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Thomas J Thomas in 1892. Edmund Mountjoy, born in 1870, had married Mary Ellen Harris in
1895. Four years later he appears in the Voters Roll (people claiming a vote on the referendum
about the institution of the Commonwealth of Australia). His house at Deans Marsh was called
Carlowrie.
The Diamond Wedding of Caleb and Louisa in 1914 was celebrated at their home, Airlie Bank,
in Retreat Road, Geelong. They had an 'At Home', which began on the Saturday afternoon and
lasted until late that night.
Apart from their three surviving children (Edmund, Emma and Mabel) and their families, other
guests would have included Lawrence Harward's widow, Helen Mountjoy, and her children;
Thomas's widow, Sophia, their children and grandchildren; and some perhaps of the multifarious
decendants of Richard and Mary Mountjoy. She had died three years earlier, aged 87; and
Thomas had died at Lome the year before, also aged 87.
It must have been a grand occasion and was proudly announced in the Geelong Advertiser that
week.
It was also a time of remembrance: of Cornwall, Kilkhampton and the voyage out; of those
early days in dusty Geelong; of farming in the Barrabool Hills, at Echuca and Deans Marsh; of
holidays at home, of family and friends who had lived and died. The younger ones would have
wondered what changes would take place in their time.
For the city of Geelong, proclaimed as such in December 1910, was now waking from its
Edwardian slumbers. Industrialisation was effecting a transformation: the site of the
Commonwealth Woollen Mills was chosen in 1912; the first trams appeared that year; and the
telephone exchange (the first automatic one in the southern hemisphere) was opened; foundation
stones of churches, businesses, and an art gallery were laid; and building began on the Grammar
School at Corio and on Geelong High School.
But Louisa Mountjoy never saw the outcome of any of this, nor the start of the Great War.
Three and a half months after the Diamond Wedding celebration, Louisa Mountjoy died, on 5
July 1914.
Caleb Mountjoy, whose lifetime all but spanned a century of great change, died on 28 October
1923 at the age of 93.
The last living link of the Mountjoys with Kilkhampton had snapped, and all the descendants of
Thomas and Caleb, and Richard their cousin, would thenceforth call Australia home.
141
(0 .lane's Last Years in Geelonq
Jane and Lawrence Mountjoy continued to live at Fernside until his death in 1899. They were
probably most happy there, near the fields where once they had farmed, near their church and
oldest friends.
In 1894, when Lawrence and Jane were respectively 74 and 68, and during the worst
Depression in Victoria's history, they had three visitors who, coming from Queensland, must
have seemed like visitors from another planet. And the ageing couple and their way of life, and
the quiet, green gardens of Thornhill Road, must in turn have seemed as strange to John
Honeycombe and his two eldest boys.
No doubt it was Jane who wrote to her much younger brother, John, when she heard of his
family's domestic troubles, and invited him to stay if he ever came south: Mary, the boys'
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