William Trewin: 'Rhoda Mountjoy is my niece. She has been staying with me on a visit for about three weeks

The funeral cortege left 76 Albert Street at 3.30pm on the 8 July and proceeded to the Melbourne General Cemetery, attended by Jane (now 77), and Jack (now 63); and by his married daughters, Mrs Regelsen, Mrs Steel and Mrs Allen and their families; and possibly by Fanny and her family, and the widows of his sons, Thomas and George. He was buried in the Methodist section of the cemetery, beside his daughter Emma and his wife. Jane would join them in 1934, dying of a strangulated hernia and toxaemia when she was 85.

In the meantime, Jane continued to live in the house in Albert Street. Aunt Lil said of her: 'She used to be a housekeeper for some photographer in the city. But when her mother and father got too old, she left her job and came to Albert Street to look after them, the two of them, until they both died. After her father died she had a housekeeper as a companion who used to live in.' And Arthur said: 'Jane was a very kindly person, a gentle person. There used to be a great almond tree in the backyard of Albert Street, and Uncle Jack used to go down and pick the almonds for Auntie Jane. She used to worry about the almonds falling in the yard. She was very old then. I'd be about four or five... The house isn't there now. The Tramway Board pulled it down and built a yard for their buses. But there's a bit of the old bluestone wall along the street.

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Louie and Jessie went on working for gents' tailors, Louie moving away from Scovell and Spurling to a Mr Drayton, whose business was in Seddon, south of Footscray. Jessie married Oscar Sutcliffe (to whom she had been introduced by Louie) on 23 December 1933, at the Methodist church in Ballarat Road where Louie, Addie and young Arthur sang in the choir, and where Thelma would join them, also becoming the church organist when she was still in her teens. Jessie was nearly 42 when she married Oscar; he was 43. They went to live at 56 The Parade, Ascot Vale. Oscar, known as Okker, was somewhat eccentric and not a bit like small, white-haired Jessie, who was quite reserved. A gas-fitter by trade, he was quite tall, slim and bald and wore glasses (so did Jessie) in later years; his growing baldness he plastered with long strands of hair. An ardent fisherman, he frequently went fishing along the Maribyrnong for eels and other fish, bicycling thither and back. Late in life he bought a car, but was not at all mechanically minded. When told by a doctor not to drive the car or ride his bike at the age of 80 he was devastated. But he wouldn't sell the car. He kept it at the side of the house and cleaned it every week. Popular with children, whom he liked to amuse and entertain, Oscar had what was thought by others to have a morbid interest in cemeteries and murder. He loved jury duty, and had a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings and magazine articles on murders and murder trials. In Melbourne Cemetery he would tell total strangers about interesting tombstones and show them the graves of murder victims and suicides. But his greatest eccentricity was to keep his money, amounting to $4,500, in a fishing-bag hidden under the lino and floorboards of the laundry at home.

Fanny Honeycombe died, aged 81, in April 1942, two years after the whole family moved to 28 Coral Avenue, Footscray, to a bungalow that Dick built himself. Her sight had failed, despite a cataract operation, and she became very dependent on Addie and Dick. As did Louie, to a lesser degree. Every time they went on holiday, Louie went too.

After Arthur married Laurel Ellwood in the Manly Methodist Chapel in Sydney in September 1946, the young couple spent the first years of their married life with his father and mother and Aunt Louie in 28 Coral Avenue - and with Thelma, until she married Bill Clemence, a salesman and a former prisoner of war of the Japanese in Changi Prison and Burma. Aunt Louie, seeing Arthur and Laurel hold hands, would say; 'You make me sick!'

Arthur and Laurel moved around the corner, to 11 Govan Street, Footscray, in 1951. They had four children, three girls and a boy, Alan Richard; and they live in Govan Street to this day.

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Jack died at 9 Wolverhampton Street of heart failure on 4 July 1956, aged 94.9. He had bought a burial plot (eight feet long and three feet wide) in the Melbourne General Cemetery in October 1891 for £1. Situated in the Church of England section near the South Gate and designated MM, number 205 was 'for the sole and separate use of the said John Honeycombe and his representatives for ever1. Here he was interred by Lily, his wife for 35 years, in a 'nickel polished coffin & breastings', having been brought to the cemetery in a 'glass hearse' attended by one limousine. Such were the items listed on the undertakers' invoice, together with the cost of death notices in The Sun, cemetery fees, the clergy fee, and £4.10.0 for removing the body - all of which added up to £74.12.6.

