Up the Country: A Saga of Pioneering Days

The surname Mazere was a corruption of de Mazières, a name borne originally by a branch of the great Huguenot family of d'Abzac. The family tree boasted such dignitaries as the Archbishop of Naronne and, later, when the family was driven out of France during the religious persecution of the seventeenth century, the Bishop of Canchester in England added to its distinction.

Philip Mazere Senior therefore considered himself something of an aristocrat and was outraged when he learned that Philip, his firstborn, had lost his heart to Charlotte Pool. She was a member of a wild brood that had a run on a slope of the Bogong Mountains, by the wide windy plains of Maneroo where the streams, snow-fed from old Kosciusko, sing their icy way with a music that is meet accompaniment to the poetry of their names.