The National School Board acted and Miskin was dismissed.

There was a public uproar. Meetings were held and letters flowed to Melbourne. One was quite explicit. After stating that the people were perfectly satisfied with Miskin they claimed that his enemy was a squatter who was trying to remove him because, as the agent of the Colonial Freehold Land Society, Miskin had been the means of procuring some of the squatters' runs for the Colac people.

The issue was finally resolved. Miskin's dismissal remained, but a new set of school patrons, acceptable to both the Board in Melbourne and the Colac people, was negotiated.

The people publicly involved in this issue were men, and mainly men whose presence in the settlement had pre-dated the gold rushes. Not all of them had children and others had children whose education would not have been at the National School. Henry Nankivell, for example, was single and someone who in his role as doctor mixed more widely in the community than the Murray family, with whom he was connected by marriage. Alexander Dennis held an extensive squatting run east of the town, and unlike the other district squatters had not lived in class-conscious Van Diemen's Land. He came to the area with his family directly from Cornwall in 1841 and was a staunch Methodist. The dissident group had suggested him as a new patron. Irish Catholic Patrick Danaher's colonial life dated from his arrival on the Lady Peel in 1850 as one of several immigrants sponsored by Lord Monteagle. There had always been a Catholic patron on the board of the local school, and Patrick, although now engaged in the profitable business of carrying to the goldfields, had a family in Colac and was a literate and respected citizen, and was seen as an appropriate person to be nominated. Thomas Hill, always ready to face up to the squatter class, was also outspoken at meetings of this group. The interconnected issues of land, school, and politics thus revealed both increasing fractures in the local society and disinterested people prepared to act together for the perceived common good.

Presumably there were women of the community vitally interested in the welfare and education of their children, but public records do not reveal this. Apart from the bald numbers on the census returns, and civil registrations, very few official records were found which shed any light on the activities of the women. While there are no extant court records for Colac during 1857, one Colac case did reach the Geelong court. A young girl of eight-and-a-half years had been sexually assaulted after being enticed with sweets into a hayfield on the outskirts of the town. Jane Gears appeared as a witness at the trial, giving an identity to one of the three women storekeepers identified by the census. She told of the child coming into her store with money for a shilling's worth of biscuits. The accused man had been in the store at the same time and the two left together. Gears, a childless, married Irishwoman, signed her deposition in a firm and practised hand. Maria Troy's signature was also firm but perhaps not as confident. She had seen the two in the field and when she came out her door the accused man went the other way. Brigid Anthony, working in her family's hotel, saw the two leave the field separately and recalled the prisoner coming in for a nobbler after being seen with the child. Brigid, too, was literate. Sarah, the child, was taken by her mother, a 46- year-old, well-educated settler of several years' standing, to the doctor for examination on the evening of the assault.

A glimpse into another woman's possible hard lot came in the files of the Geelong Police District. Amelia Pearce had given birth to a son, Robert, in Melbourne, shortly before her husband, Constable Robert Henry Pearce, was transferred with little notice to Colac. Sergeant Cahir in Colac was instructed to advise Pearce about finding a hut as lodging for his family, and permitted him to take the Colac police horse and cart to Winchelsea to collect his wife and child, who would have had to travel there by ship from Melbourne to Geelong and thence by coach to Winchelsea.¹⁸

Another young wife had a very different life. In 1854, at the age of seventeen, Annie Blair and her husband Reverend Hugh Blair, who was sixteen years her senior, arrived in Melbourne aboard the SS Great Britain. Blair's appointment to Colac followed and in 1857 the couple moved to the newly completed manse. Here the young woman, now with a one-year-old son, Hugh Murray Blair, was frequently required to entertain official visitors to the town, often accommodating groups of six or seven people. There are occasional glimpses of her witnessing a marriage when a wedding took place at the manse.

Some women appeared as inquest witnesses. We learn that Isabella Pink was married to a timber worker who was away in the forest for up to two weeks at a time, leaving her with two children under three years of age. Mary Doyle was seen staying for a week in the home of a settler outside the town, being prepared to help with an imminent confinement. Another woman was married to a man who had drinking bouts of two to six weeks. Maria James, the wife of a herbalist, had been consulted about the death of a man who suffered 'stoppage of the bowells'.¹⁹

Three women, each the mother of a large family, were widowed during 1857. Seven experienced the death of an infant. Over half the women of child-bearing age had a child during the year, many of these infants, particularly those of the pre-1853 settlers, joining families where there were already five or six other children. Perhaps women were elusive when it came to creating a snapshot of the district in 1857 but their presence influenced so much else of what went on. The housing, the standard of the school, the employment of the men, and even the quest for land at every level of society, was of increased importance because of the substantial number of families making their home in the colonial outpost.

In compiling this snapshot, accounts of co-operation and of conflict in the little settlement were enriched as knowledge of the protagonists' backgrounds, and perceived personalities became part of the story. Family histories and other contemporary sources added depth to the information that emerged from the official records. The particular nature of the Colac area - its discrete geographical boundaries and relatively small population with a stable element stretching back almost twenty years - was a key factor which made such a study possible.