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If she had removed the can she would, perhaps, have died instead of them. But the two younger
girls were no doubt full of high-spirits and averse to sharing their chatter, let alone their special
heating device, with boring old Emma.
The two girls shared the room, as well as the bed. When Emma left she closed the door. It was
a cold winter night.
The following morning, about 6:45, Mabel entered the bedroom.
According to the local newspaper: 'A member of the household went to call them for
breakfast... and hearing no response to the continued knockings, the chamber was entered.'
There is no mention of this in Mabel's statement, but a servant may have been the one who
summoned her and raised the alarm. Perhaps Mabel slept in the next room.
She said: 'I spoke to them, and getting no answer I thought they were pretending to be asleep. I
went close up to my sister and touched her. She felt
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decidedly of the opinion, without having recourse to an autopsy in either case, that death in both
cases was caused by the poisonous percentage of Charcoal vapor (a mixture of Carbonic Acid
& Carbonic Oxide)... & being a heavy vapor had no means of exit until it had filled the whole
spaces of the room.'
Annie and Ada Mountjoy were both buried in Highton Cemetery on Friday, 28 August 1891.
The bodies were taken by coach and train to Geelong, where they were met by two horse-
driven hearses. Among the 12 pall-bearers was the Mayor, Alderman Strong.
The Colac Herald remarked: The cortege was a fair length, and its representative character
gave evidence of the respect in which the family is held... After the burial service had been read
by the Rev JW Crisp, and a hymn sung by the persons gathered about the graves, the rev
gentleman mentioned delivered a brief address, and referred to the ceremony just performed as
a shocking illustration of the uncertainty of life, which, he trusted, would warn Christians to be
always prepared to meet their Maker.'
Of Caleb and Louisa's 11 children, but three now survived: Emma, Edmund and Mabel. Three
had died in just over three years: Rhoda, Lawrence Harward, and Annie.
Thomas Mountjoy, however, had seven sons to succeed him, and already had five
grandchildren. Caleb just had Edmund; and Lawrence and Jane had no heirs at ail. They must
have all felt fated in their different ways that Friday, as they stood in the cemetery and watched
the two coffins containing Annie and Ada being lowered into the ground.
Annie, born at Wharparilla in 1878, was the sixth of Caleb and Louisa's children to be laid to
rest at Highton, and her name was added to the other inscriptions on the stone.
No other name would be added thereon for many years, until December 1948, when Helen
Mountjoy, Lawrence Harward's widow, died and was buried at Highton. She had continued to
live at Deans Marsh, as a Sunday School teacher. She had been a widow for 59 years.
Caleb and Louisa are also buried at Highton. Married in March 1854 in Adelaide, they
celebrated their Diamond Wedding in Geelong on Saturday 21 March 1914. She was 78; he
was 84.
A few years before this, in 1905, Caleb had sold about half of his property at Deans Marsh to
his nephew, Edgar Mountjoy, who resold most of it the following year, including the homestead,
Yan Yan Gurt. Edgar built a new home for himself called Langi Banool, which was destroyed in
a fire in 1969.
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