Buckley's Hope: The Story Of Australia's Wild White Men
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Tanning and foxing
One of the most astonishing true stories to emerge from the Australian frontier, Buckley's Hope chronicles the extraordinary life of William Buckley — a transported convict who escaped into the vast wilderness of early colonial Victoria and lived for thirty-two years among the Wathaurong Aboriginal people, becoming a towering, ghostly figure the Indigenous Australians believed to be a reincarnated ancestor. Craig Robertson reconstructs this almost mythological tale with meticulous historical rigour, drawing on contemporary accounts and records to illuminate the collision of two radically different worlds on the Australian continent in the early nineteenth century. Robertson presents Buckley's saga not merely as a survival story, but as a profound meditation on identity, belonging, and the nature of civilisation itself — a man who stood literally and figuratively between two cultures, belonging fully to neither. The narrative sits at the crossroads of biography and historical adventure, rendered in a style that is both vivid and authoritative, capturing the raw, unforgiving beauty of pre-settlement Australia. The phrase Buckley's chance, still alive in the Australian vernacular today, was born from this very legend — and after reading Robertson's account, one is left to wonder whether that expression speaks more to the impossibility of survival, or the impossible miracle of one man's endurance.
Author: Craig Robertson
Format: Hardback
Genre: Australian history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Tanning and foxing
One of the most astonishing true stories to emerge from the Australian frontier, Buckley's Hope chronicles the extraordinary life of William Buckley — a transported convict who escaped into the vast wilderness of early colonial Victoria and lived for thirty-two years among the Wathaurong Aboriginal people, becoming a towering, ghostly figure the Indigenous Australians believed to be a reincarnated ancestor. Craig Robertson reconstructs this almost mythological tale with meticulous historical rigour, drawing on contemporary accounts and records to illuminate the collision of two radically different worlds on the Australian continent in the early nineteenth century. Robertson presents Buckley's saga not merely as a survival story, but as a profound meditation on identity, belonging, and the nature of civilisation itself — a man who stood literally and figuratively between two cultures, belonging fully to neither. The narrative sits at the crossroads of biography and historical adventure, rendered in a style that is both vivid and authoritative, capturing the raw, unforgiving beauty of pre-settlement Australia. The phrase Buckley's chance, still alive in the Australian vernacular today, was born from this very legend — and after reading Robertson's account, one is left to wonder whether that expression speaks more to the impossibility of survival, or the impossible miracle of one man's endurance.