HISTORICAL REVIEW OF VICTORIA. 333 



voured to attract their attention from the shore, but was probably mistaken for one of 

 the marauders, and his signals were disregarded. On another occasion a boat was 

 stranded in the harbour, and the two sailors who were in it were kindly treated by the 

 natives of his own tribe, but were afterwards speared by those of the Yarra tribe. He 

 had been also told by his black companions of a third vessel having entered Fort 

 Phillip, of a boat-load of seamen having landed, and of two men having been tied to 

 a tree and shot. But statements like these must be received with a certain amount of 

 suspicion, owing to the clouded condition of Buckley's faculties ; the man who had lost 

 the memory of his native tongue had naturally little recollection of past facts. Governor 

 Bourke, who saw him in 1837, could extract nothing from him but a few monosyllables ; 

 Captain Lonsdale was equally unsuccessful; Mr. J. P. Fawkner called him "a mindless 

 lump of matter;" and Mr. George Arden, who wrote the earliest pamphlet published in 

 the colony (1840), tells us that " Buckley's extreme reserve rendered it almost impossible 

 to learn anything from him of his past life, or of his acquaintance with the aborigines." 

 The last glimpse we obtain of him is in Hobart Town, where his gigantic figure was 

 to be seen almost daily " pacing along the middle of the road with his eyes vacantly 

 fixed upon some object before him, never turning his head to either side or saluting a 

 passer by ; and seeming as one not belonging to the world." 



JOHN PASCOE FAWKNER. 



While Batman was negotiating with the tribal chiefs for the acquisition of six 

 hundred thousand acres of land on the northern and western shores of Port Phillip, 

 another Launceston man, John Pascoe Fawkner, was organizing an expedition for the 

 colonization of the same territory. It consisted of Captain Lancey, George Evans, 

 Robert Hay Marr, W. Jackson, a blacksmith named James, and a ploughman named 

 Wyse. Fawkner had been on board the Calcutta when Collins had made his abortive 

 effort at a settlement, and therefore knew something of the harbour. He was an energetic 

 little man, "whose life in low estate began;" who had fought his way up, and who had 

 been called upon to " breast the blows of circumstance, and grapple with his evil star." 



Self-educated, self-reliant, and self-assertive, he possessed some excellent qualities for 

 a pioneer ; and he lived to witness the obscure settlement he may claim to have founded 

 on the banks of the Yarra, grow and ripen into a great city. He had chartered for 

 his expedition the Enterprise, a fifty-ton schooner, trading from the port of Launceston. 

 She dropped down the Tamar in the middle of July, 1835, but was detained by foul 

 weather from putting to sea until the 4th of August. Fawkner was prevented by illness 

 from accompanying the expedition, the command of which devolved upon Captain Lancey. 

 After calling at Western Port the vessel entered the Heads on the -i 6th of August, and 

 carefully feeling her way up the Bay she reached the mouth of the Yarra, and a boat 

 was sent to explore that stream. It proceeded as far as the site of Melbourne, and 

 having found a suitable landing-place, where the River widened into a spacious pool below 

 a ledge of rocks which barred further progress at that spot, the Enterprise sailed up 

 the Yarra on the agth, but mistaking the Saltwater River for the main channel, pursued 

 a wrong course until the error was discovered and retrieved. On the day following, the 

 vessel was moored on the north bank of the stream, immediately opposite the present 



