Although the exact order of events is unclear, the Board's request to Howe for further information was dated 19 September, the day after the Member for Gippsland North, James McLachlan, forwarded the second petition from Lake Tyers Station to the representative for the Lake Tyers district, the Member for East Gippsland, James Cameron. This second petition, which had significantly revised the original and was open in its criticism of the Board, had been sent to McLachlan, who now advised Cameron that he had 'informed the petitioners it is in your hands'.²² Cameron himself had just received a letter concerning Mrs Bulmer from a Mr HS Dickson in Melbourne. Probably drawn in through a connection with the Bulmer family, whom he appeared to know personally, Dickson asked Cameron to rectify this 'injustice': 'it seems a very hard and cruel thing, to treat his widow like this ... Surely the old lady can be left in her house, and receive supplies for the year or two she might live'.²³ Cameron, it seems, then passed the assorted correspondence to the Chief Secretary, who was also the Board's chairman. It was then referred directly to the Board for consideration on 20 September - two days before the date of Howe's reply. Meanwhile, the Board's secretary had also received a second letter from Mrs Bulmer (dated 19 September, the same day that they had first asked Howe for more details), asserting the validity of her claim to the house her husband had built.

The extension of the matter into the wider public domain and especially the interest of two parliamentarians may well explain the Board's hesitancy at this point. Mrs Bulmer and Howe were directed on 2 October that 'existing arrangements will not be disturbed for the present'.

A month later the Board had arrived at a considered opinion on the matter. In a letter to the Chief Secretary (who, as already noted, was chairman of the Board), dated 24 November, the secretary recorded the bland explanation that the Board felt 'that in the best interests of the station it is advisable that she [Mrs Bulmer] is not permitted to remain'. The point was clarified in the minutes of their discussion on the question in the New Year, 1914:

The Board thinks that a continuation of residence is not desirable, as discipline is interfered with, since from long association, the Bulmer family necessarily retains a strong influence over the aborigines.²⁴

Whether beyond their understanding, or simply their capacity to express it, the fact that Aboriginal people had taken the initiative was not allowed for in this record of the Board members' view. Nevertheless, the intervention of the Aboriginal people at Lake Tyers to help Mrs Bulmer, in the face of the manager's overt hostility, was the foremost reason the Board decided to support the latter's position. It is therefore worth returning to a closer consideration of this second petition.

Faced with no response to their original petition (other than the peremptory letter sent to Mrs Bulmer), in early September 1913 the Lake Tyers residents had approached Percy Pepper, a man living off the reserve, for help. Pepper re-wrote the petition for them and included a statement describing his role at the bottom: 'I, P. Pepper Half Cast Cunninghame who has Relations on Lake Tye[r]s Knowing what the People want and Acting as Leader of this Petation my Siginiture Percy Pepper'. By now the list of signatories had grown from 42 to 53 (including Pepper and his two witnesses). The first petition had been headed by John McDougall and his wife Bella (in what seems to be the tradition of Lake Tyers petitions, men's names were generally listed in a column on the left, and women's on the right) and while the order of the names had changed somewhat, the name of John McDougall still headed the list. As van Toorn points out, the order of names listed on Aboriginal petitions signified the ongoing recognition of authority within Aboriginal communities that was being subtly asserted in formal correspondence with the white administration. Pepper, originally from Ramahyuck Mission and forced away by the Aborigines Act 1886, was married to a woman from an original Lake Tyers family, and, as John McDougall's wife was the aunt of Pepper's wife, it may have been through this connection that Pepper was approached.²⁵

Van Toorn has written more extensively on the BPA archives in her recent book, Writing never arrives naked, in which she makes the point that the Victorian authorities used writing as a self-protective distancing device - that is, orders to be carried out on the stations were sent by the authorities comfortably ensconced in their Melbourne office, while the Aboriginal writers used the same tool to bridge the social and spatial divide between themselves and those who could help them, evading the 'proper' channels of communication to write directly to those in positions of higher authority. Furthermore, van Toorn speculates, for Aboriginal people 'the written petition had to be delivered as though it were an oral message' in order to be considered effective, both in terms of the white man's criteria for authenticity, and to satisfy their own cultural precepts: 'Power and meaning did not reside inherently in the alphabetically written document itself, but were activated through the ceremonial process of its face-to-face delivery and re-voicing'.²⁶ In fact, when Pepper forwarded this second petition to McLachlan, he explained in a cover note his intention to come to Melbourne in the company of 'The oldest Aboriginal' on Lake Tyers and one of that man's sons. They would present the petition 'our Selves' to the Governor, wrote Pepper, as the Board 'have not given us Satisfaction to the last Petation we sent in':

... we think it is better to carry the Petation and any question we will answer or rather the 2 men I take down will as one of them was in his wild State when he first knew Mr and Mrs Bulmer ....

They wanted to call upon McLachlan as well, to 'let you know every thing also show to you some of the Aboriginals Complaint how things are carried on'. Face-to-face contact could serve pragmatic reasons as well as ceremonial, of course, allowing opportunities to elaborate and argue that were not necessarily available or possible in the written text.