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The previous December he had made a will. Perhaps he was ill. Perhaps some incident, or a
death in the vicinity, made him brood about his own mortality. The will was witnessed by
William Trewin, a farming neighbour and the brother-in-law of Lawrence Mountjoy, and by a
WA Calrow.
In the will, William left all his land, furniture and goods to his son-in-law, the will's executor,
Lawrence Mountjoy. Jane received £15, as did his other daughters, Elizabeth Thompson and
Martha Chapman. His sons, Richard and John, received £5 each.
None of his children would have attended his funeral, unless Lawrence telegraphed Jane and
Richard straightaway, giving them time to get from Geelong and Melbourne to Echuca by train.
Perhaps, if they were there, they stood in the pouring rain, under black umbrellas, while the pale
earth streamed at their feet, and on the nearby river, beyond the red gums, a paddle-steamer
sang its doleful siren song.
If Jane were there, bonneted and in black, her mind must have been awash with images as she
dumbly gazed down on her father's coffin -remembering the kind of man he was, and seeing
subliminal pictures of events long past, of places and people form a Victorian England so
different form the Victorian reality of where she was now.
What would we give now to know what she knew, to see what she saw and remembered?
William was a speck in the history of his time, but a giant in this family history. He made the leap
across space and nations that gave his descendants a better chance in life.
As his funeral proceeded, a thousand miles away another great venture, which had begun on 18
February at Geraldton, was facing extinction.
128
Ernest Giles, on his fifth exploration and second crossing of Australia, had pitched camp, with
his camels and companions, on Saturday 3 June, eleven miles into the Gibson desert. Plagued
by sand blindness, heat and flies 'enough to set anyone deranged', they trudged across sandhills
for another 40 miles on 4 June. Half their camels were incapacitated overnight by chewing on a
poisonous shrub. So they rested for a day, then staggered on, spending two days digging a well
15 feet deep, until some water 'yellowish but pure' appeared. 'Two other camels,' wrote Giles,
'were poisoned in the night... On the 8th of June more camels were attacked, and it was
impossible to get out of this horrible and poisonous region... I dread the reappearance of every
morning, for fear of fresh and fatal cases... We had thick ice in all the vessels that contained any
water overnight; but in the middle of the day it was impossible to sit with comfort, except in the
shade. The flies still swarm in undiminished millions...'
Ernest Giles died in Coolgardie in 1897, a 100 years after William's birth. Born in Bristol, Giles
came from there, as William did, to make his mark on Australia. Giles succeeded hugely, seeing
much that no white man had seen before and naming everything new he saw. His discoveries
and his books live after him.
But Giles died childless. William gave his adopted country his children, and, through them, his
name.
129
Fernside and Roslvnmeari
Soon after William's death, Lawrence Mountjoy set about his task as William's sole executor of
sorting out the estate. A letter was despatched on 29 July 1876 via Lawrence's solicitors, Kelly
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