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travelled south to assist his brother now and then. This may also have been the case with
Lawrence Mountjoy.
JH Bottrel! is dearer about this in an article that appeared in the Geelong Advertiser m 1931.
He wrote; 'Mr Thomas Mountjoy may be considered as the founder of Lome. For with his wife
and family he went in a bullock dray through the forests, and settled at that fashionable
watering-place to today.'
Lome is now easily reached from Geelong by a 35-mile southwesterly drive along the Great
Ocean Road. Hemmed in by the heavily forested Otway Ranges, then and now, the town faces
the stormy waters of the Bass Strait across a half-moon beach. In 1864 it was a wiid, isolated
spot, approached either by sea or by a wayward forest track over the hiils. Then called Louttit
Bay, It is first recorded as such in 1846, having been so named by a Captain Louttit, who used
to shelter there in his sloop, the Apollo, when bad weather disrupted his trading trips between
Port Fairy and Portland and then up into Port Philip Bay. Louttit later commanded the first
sailing-ship that took wool to London from Geelong.
Timber-cutters, or 'splitters', were evidently the first to camp in Louttit Bay in 1849. They
pitched their tents near a small river, the Erskine, that flowed into the sea at the northern end of
the bay. They were led by a William Lindsay, who employed Louttit's sloop, among others, to
take his timber to Geelong. Lindsay was something of a merchant adventurer, pursuing various
enterprises in the area until, in April 1849, he was issued with an official licence to cut timber at
Louttit Bay. He then settled there with his family, and they lived in a hut on a flat triangle of land
between the littfe river and the beach. Less than a year later, in January 1850, his two young
sons, aged eight and four, were digging a tunnel in the sandy riverbank, when it collapsed. They
were buried alive, and by the time help reached them, summoned by the mother's screams - she
apparently saw the accident - the two boys had suffocated under the sand.
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Their graves, and a memorial, are situated near where they died.
William Lindsay and his wife soon thereafter left the bay and this history, their places being
taken, when the area was leased as a pastoral run, by a Mr Herd, who crossed the Otway
Ranges in 1853 and attempted to establish a cattle station there, stretching for 10 kilometres
along the coast from Reedy Creek to the Cumberland River (with Louttit Bay roughly at its
centre), and covering some 27 square inland miles of very rugged and forested land.
He was succeeded in 1855 by a Mr Asplin. John Short took over the lease in 1862, before
selling it - allegedly to the three Mountjoy brothers - in 1864.
It was Thomas Mountjoy, however, not Caleb or Lawrence, who betook himself and his family
to Louttit Bay, trekking up the remoter valleys of the Barwon River, before turning left and
taking a bridle track over the Otway Ranges, from the as yet unformed hamlet of Deans Marsh
to the sea. He was now 38; his wife, Sophia or Sophie, was 10 years younger and had already
provided him with four of their nine children.
On reaching Louttit Bay, Tom and his family occupied the two-room dwelling by the Erskine
River that had served as the home of previous lessors.
In due course Thomas rebuilt the shack. He also extended the wheat crop grown on the
foreshore by Mr Asplin, and cultivated other crops. But nothing went well. In 1865, the
Mountjoys paid the shire £2-1s-3d in tax. Overcharged, they asked for the amount to be
reassessed, which it was the following year at 16s 8d. Meanwhile, they faced other disasters.
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