Lily paid the bill the following month. But she never had the money for a headstone, and Jack's grave is still unmarked.

The memorials of his father, Richard Honeycombe, are many - apart from his gravestone. They are scattered through Melbourne, Geelong and Winchelsea and wherever Richard Honeycombe worked and left his mark. For he did just that - on the stones he shaped.

In 1949 an old stonemason told Lance Finch, a Melbourne architect, that there used to be a master stonemason called Bluey, whose mark was an H. He specialised in bluestone, the local name for black basalt, which, because of its vesicular nature and the surname of the mason much associated with it, was also known as honeycomb basalt. Latterly, this Honeycombe had worked on stone gateposts or gateways. But he had also done work for stone viaducts and bridges in and around Melbourne. Wrought stones only bore his marks - those big bluestone blocks used as foundations for edifices of every kind. And these marks, on the top right of a stone were an H - or, on a special stone an R H, his main mark, like this - .

Finch had found these marks on some basalt in Geelong and wondered which mason had made them. He found them elsewhere - on the Treasury building in Melbourne, for instance - and they might have been on the later basalt developments of St Patrick's Cathedral and of Parliament House. And perhaps, we might add, of the third Government House.

Unknown to all but a few, a tough little stonemason called Richard Honeycombe had for over 50 years laboured on Victoria's buildings and left his initials on all that he touched.

He had made his mark.

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Jt£ John Goes For Gold

His descendants would prove to be the most hard-working and successful of all the Honeycombes in Australia, as well as the most beset with family tribulations and grief.

We know nothing about his childhood, which was spent mainly in Bristol, where his father, who was a stonemason by trade, was in business as a builder with George Wilkins for a few years. By 1848 the business had broken up and the four eldest children had gone their separate ways: Mary Ann and Richard had married, and Jane had given birth to an illegitimate child; William Robert would marry in Bristol the following year.

In 1849, when John was seven, his brother Henry was 15, and his sisters Elizabeth and Martha were respectively eleven and nine. It is probable because his middle-aged parents were small in stature, that he was a tiny child - although he apparently outgrew them later on - and because he was the youngest, rather wild. The long voyage to Australia in 1850 was probably much enjoyed by him and must have left him with some enduring memories and impressions, especially the ports of call: Praia in the Cape Verde Islands and Cape Town in South Africa.

Family sources, as has been noted in Chapter Six, say that John "came with his parents as a child from South Africa' - which indeed he did - and that he 'lost an eye in a goldmine in South Africa before coming to Melbourne'.

John certainly had a glass eye in later life and as early as his twenties. When and how he lost the original is unknown. He could never have been a gold-miner in South Africa, as the first major goldrush there did not occur until 1885, when John was definitely in Queensland. It seems that the two oral traditions have become confused. For another John Honeycombe was in South Africa in 1885, working in a goldmine, although as far as we know he never had an accident involving the loss of an eye, or limb. 8n the othar hand, oral

traHitinn nnny inffliirln n truth thtit rmr.lnhn nnnirlnntnlly In il / ullr

boy, whon tho Soo Queen stopped at Capo Town far previsions en the voyage

OUtr

The fact is that we have only one documented record of John's existence and whereabouts between his birth in 1842 and his marriage in Charters Towers, nearly 40 years later. And that is a photograph taken in a studio in Ballarat about 1866, when John would have been 24.

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Would that we knew when the photo was taken, and why. And what was John doing in Ballarat? How long had he been living and working there? Was the photograph taken on his birthday, after a particularly good season mining for gold?

John seems to have been a gold-miner all his life, although in his youth he could have been many things. For, apart from the photo, no positive record of John's whereabouts or activities has been found between that which dates his arrival in Australia in July 1850 and that which documents his marriage in Queensland in July 1881. Where was he in those 31 intervening years?

His mother died in Melbourne, we know, in April 1851, and five months later his father remarried, his second wife being the schoolteacher Elizabeth Hicks. Was she in part responsible for the fact that John, as well as his younger sisters, could write a good hand? Her influence in other respects was probably disruptive. For in October 1852, 14-year-old Elizabeth Honeycombe married Charles Franklin, who was aged 31; and within two years the children's stepmother had decamped to Tasmania and William had taken himself and his children to Geelong.

It would seem the move was made in 1853, for in September that year Richard Honeycombe, his wife and their first three children arrived in Geelong, to be followed in July 1854 by Jane. She married Lawrence Mountjoy a year or so later, in November 1854.

