been advanced that he may have suffered from bipolar disorder. Baddeley, Daniel and Pennebaker's analysis suggests that his final extreme distress could have been occasioned by gossip circulated about illegal sexual relationships with convict associates. There was no concrete evidence available at the time for this. It is more likely that this gossip was malicious and intended to blacken his name. There could well have been some envy at Stanley (the base for the Van Diemen's Land Company) that Hellyer could look forward to a government appointment. As a devout Christian, he would have been devastated by this. A further suggestion is that he may have suffered from gelotophobia, an inability to deal with what he perceived as bullying, even if this was in fact merely thoughtless teasing. A further LIWC analysis of the internal inquiry conducted into his suicide, on behalf of the Van Diemen's Land Company, suggests there was a whitewash by those who might have been seen as involved in negative behaviour towards Hellyer. Gwyneth Daniel's detailed exposition of these and other points can be seen in Utmost Extrication. Why Henry Hellyer Shot Himself. Despite the evidence concerning depression, in a letter to his sister-in-law in 1830 he wrote that he had been in excellent health ever since arriving in the Colony, "...except for two or three short attacks occasioned by over-exertion and fatigue after some of my long excursions in the bush". There is no hint of what these "attacks" may have been, but there is no doubt that his explorations were marked by extraordinary energy and copious note-taking on everything that took his interest, from cicadas, through "young centipedes white as snow" to land-crab chimneys. He is often described as a visionary. The Chief agent of the VDL Co wrote of him, "He is exceedingly chimerical in all his ideas... He would have mansions where I would have cottages", and elsewhere, "...he may he said to look upon everything with a painter's eye and upon his own discoveries in particular with an affection which is blind to all faults". If Henry Hellyer was prone to "attacks" of depression after periods of over-exertion and fatigue, the winter of 1832 provided an occasion. He wrote: "...The snow is so deep that we are completely hemmed in by it. It forms such hard lumps on my overalls... that I was completely fettered by it and in the greatest