Soon after this memorable incident, the Minister and Secretary made an official pleasure excursion through the Western District.  They visited the court and inspected it, and me, and the books, and the furniture.  They found everything correct, and were afterwards so sociable that I expected they would, on returning to Melbourne, speedily promote me, probably to the Bench.  But they forgot me, and promoted themselves instead.  I have seen them since sitting nearly as high as Haman in those expensive Law courts in Lonsdale Street, while I was a despicable jury-man serving the Crown for ten shillings a day.  That is the way of this world; the wicked are well-paid and exalted, while the virtuous are ill-paid and trodden down.  At a week’s notice I was ordered to leave my Garden of Eden, and I let it to a tenant, the very child of the Evil One.  He pruned the vines with goats and fed his cattle on the fruit trees.  Then he wrote to inquire why the vines bore no grapes and the fruit trees no fruit, and wanted me to lower the rent, to repair the vineyard and the house, and to move the front gate to the corner of the fence.  That man deserved nothing but death, and he died.

In the summer of 1853, the last survivor of the Barrabool tribe came to Colac, and joined the remnant of the Colac blacks, but one night he was killed by them at their camp, near the site of the present hospital.  A shallow hole was dug about forty or fifty yards from the south-east corner of the allotment on which the Presbyterian manse was built, and the Colac tribe buried his body there, and stuck branches of trees around his grave.  About six months afterwards a Government officer, the head of a department, arrived at Colac, and I rode with him about the township and neighbouring country showing him the antiquities and the monuments, among others the mausoleum of the last of the Barrabools.  The leaves had by this time fallen from the dead branches around the sepulchre, and the small twigs on them were decaying.  The cattle and goats would soon tread them down and scatter them, and the very site of the grave would soon be unknown.

The officer was a man of culture and of scientific tendencies, and he asked me to dig up the skull of the murdered blackfellow, and sent it to his address in Melbourne.  He was desirous of exercising his culture on it, and wished to ascertain whether the skull was bracchy-cephalous, dolichophalous, or polycephalous.  I think that was the way he expressed it.  I said there was very likely a hole in it, and it would be spoiled; but he said the hole would make no difference.  I would do almost anything for science and money, but he did not offer me any, and I did not think a six months’ mummy was old enough to steal; it was too fresh.  If that scientist would borrow a spade and dig up the corpse himself, I would go away to a sufficient distance and close my eyes and nose until he had deposited the relic in his carpet bag.  But I was too conscientious to be accessory to the crime of body-snatching, and he had not courage enough to do the foul deed.  That land is now fenced in, and people dwell there.  The bones of the last of the Barrabools still rest under somebody’s house, or fertilise a few feet of a garden plot.