Author Talk – Adam Courtenay – The ghost and the bounty hunter

Just after Christmas 1803, convict William Buckley fled an embryonic settlement in the land of the Kulin nation to take his chances in the wilderness (Port Phillip area, Victoria). A few months later, the local Aboriginal people found the former soldier near death. Believing he was a lost kinsman returned from the dead they took him in. The outside world finally caught up with Buckley in 1835, after John Batman, a bounty hunter from Van Diemen’s Land, arrived in the area seeking to acquire and control the perfect pastureland around the bay. What happened next saw the Wadawurrung betrayed and Buckley eventually broken.

Hear Adam Courtenay discuss his new book, the Ghost and the Bounty Hunter, the life of William Buckley and the birth of Melbourne.