In 1981 the historian Peter Gardner wrote a moving article in the VictorianHistoricalJournal on the fate of the Gippsland aboriginal leader Bunjilene, who was thought to be holding a lost white woman supposedly captured by aboriginals in the early 1840s. Bunjilene was first taken into custody by Commissioner Tyers at Eagle Point near Bairnsdale in 1847, but while escaping, his son drowned in the lakes. This was the first in a series of tragedies which was to eliminate the Bunjilene family. When he couldn’t produce the white woman, he was taken as punishment to the Native Police station near Dandenong, even though the authorities knew he could not legally be kept prisoner. Here he was chained to a gumtree for long periods. His wife soon died, and after 18 months of illegal detention Bunjilene himself passed away from ‘grief’. Their two sons were taken away to be educated like whites and displayed around Melbourne. One died early, and the other, after some tragic incidents which revealed his disorientation, succumbed to fever and consumption in 1865. He was only eighteen-years-old.