John was 12 that year. He was presumably living with his father in Noble Street, along with his older brother Henry, now a 20-year-old stonemason, and his sister Martha, who probably kept house and cooked for her two brothers and father, although she was but 14 years of age. These duties may have been forced on her when her older sister left the household to get wed.

In 1856, if not before, John would have been apprenticed to some trade -as a stonemason perhaps like his older brothers, Richard and Henry. But in 1856 a William Honeycombe appears on an Electoral Roll as a miner, holding a miner's right at Kangaroo Flat, near Bendigo. This William is virtually certain to have been John's father. So is it possible that John went with him to Bendigo, and thus began his working life, not as an apprentice stonemason, but as gold-miner when he was 14 years old?

His married sister Elizabeth Franklin gave birth to her first child in Bendigo in 1856. Perhaps William (and John) lodged with the Franklins for a while. The Franklins were still in Bendigo at Golden Gully, in 1859, the year in which Martha Honeycombe, then aged 19, gave birth at Mulgrave near Melbourne to an illegitimate baby boy. She later married the baby's father. The next family event that would have some significance for John was the death of his brother Henry, aged 24, in July 1860 in Geelong.

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But where was John? We do not know. If he was ever in Geelong about this time he presumably lived, like his father, with the Mountjoys on their farm at Roslyn on the edge of the Barrabool Hills. If he was gold-mining, he could have stayed with his sister Elizabeth in Bendigo or lodged with a group of chums in any of the booming gold towns north of Geelong. On the other hand, he might have travelled further afield, to Tasmania or to Adelaide. We do not know.

I think this James (and there was no one with that forename in Australia then) is an error for John. For that photo of John was taken in Ballarat about this time. And at the bottom of the original photograph is the photographers' name and address. It says - 'Milletts Photo, 19 Sturt Street, Ballarat'. Sturt Street was where the miner J Honeycomb is registered as having lodged for two years. It has to be John. So at least we may surmise where he was then, where he lived and how he was employed.

But then he disappears again for eleven years, only reappearing on the Queensland Electoral Roll at Charters Towers in 1878.

Eleven years is a long time in anyone's life, especially when it spans a man's most active years. But those years of John's life, between the ages of 25 and 36, are lost to us, unless some long buried record may one day be discovered and tell us more. What adventures he had, what successes and failures, what women he bedded, perhaps even loved, remained locked in his memory while he lived - for he apparently never spoke much of his early life to his sons - and vanished when he died.

John's qualification for appearing on the electoral roll for Charters Towers in 1878 was that he had lived there for six months. So we can probably place him there the year before. But why Charters Towers?

His father William, aged 79, had died at Wharparilla near Echuca in June 1876 and had left his two surviving sons, Richard and John, £5 each. Perhaps his father's death and the little legacy prompted John to sever all his ties with the towns and goldmines of Victoria and to seek his fortune up north. Perhaps some unhappy personal or professional association preceded his decision to break away. On the other hand, his disappearance from Ballarat in or after 1867 might have determined by the first major discovery of gold in Queensland that year.

This was at Gympie, some 180km north of Brisbane. Other strikes had already been made further up the coast near Rockhampton, at Canoona and Crocodile Creek. Many of the miners from the Victorian goldfields made their way north, travelling thither from Melbourne by sea. John Honeycombe may have been among them. The next gold-strike was far inland and even further north, at Ravenswood. That was in 1868. Some of the miners rode to Ravenswood from Rockhampton; most probably walked. Others sailed up the coast to Townsville and made their way to Ravenswood from there.

It was not until 1871, however, that prospectors, moving west from Ravenswood, found the biggest gold-field in the north. Three prospectors from Ravenswood, Mosman, Fraser and Clarke were camping in the bush when there was a storm. The horses scattered, and an 11-year-old aboriginal boy with the group, called Jupiter, was sent to round them up. While so doing he knelt by a stream to have a drink of water and recognised the glint of gold. Excitedly he carried the glittering stone back to his masters. It was Christmas Day.

The site was named after WSEM Charters, the warden or gold commissioner at Ravenswood, who registered the claim, with the descriptive addition of Tors, referring to the low hills thereabouts. This changed to Towers, the two words sounding much the same to the largely illiterate miners. The scene of Jupiter's find, a thousand miles north of Brisbane and proclaimed a town in 1877, grew from a collection of huts - 'a drunken, brawling community' according to an official in 1873 - into the second largest town in Queensland. Boastfully known as The World, it would sustain a population of 27,000 and 54 hotels by 1901, when Australia became one nation in constitution and name.

