In September 1913 Caroline Bulmer, widow of the missionary John Bulmer, wrote to the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aborigines to request that she 'be allowed to live in the old home' she had shared with her late husband on Lake Tyers Aboriginal Station 'for the rest of my life-time', adding that 'I feel to leave this home, would hasten my end'.1 She had just received Board advice that she and her dependent adult daughter Ethel were obliged to leave the station. It was a pathetic case: her husband had died barely a month earlier, she was 73 years of age, and she had known no other home since the start of her married life fifty-one years previously. The Aborigines Act 1886, under which no Aboriginal person of mixed descent under the age of 34 was entitled to reside on an Aboriginal station, was in full force, but Mrs Bulmer's situation as an elderly white woman was unique. Intriguingly, the Aboriginal residents of the station strongly supported her cause. Having already spelt out their concerns on her behalf in a carefully written petition to the Board, they prepared a second to be presented to the Governor of Victoria. The first of these petitions lies alongside Mrs Bulmer's letter and further correspondence and documents in files held at PROV. The second petition, apparently never delivered to the Governor, is in another, rather slimmer file, also in the PROV archival collection.²

Letter from Caroline Bulmer to the Board for the Protection of Aborigines, 8 September 1913. PROV, VPRS 1694/P0, Unit 6, Bundle 2

In the end the campaign for Mrs Bulmer's tenure was unsuccessful. It is one of those forgotten snippets of the past that lie buried in the archives of Aboriginal administrations around Australia - another small, lost cause all but discarded from historical memory. But the story of the Aboriginal campaign against Mrs Bulmer's eviction rewards closer examination, though it is one we might struggle to interpret. It will, perhaps, surprise the present-day reader to find a white woman of that time pleading with the authorities to be allowed to live amongst Aboriginal people on an Aboriginal reserve; we might find it even more curious today that the Aboriginal residents should have merged their own struggles with her cause. Certainly the petitions highlight a complex episode of alliance between a white woman and an Aboriginal community that interrupts a history dominated by representations of female and Aboriginal passivity and submission. More crucially, however, the story provides an insight into the fissures within the edifice of a white colonising power, so often imagined to be monolithic and unfaltering, revealing some of the ways in which those on the receiving end of colonisation resisted by intervening and actively engaging at such interstitial moments.

A simple narrative can be constructed from the archives. Such a narrative opens with the first petition, bearing 42 names, being received by the Board in August 1913 just five days after John Bulmer's death. The Board thereupon sent a remarkably distant letter to Mrs Bulmer, advising her that 'under the altered conditions your claim to occupy the quarters at the Aboriginal Station has ceased'.³ Mrs Bulmer replied to ask - with what seems a certain degree of confidence - that she be permitted to stay. Promptly approached by the Board for his 'opinion' in the matter, the manager RW Howe made his hostility to Mrs Bulmer explicit, by which time - late September - the existence of the second petition had come to the Board's attention. In November 1913 the Board notified the widow that it could 'not approve' of her remaining at the station after the end of that year. As events transpired, her date of removal would be deferred in late December till the end of January 1914, and then again till the end of March, and in fact it was not until May 1914 that the Board's vice-chairman himself informed Mrs Bulmer that she was required to 'remove with as little delay as possible', and to ensure she had 'severed her connection with the station by the end of June'. '[S]o far as the Board [was] concerned', the decision was 'final', he stated firmly. Yet the Board was finally obliged to provide an annual pension, conditional upon Mrs Bulmer vacating the station, to persuade her to leave - which she did, on the very last day of June 1914.

Nobody who looks through the records of the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aborigines can fail to be struck by the prevalence of 'the Aboriginal voice' within their pages: the Indigenous communities of Victoria reveal themselves to be prolific letter-writers who were more than willing and able to adopt the constitutional tools and methods - including formal petitions - of white Victorians to defend their interests.⁴ In her perceptive discussion of Aboriginal writings from Lake Condah in the same time period (and in the same archive), Penny van Toorn reminds us that these carefully worded public texts, seemingly concessionary and couched in the language of the white oppressors, can carry embedded within them 'hidden transcripts' of resistance, and evidence of chronic dissatisfaction.⁵ At the same time, the Aboriginal petitioners themselves seem intensely aware that they are writing to a particularly obtuse audience - white, educated, male authorities - to whom they wish to make their point unambiguously. 'We will try to make ourselves understood', the first petition begins. 'It is on behalf of Mrs Bulmer & Miss Ethel Bulmer that we are concerned about.'