As the sun rose on a winter's day in 1834, and the pale light successively shone on that wild coast stretching all the way from Eden to the outskirts of Albany, only the sparsest signs of activity could be seen. Here and there the smoke drifted from a fire. On a few stretches of sand a rowing boat might be seen, resting well above the reach of the high tides. An alert eye might have discerned, in a few places, the green of a vegetable patch and the fresh unpainted wood of a hut and a new grave or two with a name and a date carved on a spar or the lid of a wooden cask. Along that 3000 miles of coast, Aboriginal people were probably stirring in the early morning from their sleeping places beside their tiny fires. Maybe a hundred Europeans could be counted. Most were camped on the coast of the present Victoria, the advance troops of an invasion which suddenly was to shake and then shatter the old Aboriginal way of life.

Bass Strait, to the British, was still more important than Victoria itself. The land was simply an intruder, a hazard, for the sea captains who passed through the strait on the last phase of their voyage from England to Sydney. Charts of this coast existed, and indeed western Victoria had been charted in 1800 by James Grant, in 1802 by Baudin the Frenchman and by Flinders the Englishman who saw a rather high sandy terrain ‘in the intervals of thick squalls’. Most Europeans living on this coast could not even read a chart. They made their living by killing seals, by catching whales near the shore and boiling them down for oil, or by gathering tanner's bark from the wattle trees. Some were former convicts and some were runaways, and many probably kept Aboriginal women who shared bed and work. These were the pioneers of the coast near Portland and Port Fairy and many bays and inlets further east.