They did not stand idle in the shade, waiting
for someone to come and hire them. They dug a vineyard and planted
it. The vines now bring forth fruit, the winepress is full, the must
is fermenting. When the wine has been drawn off from the lees, and
time has matured it, of what kind will it be? And will the Lord of
the Vineyard commend it?
FIRST SETTLERS.
The first white settler in Victoria was the escaped convict Buckley;
but he did not cultivate the country, nor civilise the natives. The
natives, on the contrary, uncivilised him. When white men saw him
again, he had forgotten even his mother tongue, and could give them
little information. For more than thirty years he had managed to
live--to live like a savage; but for any good he had ever done he
might as well have died with the other convicts who ran away with
him. He never gave any clear account of his companions, and many
people were of opinion that he kept himself alive by eating them,
until he was found and fed by the blacks, who thought he was one of
their dead friends, and had "jumped up a white fellow."
While Buckley was still living with the blacks about Corio Bay, in
1827, Gellibrand and Batman applied for a grant of land at Western
Port, where the whalers used to strip wattle bark when whales were
out of season; but they did not get it.
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