330 AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



belonging to a tribe named Iranioo and (iccfoiig, professing to be the lords of an 

 extensive domain encircling Corio Ha)-. Had these ambitious and overreaching transac- 

 tions been carried through they would have conferred upon Batman and his fourteen 

 associates all of them, with one exception, residents in Launceston boundless affluence ; 

 for the value of the territory thus acquired can only be estimated at the present time 

 by scon-s of millions sterling. This vast estate was to be divided into seventeen equal 

 parts, two of which were to be awarded to Batman ; and the government of the new 

 settlement was to be entrusted to Messrs. Charles Swanston, James Simpson and Joseph 

 Tice Gellibrand, three of the partners in the enterprise, subject to a code of rules 

 prepared for that purpose. Batman forwarded a detailed statement of his proceedings to 

 Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, in Van Diemen's Land, who transmitted a copy of it, 

 together with a draft of the conveyance, to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. 

 That gentleman, however, declined to confirm the grant, but promised that the serious 

 consideration of the Home Government should be given to the subject of forming a 

 settlement in the vicinity of Port Phillip. Meanwhile, Mr. J. H. Wedge, one of 

 Batman's partners in the undertaking, and formerly an officer in the Survey Department, 

 had made an examination of the country surrounding Port Phillip, and had extended his 

 investigations to a distance of from twenty-five to forty miles inland, laying down the 

 various eminences, as well as the rivers and creeks, upon a chart. 



\ 



THE STORY OF BUCKLKY. 



In spite of the friendly relations which Batman believed he had established with the 

 natives, some of them had concerted an attack upon the little party he had left behind 

 him, and it was only frustrated by the interposition of a white man who had lived 

 among them for a period of thirty-two years. -This was William Buckley, the narrative of 

 whose career constitutes one of the most romantic . episodes in the early history of 

 Victoria. He was one of the convicts who had been landed from the Calcutta at Sorrento 

 in 1803, and who had made his escape into the bush with two other men under sentence, 

 both of whom are believed to have perished. He was a man of commanding stature- 

 six feet five inches in height without his shoes and to this circumstance probably, 

 coupled with the belief that he was nninrnon^ gnnrk that is to say, a chieftain who had 

 been killed in battle and had been resuscitated a white man he owed his escape from 

 death. He had been wandering about for a whole year, however, before he fell in with 

 the natives; and the lonely cavern in which he is reported to have taken refuge at 

 night is still pointed out as " Buckley's Cave." One of the blacks detected some immense 

 foot-prints in a sand hummock near the outfall of the River Barvvon, and following them 

 up found the white stranger sunning himself upon the beach after a bath in the sea. 

 An alarm was given, and Buckley presently found himself surrounded by the whole of 

 'Von Kondak Baarwon T asked one of the party. It was the name of a 

 departed chief. The white man nodded and grunted assent. Other questions were put 

 on the subject of his re-incarnation, all of which he fortunately replied to in the 

 rmative, and he was forthwith admitted a member of the tribe, gradually learning 

 language and forgetting his own. They gave him a wife, but she preferred a 

 lover of her own complexion, and she and her paramour were put to death in conse- 



