KONDAK (Paperback)

In 1803 the convict escapee William Buckley, an Englishman and former soldier, abandoned the life he knew and without any contact with Europeans lived for many years among the Indigenous peoples of the future colony of Victoria. In doing so he showed an extraordinary ability to understand and adapt to a culture in which he was the alien and the intruder. This is an original, thoroughly research account of how and with whom Buckly lived between 1803 and 1835. Remarkably, as Murrangoork, he deeply believed in the reincarnation myth he was thought to be embodying, and he may have thought of himself as Kondak, a Wathaurong elder—an astonishing claim by the first long-term European resident of Victoria, who went on to become that colony’s first and greatest racial conciliator.