presumably of the Wathaurong, later made another attempt to barter for his stockings with an offering of berries, but Buckley stood firm, later fleeing back to the comparative safety of the shore.

When Buckley had first escaped, it was the Australian summer. Soon though, he found the weather cooling and his food supply began to dry out. Most likely, he was learning one of the basic lessons of the hunter gatherer lifestyle - the Wathaurong needed to keep moving from one site to another; moving across their territory in a long multi-year cycle. Soon, Buckley was starving again, and, in desperation, was heading back along the coastline, the way he had first come.

Being now very weak from the privations I had undergone, I could only make short distances during each day; and , as the nights were very cold, my sufferings were great, so much occasionally as to overpower my remaining strength and resolution. After several days I reached a stream which the natives call Dooangawn, where I made myself a sort of shelter in the scrub, and in the morning saw a mound of earth, with part of a native's spear stuck upright on top of it, to indicate its being a grave. I took the spear out and used it as a walking stick to help me on my journey.

Dooangawn is now known as Spring Creek, in the town of Torquay. It's actually the same creek I run across every morning when I'm down there. This bridge probably wasn't there in those days though.



Heading back across the Karaaf River, this time Buckley was lucky just to make it across. He made it just a little bit further, to a place called Maamart, where he rested after searching for gum (tree sap) to eat.



It was here that his life took its next extraordinary turn. While searching for gum, he had been observed by two Wathaurong women, and after he had collapsed under a tree to rest, they went to gather the rest of their clan. It turned out that the Wathaurong had a belief that when people die they return as white spirits and these people just happened to be friends and relatives of the man who had been cremated at Dooangawn. They quickly concluded that Buckley was the reincarnation of those lost friend; a belief confirmed by the fact that he was even carrying the remains of his spear. They gave him the name Murrangurk which I have seen translated as both "Returned from the Dead" and "Ghost Blood".

And then, William Buckley's adventures really began...

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Aaaaaahhhhh! Keep going! Write more!

(And you know, until your friend on the previous page said it, I confess I didn't think of looking at Wikipedia or Google at large, I think because I have an intuition that while the story will be interestingly told there, it won't be as well told as your telling it here, and certainly not with the gorgeous photos.)

His story so far is eye opening. As a kid, one of the things we always believed was that it was easy to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Later we learned that this is a very laborious process and not always successful. But maybe Buckley's childhood never included that belief? Or he tried, but had no tinder, so couldn't get a light? In any case, wow, no food and only brackish water--what a nightmare. And in those circumstances, to value your stockings more than the possibility of aid from other humans? But maybe he had an instinct that that first group of locals wouldn't, in the end, have helped him much?

--Which makes me wonder: at that point,what sort of relations did the local groups he's running across have with white incomers? Maybe the Wathaurong hadn't had any contact with whites previously? (So, so far had had no bad experiences?) And what, conversely, did Buckley know about the locals? He seems to know *some* things, since he talks about what abalone is called in local languages and so on.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

The local Koories would have had only very limited contact with white people up until then. The Sullivan Bay colony had only been there a few months before Buckley escaped, but there had been sailors and explorers in the area in the year before that (1802). On the other hand, the settlement at Sydney was started in 1788, so it's possible that news of events could have reached this far south by then.

As for Buckley, he knew next to nothing about the natives at the time he escaped. He and the other convicts did their best to avoid them and Buckley was very apprehensive in his early encounters that they might be cannibals. (As it happened, he did observe ritual cannibalism later, but it was in the form of eating part of an opponent's corpse to gain their power, not the killing of people for mere food.)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Nodding about the fear of cannibalism. It's a terrific fear that people the world over has of "that group over there." I remember a book I read in an introductory anthropology class that basically argued that there were no people who ate other people as food--or at least, no reliable documentation of same. There's cannibalism of necessity (as in shipwrecks and things like that), and there's ritual cannibalism, but no humans-as-a-menu-item cannibalism.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

That's interesting! It reminds me a bit about one of the Jared Diamond books (Guns, Germs and Steel?) where he mentions travelling through PNG and finding tribe after tribe who would all warn him about the cruel and ruthless savages over in the next valley...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Exactly! "We're good sorts, but you'd better watch out for them over there." (And would you ever believe anything any group said about its neighbors? What the English said about the French? Or the French about the Germans?)

Or, something will be cast in the past. "Once upon a time we used to be terrible cannibals, but not anymore." But this is not reliable for lots of reasons, not least that people tend to tell those in power the stories that those in power want to hear. But not only that, also, it's hard to untangle the mythic past from the historical past, and metaphor for reality.

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

Argh, read these out of order. I was wondering what I had missed (and why) when I read about him coming back from the dead. :P

I adore that first photo. I miss seeing a good sunset.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Thanks. That's actually a sunrise. It's on the beach where my parents walk each morning, so they get a lot of sunrises throughout the year. I only got to do it once when I was down there last week, so I was lucky I got a good one.