Bill Buckley, Order of Australia, worked on level six of building one at Jumbunna student centre. I’m pretty sure he once told me that he was Jumbunna’s first employee. He was the first person I talked to at UTS— he called me, asked me what I wanted to study, told me stories about former students and family.
After that, Bill would call me every week, say ‘I’m not policing’, just that he would like me to pop in to try a cake he or Colleen had baked. We went to his house for lunch once and he and Colleen served us Uyghur chicken stew and an oat slice.
I would be in his office and former students would pop by to say hello, or come in their graduating gowns to get a photo. His funeral was no different—dozens of us formed an honour guard from different universities and decades.
He was one of those people I wished I’d taken a photo of, sitting in his office on Level Six of Building One, overlooking the Waraburra Nura garden.
I told Bill I was writing poems and so he yarned to me about poets for a long time. The ones he admired, like Bobby Sands, and the poets who he had crossed paths with like Oodgeroo Nunnegal. He’d run poetry workshops in prisons as a young man, and ‘Aunty Kath’ known later as Oodgeroo, went in with him once. One fella in prison recognised her, came up and said that when he was in year 8, his last year at school, he’d written a letter to Oodgeroo and she sent one back. He had the very letter in his cell, all those years later. He read it out in front of the group. Bill said he looked around the room and the whole group of prisoners had come to tears.
Bill also printed out poems for me by a blackfella he’d worked with in prison who spoke beautifully but didn’t write. Bill told him a short pause meant a line break, and a long one a full stop. He took his words from that prison block, showed them to me and many other people. I’ve got one of his poems on my wall. Last year he told me he had plans to travel south because he had a hunch about where he could find him. Anyone who knew Bill wouldn’t be surprised—he was gifted with enough sentimentality that he was always remembering. And although he was a whitefella he’d been around mob long enough that he was bound to know one of your cousins or Aunties or Uncles.
That was talking to Bill—listening to a man with one big story that connected everything, that shot in every direction. He remembered every face and name and story.
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