But the land on which I had spread the black loam was almost barren, and yet I had seen fragments of bones mixed with it, and amongst them a lower jaw with perfect teeth, most likely the jaw of a young lubra.  On mentioning the circumstance to one of the early settlers, he said my loam had been taken from the spot on which the blacks used to burn their dead.  Soon after he arrived at Colac he saw there a solitary blackfellow crouching before a fire in which bones were visible.  So, pointing to them, he asked what was in the fire, and the blackfellow replied with one word “lubra.”  He was consuming the remains of his dead wife, and large tears were coursing down his cheeks.  Day and night he sat there until the bones had been nearly all burned and covered with ashes.  This accounted for the fragments of bones in my black loam; why it was not fertile, I know, but I don’t know how to express the reason well.

While the trenching of my vineyard was going on, Billy Nicholls looked over the fence, and gave his opinion about it.  He held his pipe between his thumb and forefinger, and stopped smoking in stupid astonishment.  He said—­“That ground is ruined, never will grow nothing no more; all the good soil is buried; nothing but gravel and stuff on top; born fool.”

Old Billy was a bullock driver, my neighbour and enemy, and lived, with his numerous progeny, in a hut in the paddock next to mine.  In the rainy seasons the water flowed through my ground on to his, and he had dug a drain which led the water past his hut, instead of allowing it to go by the natural fall across his paddock.  The floods washed his drain into a deep gully near his hut, which was sometimes nearly surrounded with the roaring waters.  He then tried to dam the water back on to my ground, but I made a gap in his dam with a long-handled shovel, and let the flood go through.  Nature and the shovel were too much for Billy.  He came out of his hut, and stood watching the torrent, holding his dirty old pipe a few inches from his mouth, and uttered a loud soliloquy:—­“Here I am—­on a miserable island—­fenced in with water—­going to be washed away —­by that Lord Donahoo, son of a barber’s clerk—­wants to drown me and my kids—­don’t he—­I’ll break his head wi’ a paling—­blowed if I don’t.”  He then put his pipe in his mouth, and gazed in silence on the rushing waters.

I planted my ground with vines of fourteen different varieties, but, in a few years, finding that the climate was unsuitable for most of them, I reduced the number to about five.  These yielded an unfailing abundance of grapes every year, and as there was no profitable market, I made wine.  I pruned and disbudded the vines myself, and also crushed and pressed the grapes.  The digging and hoeing of the ground cost about 10 pounds each year.  When the wine had been in the casks about twelve months I bottled it; in two years more it was fit for consumption, and I was very proud of the article.  But I cannot boast that I ever made much profit out of it—­that is, in cash—­ as I found that the public taste for wine required to be educated, and it took so long to do it that I had to drink most of the wine myself.  The best testimony to its excellence is the fact that I am still alive.