Aged about 21 when she married widower John Bulmer in January 1862, Caroline had accompanied her husband later that year to set up home on the site he had only just selected for a new Church of England mission in Gippsland, at Lake Tyers.⁶ Decades later, in mid-1907, the Board, which had been pushing for the closure of one or more of the Aboriginal missions since the turn of the century, resolved to take over the management of Lake Tyers Station and oversee the transfer there of Ramahyuck Mission residents, appointing RW Howe as manager.⁷ Bulmer had asked permission to remain in his house with his wife and 'minister to the spiritual needs of the Aborigines'. The Board consented, and allowed him, his wife and daughter to continue to receive rations.⁸ But the Bulmers only remained on sufferance, and when John Bulmer died his aged widow was entirely redundant. 'As her role was created by marriage, so it was destroyed by her husband's death', observes historian Hilary Carey of the missionary wife's experience in the Australian colonies.⁹ For the Lake Tyers people, preparing their petition within a few days of John Bulmer's death, the uncertainty of his widow's position was likely to have been a source of cultural anxiety as well as symbolic of their own insecure position. John Bulmer had earlier recorded the care that 'the Gippslanders' had shown a bereaved widow, noting also their belief that when a man died his spirit 'may hang around the camp for a time to see to the interests of his wife, but as soon as all is settled he takes his departure', as told in the story of a ghost who haunted his wife until the people organised her remarriage.¹⁰ What the residents of Lake Tyers made of Caroline Bulmer's situation in spiritual terms we cannot know, but we can be sure they would have felt it appropriate, even urgent, that someone look after her interests. They had reportedly been very concerned about what would become of John Bulmer back in 1907, and a sense of their loyalty to his memory - rather than a concern for Caroline Bulmer's welfare per se - comes through strongly in their advocacy for his widow in the first petition. Reverend Bulmer had 'spent his life time amongst us' this petition stressed, and through his teachings and the 'home' he established at Lake Tyers, 'many were led to lead better lives'. He was

The petitioners asked only that 'if she wishes', Mrs Bulmer be allowed to stay at the station, without making any specific claim for her. However, they went on to request that her daughter Ethel be allowed 'to live with her & carry on the work in which she assisted her late father' (conducting Sunday School) and pointed out that 'Yesterday Sunday there was neither Sunday school or Church, and if this is what is before us, then it is a poor outlook for the children & younger ones growing up'. Two of the Bulmers' adult children resided on the station at that time. Son Frank, who John had once hoped would take over from him as manager, was on a salary as an assistant to Howe,¹¹ while Ethel, who had earlier returned to Lake Tyers to act as matron there until Howe's wife could take up that duty, was now taking Sunday School and playing the church organ in return for her rations.¹² The reference to Ethel's contribution could be read as a pointed criticism of the government's administration of the station.

The Board it seems did not deign to reply. Whether its members recognised the implicit challenge in the petitioners' statement of their own perceived obligations to the late missionary, or were annoyed by the aspersions cast on their secular management, or were simply being bloody-minded, the decision to evict Caroline Bulmer was made in direct response to the petition. A minute scrawled on the back of the document a fortnight later (1 September) by secretary Ditchburn would be repeated in the blunt note sent to her two days later: 'Write Mrs Bulmer pointing out that she has now no claim to occupy the quarters inquiring what arrangements she proposes to make her future residence'. So it was, in fact, the intercession of the Lake Tyers people on behalf of Mrs Bulmer that was the catalyst for the Board's decision to evict her.

In her initial response to the Board's letter, Caroline Bulmer had also insinuated the spiritual inadequacy of government administration when she suggested, somewhat slyly, that if the Board thought Howe should take over her daughter Ethel's duties Ethel would resign. However, over the following months her correspondence with the Board tended to argue her claim upon the house at Lake Tyers in financial terms alone, deviating from the need expressed by the petitioners for a continued church presence. Her home, she reiterated, was 'wholly built by my late husband' with the 'assistance of the natives - thereby costing the Government nothing'. As a strategic device this may have seemed astute, given that the Board was always attentive to cost-saving measures, as Mrs Bulmer was well aware, but in fact it provided leverage for the Board. At the end of 1913 they offered to consider 'a money allowance' both as an inducement to Mrs Bulmer to leave and as a way of avoiding 'the appearance of harshness', eventually providing a pension of £52 per annum. The minutes of the Board's discussion on this payment in 1914 show further that they were aware they were getting off lightly (compared with the monies provided to former male manager-missionaries on other stations), and, as her allowance was to be paid out of the 'Compassionate Allowance Vote' rather than their own coffers, in effect they had saved the cost of the rations allowed her on the station. These rations were, they noted, of equivalence. For Caroline Bulmer's part, the financial hardship was probably less critical than the distress caused by leaving the home she had lived in all her married life and called her own. She had relations in the vicinity, and a male relative - possibly another son, an apparently successful timber merchant - took her in after she left the station and continued to represent her interests up until her death some five years later.¹³ John Bulmer had left a modest estate of a little land and a house in Cunninghame let for 10s. a week; and in the event, if we can believe the spiteful report submitted by Howe soon after her departure, Mrs Bulmer was in a position to buy a block of land in Cunninghame and build a house on it.¹⁴ Indeed she seems to have accepted the offer of a pension only once she was resigned to the inevitability of her eviction, ten days before she actually left.