This is what Richard Merton and Ralf Havelock read, sitting under the lilipilli on Bargo Creek: "I, David Attwell, of Melbourne City, Victoria, am lying on my last bed, and in my last illness; and the hope that my last resting place will be discovered in years to come has induced me to write down my history, that my descendants may be enabled thereby to prove their claim to the wealth that was gained at the cost of my life, and which I do here bequeath unto them. To begin with, I will draw as best I can our genealogical tree: "Now, I had been a widower for many years before I started on my wanderings through the bush that was wild and full of peril. I cared not for this, having caught the gold fever that blinds men to danger, and betakes him to places strange and lonely. My elder son, Steve, I left in Melbourne, fairly set up in business as a draper. He was not married, nor was there any likelihood of his ever marrying. My second son, Acton, lived with his wife in Sydney. He had been married no more than one year, and my grandson, Grant, was but three months old. Since then I have never seen them, and have now lost all hope of ever looking upon their beloved faces again, though for many years I had looked forward to spending my last days in happiness among them. God has seen meet not to grant this wish, and I am stricken low in a great wilderness, where no sweet face comes a-nigh to cheer me, and where no white man dwells. My sole companion is my black servant, Jacky, the faithful fellow who has stuck loyally to me through every peril, who has shared all my hardships and privations, and accompanied me in all my travels. To each and all our friends we said farewell, for we knew not that we should again return to see them; and, equipped for a long rustication, we directed our course due north.
"Now, I had in view a double object, which was to explore the country in the interests of a company of graziers, and to prospect for gold on my own account. So we set forth with stout hearts, and when we had crossed the Hunter we never again saw a white man. Many weeks of weary travel brought us into this untrodden waste, from which I am doomed never to escape. Often we were perishing from thirst, and at times reduced to such exhaustion from hunger that we could scarcely drag our legs over the creeks and dried-up swamps that intersected our path. Still we pushed on. Day by day dark forms dogged our footsteps, flitting like shadows from tree to tree, whence black spears came whizzing the way we went. At night they closed round our camp-fires, and hurled spears into our tent. But we were away in the dark, stretched upon our blankets beneath a tree. Many a dead savage we left in our tracks; but this we could not help, as they would have laid us low with a spear-thrust else, as they did Edmund Kennedy.
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