But the country was too good to be occupied solely by savages, and when McMillan returned with reinforcements he made some arrangements, the exact particulars of which he would never disclose.  He brought cattle to his run, and they quickly grew fat; but civilised man does not live by fat cattle alone, and a market had to be sought.  Twofold Bay was too far away, and young Melbourne was somewhere beyond impassable mountains.  McMillan built a small boat, which he launched on the river, and pulled down to the lakes in search of an outlet.  He found it, but the current was so strong that it carried him out to sea.  He had to land on the outer beach, and to drag his boat back over the sands to the inner waters.

He next rode westward with his man Friday to look for a port at Corner Inlet, and he blazed a track to the Albert River.  Friday was an inland black.  He gazed at the river, which was flowing towards the mountains, and said: 

“What for stupid yallock* yan along a bulga**?”

[* Footnote:  Yallock, river. *Bulga, mountain.]

McMillan tried to explain the theory of the tides.

“One big yallock down there push him along, come back by-and-by.”  And Friday saw the water come back by-and-by.

They reached the mouth of the river on February 1st, 1841, saw a broad expense of salt water, and McMillan concluded that he had found a port for Gippsland.

Ten months afterwards Jack Shay arrived at the port.  He had first come to Twofold Bay from Van Diemen’s Land, and nothing was known about his former life.  “That’s nothing to nobody,” he said.  He was a bushman, rough and weather-beaten, with only one peculiarity.  The quart pot which he slung to his belt would hold half a gallon of tea, while other pots only held a quart, and that was the reason why he was known all the way from Monaroo to Adelaide as “Jack of the Quart Pot.”

He had arrived rather late on the previous evening, and this morning, as he sat on a log contemplating the scenery, his first conclusion was that the port was not flourishing.  There was not a ship within sight.  The mouth of the Albert River was visible on his right, and the inlet was spread out before him shining in the morning sun.  About a mile away on the western shore was One Tree Hill.  Towards the south were mud banks and mangrove islands, through which the channel zigzagged like a figure of eight, and then the view was closed by the scrub on Sunday Island.  There was a boat at anchor in the channel about a mile distant, in which two men were fishing for their breakfast, for there was famine in the settlement, and the few pioneers left in it were kept alive on a diet of roast flathead.  On the beach three boats were drawn up out of reach of the tide, and looking behind him Jack counted twelve huts and one store of wattle-and-dab.  The store had been built to hold the goods of the Port Albert Company.  It was in charge of John Campbell, and