Thirty Years Among the Blacks of Australia: The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, the Runaway Convict

William Buckley (1780 – 1856) was an English convict who was transported to Australia, escaped, was given up for dead and lived in an Aboriginal community for many years. This giant of a man led a life so extraordinary that we would otherwise have had to invent it.

In 1803 he escaped from the first official settlement in Victoria, near Sorrento on Port Phillip Bay. For 32 years he lived with Aborigines around the bay before giving himself up in 1835. For the next thirty-two years, he continued to live among the Wathaurung people on the Bellarine Peninsula being treated with great affection and respect. "By virtue of his age and peaceful ways, Buckley ... became a Ngurungaeta, a person of considerable respect among his people and his voice was influential in deciding matters of war and peace."

This book published in 1904 has been reformatted for the Kindle and may contain an occasional defect from the original publication or from the reformatting.