We have seen that the Board's initial decision to expel Mrs Bulmer was made in reaction to the petition from Lake Tyers. Their determination to carry this decision through would be based on the threat they were increasingly convinced her presence posed to the station management. On 16 September 1913, Howe had responded with irritation to the Board's request for his opinion on Mrs Bulmer's appeal. He complained that 'the proposition was unworkable', referring to the 'party interests' on the station and the need for the Board's representative to have 'sole and uninterrupted control over the natives', as the 'old regime [was to] be ended forever by the death of Mr Bulmer'. The Board asked him to elaborate.

It was clear Howe had been looking forward to directing Mrs Bulmer to go. Seeing his opportunity to do so evaporating, he was strenuous in his defence of his opinion. As he explained in his cramped writing: 'What I meant by party interests, was that, at any time when I had occasion to correct or punish any of the blacks or halfcastes for misbehaviour' (for example, sending people off the station), Mrs Bulmer would sympathise with those people, saying 'that it was a shame to treat them like that', and so 'always caus[ing] a strong current of opposition against me' and making 'it much more difficult for my wife & myself to control the natives & maintain discipline on the Station'. Furthermore, he complained, Mrs Bulmer was in a habit of 'order[ing]' the people to carry out work for her '& they of course would not refuse her', thus keeping them 'from doing the work which I had instructed them to do'. All this meant that Howe 'could not cope with the position without a great deal of unpleasantness which I wished to avoid during the lifetime of Mr Bulmer as he had nothing to do with the before mentioned facts'.¹⁵

Howe was known as 'a hard man' by the Lake Tyers people and his reputation lives on in their history.¹⁶ In the archival records, his vindictiveness towards Mrs Bulmer betrays a man who felt his own position of authority to be insecure. A confrontation in 1911 between him and his wife and an Aboriginal woman, Emily Stephen, who had been moved onto Lake Tyers from Ramahyuck, provides a telling glimpse into the history of his relationships not just with the Aboriginal residents but also with Mrs Bulmer. It suggests too that the Aboriginal people were adopting a protective stance towards Caroline Bulmer even before her bereavement. Emily Stephen had arranged for her 14-year-old daughter to work for Mrs Bulmer (as a servant) and was incensed when Mrs Howe tried to bully the girl back to work in her own household, complaining to the Board of the Howes's high-handed treatment of the station people. Mrs Stephen represented Mrs Bulmer as a defenceless 'old lady' who depended upon her daughter's regular 'help', and who was 'afraid for me to write to you, because she said Captain's word would be taken first':

Howe was outraged, countering that Emily Stephen 'defies me ... she goes round to all the blacks and the Bulmers telling them that she has the "Board" on her side ...'.¹⁸ He was certainly not above exploiting existing tensions on the station (or 'party feelings') himself in his efforts to get Mrs Stephen driven off the station. Howe's complaints against Mrs Stephen would be echoed in those he made against Mrs Bulmer a few years later, and suggest that Mrs Bulmer may have had good cause to fear him. Mrs Stephen, wrote Howe with open venom,

Mrs Stephen was indeed forced off the station in October of that year (1911),²⁰ so she was no longer there when Mrs Bulmer was facing eviction two years later. Her experience at the hands of Howe gives us an insight into the kind of 'unpleasantness' Howe felt obliged to 'avoid' when John Bulmer was alive. The conflict itself provides clear evidence of solidarity between Caroline Bulmer and the Lake Tyers people, alluded to by Howe in his 1913 complaints about the widow's misplaced sympathies.

Of course, Howe's personal hostility does not explain the Board's determination to expel Mrs Bulmer (or indeed Mrs Stephen). The Board members had been impatient with Howe over the case of Mrs Stephen. '[A] little gentle advice may probably have the effect desired so that the intervention of the Board would not be necessary', they admonished him in response to his first request to have her removed.²¹ It was only his consummate failure to exert his authority effectively, the evidence of which he provided in such detail in his complaints, that compelled them to intervene in that instance. Now, in relation to Mrs Bulmer, the Board responded cautiously, and relatively slowly, to his reply of 22 September.