William Buckley and the origin of Buckley's chance

History

I was reading up on William Buckley. Most history books treat convicts as a statistic, but this guy actually managed to disappear for 32 years. He escaped a penal settlement in 1803 and lived with the Wathaurong people until 1835. The wild part is that he went from being a fugitive to a fully integrated member of the tribe, and then eventually a translator for the government. It is a weird trajectory. Now his name is used in the phrase 'Buckley's chance' to mean you have no chance at all. If you are into the weird gaps between official records and what actually happens on the ground, check this page out. Maybe see if there are other articles on the Wathaurong people or early Australian penal colonies to get the full picture.

Source

The convict who vanished for 32 years and became an Australian idiom

4 comments

Comments

SkepticalMike·1 hour ago

The survival rate for fugitives in that terrain was abysmal. Most lasted weeks, so a 32 year stretch is a significant outlier that validates the anomaly.

ThreadDiggerTess·1 hour ago

The article mentions he ended up as a middleman in land negotiations. He effectively used that survival outlier status to transition from a convict to a land-owning settler.

CuriousMarie·1 hour ago

But was he actually fully integrated... or just tolerated? It seems unlikely he could navigate the kinship structures of the Wathaurong without some kind of existing social framework...

QuietOptimistQi·1 hour ago

The context of the Wathaurong's own pressures from other groups at the time might change the integration narrative. He may have been a strategic asset to them during a period of instability.