But my chief excursions, which have left a pleasantly vivid recollection
of early colonizing life, were made to the far west--the one in 1844,
right through to the Glenelg; the other the year after, to the
newly-founded township of Warrnambool. The first of these was undertaken
partly on business in the interests of the Boyd stations lately formed
about Eumerella, a place of evil repute then as to the native hostility.
I had previously chanced to "chum" with Boyd's Port Phillip manager, Mr.
Robert Fennell, a young fellow as well-looked, gentlemanly, and pleasant
as anyone could meet with, and with whom I both officed and housed to
mutual satisfaction for two years, until his marriage with a daughter of
John Batman. And thus I came in for some few of the many Boyd
commissions that were flying freely about in those years, and which were
not at all unacceptable to any of us in that time of small things. I
afterwards, as I have pleasure in recording, received the hospitalities
of the great commission-maker in his generously open house at Sydney.

Once more, in passing westwards, I was at Colac. It was the month of
June (midwinter), but the country, with its lake, was not the less
beautiful in the universal green. Excepting the partial post-and-rail
barricade of my friend William Robertson's 5,000 acres of purchased
land, there was nothing all around but free and open squatting. On every
side was the hardly yet disturbed indigenous aspect. Pelicans flew
aloft, tall "adjutants" stalked about here and there, and cockatoos
screeched everywhere. One of the curious green knolls, so common there,
was so thickly covered with the yellow-crested white cockatoo as to give
the look of a cap of snow.

Leaving Morris's huts, I made for another Boyd station, in the famous
far west Eumerella district. There were many beauties around, for I had
entered Mitchell's "Australia Felix"--its extreme borders, to be sure,