Also on the jury for Keppel was one of the men Thomas Hill had attracted to the district, Simon Campbell, a skilled blacksmith from County Clare. He had a thriving business in the town, and links by marriage to other families of similar origins. Another Irishman and also well-established in the town and a member of an extended family there was John McGonigal.

William Martin, an orchardist from Yorkshire, John Gibson, a shoemaker from Ayreshire, and another shoemaker, John Black, from County Tyrone in the north of Ireland, were also members of this jury. Other juries were similarly mixed. It is difficult to imagine circumstances which could have brought together such disparate men before their migration, and in the isolated settlement they were jointly brought face to face with raw death.

Less exceptional deaths also forced a deal of interaction between various local people. Legal requirements surrounding a death involved the deputy-registrar, a doctor or coroner, an informant, an undertaker, a minister or witnesses - usually a minimum of five people. During most of 1857 the local deputy-registrar was Cornishman Henry Nankivell, who usually also certified the death in his role as doctor. The Reverend Hugh Blair from the north of Ireland was the only resident minister of religion and frequently signed the death certificate as one of the witnesses of the burial. Robert Shields, a carpenter from Ireland, co-signed with Blair as a witness to the burial of Donald McDonald, a general servant of Scottish birth, whose father was the informant of the death. There was no official undertaker in the town and Shields provided this service for McDonald. However, in other cases the provision of a coffin and associated duties led to a number of different men, sometimes carpenters, sometimes family members and sometimes friends, acting in this capacity. During four weeks in April 1857 sixteen different people were involved in the legal and physical requirements surrounding local deaths.¹²

Common emotions that might have been part of a shared involvement in local deaths were never enough, of course, to ensure a homogeneous community. Divisions were created by the origins of the settlers, class, religion, and, above all during 1857, by the burning question of access to the Crown land which surrounded the township - land leased to the squatters who were hoping to be able to obtain freehold to it. Many of these divisions reinforced each other, and the birth certificates reveal one of the ways in which people were separated by class and origin.

Mary Anne Johnson was an experienced midwife, in demand among the Colac settlers with links to the convict population of Van Diemen's Land. Poor economic conditions in the island colony had led to numbers of ex-convicts, many with families, making the often difficult voyage across Bass Strait to seek new opportunities on the mainland. Amongst them was a family linked by their connections to a former convict, William Massey. Massey, in 1830, at the age of 33 years, was convicted of theft in the County of Buckinghamshire and sentenced to fourteen years transportation. His wife Susannah and their five children were later permitted to join him in Van Diemen's Land, and by the time of his death in 1841 their family had increased by a further three children. Susannah subsequently married another ex-convict, Thomas East, and by 1857 their large inter-connected family group of seventeen formed a significant part of the population in Colac. They included Susannah's daughter Mary Anne and her husband Edward Johnson, with their three daughters and four sons. One of the daughters, Louisa, was married to a former convict exile, Charles Merrin, and had by 1857 borne three children. Mary Anne's husband, Edward Johnson, was one of at least seven men on the electoral roll who had been convicted in England, but who, as early settlers in the district, had been able to acquire enough land to entitle them to a vote in 1856-57. Mary Anne Johnson had midwifery skills learnt from her mother Susannah Massey/East. Birth certificates show the extent of her contacts in Colac amongst the former Van Diemen's Land residents, suggesting that people with this background formed a distinct group in the settlement.¹³

Birth certificates also show the other side of the coin. Jane Hebb and her husband, Charles, a well-educated man who had been a bookseller in Leicester, together with their six children, migrated unassisted during 1852. Jane, who was forty-six years of age, was regarded as a skilled midwife, noted for her gentle ways, her healing hands and her knowledge of herbs.¹⁴ The women she helped were all free settlers, and all people who could afford the services of the only practising doctor, Henry Nankivell.

However births, like deaths, called on the settlers' common humanity, so there were also patterns which, while they might indicate distinct groupings in the community, perhaps did so less than it initially appears. The slight tendencies for a birth attendant to have been from the same part of the British Isles, from the same class in society, or of the same religion, could also be accounted for by the fact that many of the helpers were either family members or neighbours.