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of cattle and farming as the Mountjoy brothers.
The eldest of their eight children was George. When his father died, he set up in business at the
age of 18 as the owner and driver of a bullock team for hire. After his mother's death in 1870
and the sale of Angahook, George moved to Echuca, the first of the Pearse brothers to do so.
For four years, between 1872 and 76, he was, according to the family history, a boundary rider
on a property called Roslynmead.
This may not be correct, neither the dates nor his occupation. For Roslynmead, if it existed then,
was no more than 320 acres, and had very little boundary to ride. The property was much
larger in 1909, when George returned to the district to work.
Bert Facey writes of boundary riders, whose job it was to check the rabbit-proof fence that
stretched for thousands of miles across Western Australia from north to south.
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freehold for another 12 years. At Torrumbarry North in February 1876, three of his children,
two boys and a girl, were married at a triple wedding.
Two other German families who farmed at Wharparilla were the Meiers and the Mullers.
Wilhelm Meier married Eleonore Kozorke in Geelong in 1870. They had seven children, five
boys and two girls. Wilhelm died, aged 50, in December 1895. His widow then ran a boarding-
house in Echuca, and her daughter Alice had a milliner's shop. Only one son stayed on farming
in the area.
The Mullers, Jacob and Mary Ann (who was a Londoner), took up their selection in 1871.
They had met and married in Adelaide in 1853 and in due course had 11 children, eight of
whom were girls. Their farm was called Trowbridge, and was run as a wheat farm, with five
acres of orchard and 30 dairy cattle. Mary Ann died there in 1903, two weeks before their
golden wedding anniversary; Jacob died in 1916. A creek next to their property is still called
Muller's Creek, and Muller's Bridge carries the Swan Hill Road across it.
Of the many Scots in the area who would have been known by name at least to William
Honeycombe, there was Joseph Beeson and his second wife, Christina Douglas, who was born
at Yethoim on the Scottish border in 1853, a year after Joseph arrived in Australia from
Lincolnshire. For a time he had a farm near Geelong. They married at Christ Church, Echuca, in
April 1876. He and Christina had eleven children, and although he became virtually blind, they
farmed his selection at Torrumbarry for the rest of their lives.
Another Scottish family, the McFadyens, had a spacious homestead on the Murray River,
remarkable for a room with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books. The patriarch, David, who
had emigrated with his wife and seven grownup and adolescent children in 1852, had been a
schoolmaster on the Isle of Mull. When his wife died in 1853, he lived with his fourth son, David
junior, his wife and their eight children on their farm near Clunes, until the whole family moved to
Torrumbarry North in 1871. One of David junior's six sons, Gillespie, married Jessie Leitch.
Her family had a sheep farm across the river at Benarca, and in order to do his courting,
Gillespie, known as Dep, stabled a horse in a burnt out tree on the NSW side, which he
reached by rowing over from the McFadyen homestead. They married in 1897.
Jessie Leitch was one of the eight children of Archie Leitch, who ran the family farm at Weering,
north of Colac, until 1880, when he sold up and travelled north to Benarca with his brother,
Peter, to halp their ailing and ageing father, John. Again, William and the Mountjoys may have
known John Leitch, who farmed at Colac, through their various interests, west and southwest of
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