“You don’t know me, Mat?”

“Know ye, is it?  Sure I never clapped eyes on ye before, that I know of.  Are ye runaway Government men?  Tell the truth, now, for I am not the man to turn informer agin misfortunate craythurs like yourselves.”

“My name is Tyers.  I passed this way, you may remember, not very long ago.”

“What!  Mr. Tyers, the commissioner?  Sure I didn’t know you from Adam.  So ye never went to Gippsland at all?”

“Our horses got at the provisions and spoiled them; so we had to come back, and we have had nothing to eat for three days.  There is one man somewhere behind yet; I am afraid he will lie down and die.  Do you think you could find him?”

“For the love of mercy, I’ll try, anyway.  Norah, dear, take care of the poor fellows while I go and look for the other man; and mind, only to give ’em a little food and drink at a time, or they’ll kill their wake stomachs with greediness; and see you all do just as Norah tells you while I’m away, for you are no better than childer.”

Mat galloped away to look for the last man, while his wife watched over the welfare of her guests.  She said: 

“The Lord save us, and be betune us and harm, but when I seen you in the garden I thought ye were bushrangers, and I took up the ould gun to shoot ye.”

Mat soon found the last man, put him on his horse, and brought him to the hut.  Next morning he yoked his bullocks, put all his guests into the dray, and started for Dandenong.  On December 23rd, 1843, Mr. Tyers and his men arrived in Melbourne, and he reported to Mr. Latrobe the failure of his second attempt to reach Gippsland.

While the commissioner and his men were vainly endeavouring to reach the new country, seven other men were suffering famine and extreme hardships to get away from it.  They had arrived at the Old Port by sea, having been engaged to strip bark by Mr. P. W. Walsh, usually known in Melbourne as Paddy Walsh.  He had been chief constable in Launceston.  Many years before Batman or Fawkner landed in Port Philip, parties of whalers were sent each year to strip wattle bark at Western Port.  Griffiths and Co. had found the business profitable, and Paddy Walsh came to the conclusion that there was money to be made out of bark in Gippsland.  He therefore engaged seven men and shipped them by schooner, writing to a storekeeper at the Old Port to receive the bark, ship it to Melbourne, and supply the strippers with the requisite stores.

The seven men landed at the Old Port and talked to the pioneers.  They listened to their dismal accounts of starvation on roast flathead and mutton-birds’ eggs, of the ferocity of the blacks, of the murder of Macalister, of the misfortunes of Glengarry.  The nine-pounder gun still stood at the corner of the company’s store, pointed towards the scrub, a silent warning to the new men of the dangers in store for them.  They took their guns and went