In 1878, John Honeycombe, aged 36, was living in Charters Towers on St Patrick's Block, which surpassed all the other goldmines and claims thereabouts in the amount of gold it produced. The block was situated on the northeast edge of the town near Mosman's Creek. Miners lived in communal shanties made of wood, corrugated iron and bark, or if they had some money, in rough boarding houses or even hotels. Their methods of work were very wasteful: lower grades of ore were left on the slopes in their hurry to find the richer ores which it was believed would be found at greater depths. No real effort was made to develop mining and milling techniques. Dust flew as holes in the ground were deepened and detritus deposited above. Within a few years the area was denuded of all trees and even of any vegetation, which was eaten by goats. Timber for mining had to be brought by horse teams from as far as 50 miles away. Firewood was obtained within a 10 mile radius of the town. The population was inevitably largely male, whose thirsts were slaked in the hotels, and whose other needs were catered for by the few young complacent females who served as saloon girls or domestics, and by prostitutes.

In February 1879 in Charters Towers Mary Casey gave birth to a baby boy, conceived of course the previous year. He was baptised as William John Casey, his fathers name not being given, or not even known. Mary said, untruthfully, that she was 21 and had been bom in Launcaston, Tasmania.

Although John Honeycombe would not marry Mary Casey for another two years, there is no reason, apart from family rumour, to suppose that William John was not John's son. Certainly, in photos he looks like his mother, with the same broad forehead and rather square face. But he also looks like a Honeycombe, as do some of his descendants; and he was given two names that seem to indicate he was named after his grandfather (William) and his father (John) - a common practise that century. William's first son, William Robert, had also been christened thus.

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The fact that Mary Casey was five months pregnant when she married John on 14 July 1881 might also indicate that they had had an association of at least a year and that he was responsible for William John.

Mary was a Roman Catholic. But the wedding in Charters Towers took place in an Anglican church, St Paul's, a wooden edifice in Mosman Street, erected a few years earlier - not in the Catholic church, which had just been resited and rebuilt. Was this because Mary was visibly pregnant, or because John refused to enter a Catholic church?

It can't have been a happy affair or well attended. The pregnant bride already had an illegitimate son and may have been married before. The bridegroom, who thought his bride was 23, was somewhat older than her and no longer flushed with youth.

What led them to marry? What led Mary to Charters Towers? How did they meet? We only know that they lived on St Patrick's Block for the next three years, until 1884, during which time two baby boys were born to John and Mary Honeycombe, brothers for little William John, who was known as Willie (though later as Bill).

The first of these infants was christened as Francis Horace (Frank). He was bom in October 1881, a bad year in the community for cholera and typhus, which the Honeycombe family safely survived.

Then an event occurred that would affect everyone in the Towers in some way for evermore, and mark the lives, and deaths, of John and Mary's children. To general rejoicing, the railway-line from Townsville reached Charters Towers in 1882.

Also in that year, in October, a gold-mining lease (No 358) was taken out on 6 acres of land in the Towers known as Harry's Paddock by a group of 12 men, headed by John Rutherford and John Honeycombe. Four of the group got rid of their shares within a few months. But whether John's investment made any profit we do not know.

His next son, Robert Henry (Bob) was born in August 1883, soon after the telegraph line reached Charters Towers. Bob would be the first of the Queensland Honeycombes to work on the railways, and the second to be carried home dead on a train.

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It was in this year (1883) that a young Irish woman called Daisy May O'Dwyer came to Queensland and Charters Towers, perhaps by train. She was 23 and obtained employment on a grazing property called Fanning Downs, where she met an English stockman and daredevil rider called Edwin Murrant. She married him in the Towers in March 1884. They separated a few weeks later, when he was accused of theft. This couple are of some interest, in that both became famous elsewhere bearing other names.

It's just possible, back in Charters Towers in 1884, that our Irish Mary knew Irish Daisy. And it's interesting to know that the histories of Daisy Bates and Breaker Morant briefly combined in Charters Towers as further branches sprouted on the Honeycombe family tree.

In the first years of his marriage, John Honeycombe and his burgeoning family lived in Resident Street on the St Patrick Block, a mining area of several acres where he was also employed. The St Patrick was one of the earliest mines to be established in the Towers and was the first to be richly productive. In 1876, when several mills, or batteries, were already engaged in crushing ore from hundreds of claims, the St Patrick Block produced over 4,000 tons of ore, with a gold return of nearly 10,000 ounces. Its major shareholder and virtual owner was a former blacksmith, Frank Stubley. Was little Frank named after him?