While respectful, the tone of Pepper's letter was not that of a supplicant. Pointing out that he realised that McLachlan was not the member for their electoral district, he explained that he had taken the parliamentarian 'into Confidence' on behalf of 'our People' who were 'unsettled about what is to become of Mrs Bulmer and also the daughter ...':

[A]though they [the Lake Tyers people] have no Say in putting men in Parlement the Same as I do as I am a half cast they look to me to help them the Same way as I look to you for help ... I hope and trust you will help us with the Pass [to come to Melbourne by rail] as it is no good to write to the Board of Protection as they would not give us one ...

Pepper concluded his letter, having emphasised that the petition was 'for Miss Bulmer and Mrs Bulmer to remain ... we intend to get it through', by making one final appeal for clemency that sits somewhat incongruously, if not impossibly, with the assertive tenor of the rest: 'it is for the sake of a Race that will soon die out trusting you will help'.

The petition itself had been substantially reworked from the original, particularly in the vigorous exposition of the petitioners' reasons for caring about Mrs Bulmer's fate (the original, as we have seen, expressing only their loyalties to her late husband). Opening with the heartfelt plea that the Governor 'give to us the People we would Love to be amongst us', the statement emphasised the close and filial affection the petitioners felt for Mrs Bulmer. She had 'been like a mother to us ... we all want her to Live the Rest of her Life with us'. Those of 'our Parents' who had known Mrs Bulmer when they 'were young and in their Wild state' did not want Mrs Bulmer to 'go away from them', while those of the younger generations who had been 'braught up with the Bulmer Family' considered that 'it will be very hard for them to Part from us'.

At the same time, concerns about the future of the station under government administration, discernible in the first petition, emerged more strongly. This was framed through the device of Mrs Bulmer's continuing motherly care, despite her removal from any position of responsibility with the new management:

... we know the help Mrs Bulmer and Miss Ethel Bulmer has given in the time of Sickness not only when they had the Station but after Mr Bulmer had handed it to the Present Manager and his wife although Mrs Bulmer has nothing to do with the Mission She still Looks after us in the time of trouble in the way of a Mother she Loves the Blacks and we love her we do beg to have her and her daughter with us not only for the our Selves but for the sake of our Children ...

They had 'heard no more about' the petition they had sent to the Board, and so they had 'made up our minds' to see the Governor himself, believing he would see they were 'treated in the Proper way', again implying that the Board itself would not. Indeed the petitioners concluded that Mrs Bulmer's eviction represented a state of affairs at Lake Tyers that demanded investigation into the Board's administration: 'the Station is a place that want to be seen into by some one who will look into things and they will know'. In this way, Mrs Bulmer's plight became a symbol of Aboriginal grievances against the new government regime, and a cause that might motivate other white authorities to take their grievances seriously. Her treatment was, perhaps, an 'injustice' that would outrage all.

At the point at which this petition arrived at the Board's office, as we have seen, the Board put the decision on Mrs Bulmer's eviction in abeyance while they assessed the situation. However, the hostility to the Board revealed in the second petition, and the Aboriginal effort to wield resistance it represented, could only have hardened the Board's resolve. In many ways the two petitions reflected a general air of unrest amongst Victorian Aboriginal people that had been evident for some years. John Bulmer himself had written sourly of the young 'half educated fellows' who used their 'powers of writing' to 'air their supposed grievances' by writing to the Governor, or interviewing a member of parliament.²⁷ One can only wonder what he would have made of the Lake Tyers campaign on behalf of his widow. But in the eyes of the Board it could only be a demonstration of Aboriginal subversion at a crucial time of regime change, organised around the figure of one who stood for the missionary control of the past. In 1915 legislation would be passed extending the government's powers over all Aboriginal and mixed-descent people in the state. The intent had long been to make Lake Tyers the centre for a Board policy of forcibly 'concentrating' all remaining Victorian Aborigines onto this one reserve. This was finally formally fixed upon by the Board at a meeting in 1917, by which time James Cameron, along with other parliamentarians 'in whose districts aboriginal stations or depôts existed', had been appointed to the Board.²⁸ Mrs Bulmer had to be expelled. Not because her presence in itself threatened the government (for, indeed, she may well have been allowed to live out her days in peace, had there been no petition), but to demonstrate to the Aboriginal residents the resolution of the state authorities and the futility of any attempts to resist. Had Pepper been able to deliver the second petition in person we can assume the outcome would have been no different. In hindsight, the campaign looks remarkably naïve. It not only backfired for Mrs Bulmer - remembering that the Lake Tyers residents and not she had apparently taken the initiative - but in the end was quite clearly unsuccessful in terms of changing the power relations both on the reserve and between Aboriginal people and the Board.

But to interpret this episode, this small lost cause, purely in terms of its outcomes is in a real sense to miss the point. In acting to support and endorse Mrs Bulmer's claim to stay at Lake Tyers, the Aboriginal petitioners seized upon an opportunity to make known their wider concerns about their collective futures at a key moment in their history, intervening at a vulnerable point of rupture between the old (missionary) and the new (secular state) forms of management and indeed colonisation. Regardless of both the motivation and the outcomes, this was at once an assertion of the central and ongoing importance of land and community connections to the residents of Lake Tyers, and an assertion of the rights of the people of the land and community to manage their own affairs - at root, to decide and announce who was to live among them. Revealing a humanity and generosity of spirit that resided at the heart of the Aboriginal community of Lake Tyers, the petitions showed the resilience, also, of a deep sense of Aboriginal authority that had abided through generations of violence, dislocation and missionary control, and that stood in open challenge to the growing power of the state in the opening years of the twentieth century.