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buildings, there
were vistas of rolling downs, some clad in wheat and some in gum-trees, and most dotted with
sheep.
On Sunday mornings Jane would go to the pinnacled Wesleyan Church on the corner of Ryrie
St and Yarra St.
For several years before the church was opened in October 1845, Wesleyans and
Presbyterians had held joint services in David Fisher's woolshed on the Barwon. Now 55, Mr
Fisher was to be seen driving a white horse and trap on his way from his new home in Mt
Pleasant Rd to St Andrew's Church, also in Yarra St.
Did Jane ever meet him? Probably not then. But the life-lines of the wealthy Scottish pioneer
and the humble housemaid were soon to cross. One day his old homestead would be her home,
and its name would be that of the house in which she wouid die.
It was probably at church, or at some Wesieyan gathering, that Jane Honeycombe caught the
eye, and heart, of a 35-year-old shoemaker, Lawrence Cleverdon Mountjoy.
He, like her father, had been born in Cornwall. Perhaps he worked in Ryrie Street. Or they
might have met in some Wesleyan's home in the as yet unnamed government road across the
river, known, unofficially, as Roslyn Road. They probably both attended the opening, in June
1855, of the neat little brick Wesieyan chapel at the end of Barrabool Road, in the village of
Highton, where Jane would eventually live.
This village had been lorded over for some years by the house and ample grounds belonging to
Charles Nuttall Thorne, JP. A banker, born in Bristol, he had settled with his family in Highton in
1847. He wouid become President of the Geelong and Melbourne Railway Company, and was
on the committee of the Geelong Chamber of Commerce. He left Geelong in 1860, returning to
New South Wales, whence he came.
His imposing home at Highton, Thomhill, was described by an estate agent in 1855. Made of
freestone and brick, it was 'surrounded by a colonnade, supported on 18 lofty and massive
Ionic columns'. It was approached by a long and sweeping carriage drive and surveyed a 'scene
of unsurpassed loveliness, worthy of the inspired genius of a Claude'. To the north-east there
were 'the romantic banks of the Barwon' and beyond them 'the town, the bay and the mountains
of the You Yangs.' To the west were 'the noble Barraboois, resplendent for cultivated hills and
fertile valleys, fields of waving corn... Looking southward, the view extends down the valley of
Kardinia, teeming with verdure, and dotted by the numerous cottages and homesteads with their
cultivated patches.' Thomhill was 'the spot contiguous to which our oldest settler and deeply
respected colonist, David Fisher, Esq, settled his homestead.'
The name of this homestead was Roslyn - and there Jane and Lawrence Mountjoy would come
to live for many years.
The view from what was then called Fisher's Hill, behind Roslyn, was then (and now) much
admired.
118
JH Bottrell wrote in the Advertiser in 1931: '!t is impossible to do justice to this view which
charms the eye, for it includes almost everything which goes to form magnificent scenery... An
example of nearly every geographical term may be seen with the naked eye... We have
mountain ranges, peaks, a river, lakes, open ocean, a bay, a gorge, a plain, a point or cape, a
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