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.
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