Buckley's chance

Origin: . Candidates are: * A reference to William Buckley (1780–1856), a convict who escaped in Victoria in 1803 and lived with an Australian Aboriginal tribe for 30 years (non-Aboriginal people in the bush were considered to have "no chance" of survival). This is the most popular candidate, but earliest known usages date from the 1890s, some 30 years after his death. Nonetheless, this was soon after Buckley's story was publicised in 1889 by E. W. Cole in his book Savage Life in Australia: The Story of William Buckley the Runaway Convict who Lived Thirty-two Years Among the Blacks of Australia, so. Origin information sourced from Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0).