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

There is also no proof that Mary Honeycombe ever lived in Tasmania. We know nothing about her early life, apart from the fact that she was not illiterate (like her parents) and must have had some sort of proper Catholic schooling. We know nothing other than that she arrived in Australia in 1855 as a baby, and married in Queensland in 1881. What happened to her in the intervening 26 years?

It is possible that she married in Tasmania in 1871 - and if so, she may have lived there for a while as a teenage girl. For on 8 May 1871, in Hobart, a Mary Casey (giving her age as 19) married a sailor, Charles Palmer, who is allegedly 23. They were married, by licence, in St Josephs' 'according to the rites and ceremonies of the Holy Catholic Church'. Evidently, this Mary was a Catholic, like our Mary.

Unfortunately, none of the parents is named in the marriage certificate, nor is this Mary's place of birth. So we cannot be sure that the Mary Casey who wed a sailor in Hobart in 1871 is our Mary Casey, who married John Honeycombe ten years later, on 14 July 1881. If our Mary was the one who married Charles Palmer in 1871 she would have been three months short of her 18th birthday (not 19). That is very possible, given the fact that a licence was required, and our Mary was always inaccurate when she gave her age.

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But in the 1890's a Charles Palmer dies in Charters Towers. Could he have been the sailor who married Mary Casey in 1871? If he was, and he married our Mary, we have an explanation for her presence in Queensland in 1879. But what happened to the little Palmer boy and girl?

The fact that Mary herself chose to colour her history after her marriage -as it seems she did - implies that her life before she married John was either rather dull or discreditable. It is quite possible that our Mary had a past, as they say, which might have included an earlier marriage (to the sailor, Charles Palmer, in Hobart in 1871), even other children. And what was she doing in hottest Queensland, in a rough gold-mining settlement, apparently alone and unwed, at the age of 28? Up there, only Mary knew where she had been and what she had done. And why should she tell the truth?

We know she lied about her age and place of birth, and may indeed have dreamed up a completely fictitious account of her origins and first 25 years. She was probably the originator (and who could disprove it later in Queensland?) of what was remembered later by her descendants about her alleged early life, before she met and married John Honeycombe in Charters Towers. She is said to have been a ballet dancer. She is said to have been a beauty and the Belle of the Ball at a big function in Melbourne. She is said to have been related to Lord Casey (who died in 1976). None of this, alas, has been confirmed or is likely to be true. The stories may have sprung from fantasies dreamed up by Irish Mary to romanticise a dubious past, or out of a natural inclination to fabricate events for the sake of a better story - which may have led to her losing her grip on reality later in life.

It is possible that she, not her family, lived for a while in Tasmania; she might also have lived in Melbourne. But she was not a cousin of Lord Casey -although her grandfather Michael Casey might have been related to Lord Casey's great-grandfather - Bartholomew Casey.

Who was Lord Casey? He was Australia's first life peer, and was ennobled as Baron Casey in 1960. He went on to become Governor General of Australia and died in 1976. Born in Brisbane in 1890, he was the son of Richard Gardiner Casey, a Queensland pastoralist and politician, who was chairman of the Mt Morgan Gold-mining Company, about the time the Honeycombes were at Crocodile Creek. But it is through Lord Casey's grandfather that some connection with Mary's father, Patrick Casey, might be found to exist. The grandfather, Cornelius Gavin Casey, emigrated from Liverpool in 1833, 20 years before Mary Casey was born. It was from Liverpool that she and her parents emigrated. But Cornelius was not a labourer. His father, Batholomew Casey, was a merchant, and Cornelius was a surgeon. As such he worked for four years at the Tasmanian penal settlement at Port Arthur, until 1838, when he married Letitia Gardiner, the daughter of a police magistrate. Thereafter he was

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on the staff of the Hobart General Hospital and in private practice, and in 1848 he became for a while the police medical officer in Launceston; he was also a justice of the peace. A son of his, Cornelius Sydney Casey, was born in Hobart in 1856, and he must have been living there or in Launceston, where Mary Casey is said (by her) to have spent her early years.

When Cornelius Casey's wife died in 1863 he left Tasmania with his 16-year-old son, and spent most of the rest of his life in Victoria, where he remarried, living off the profits of several prudent investments, in land and mines. He died in 1896, six years after the birth of his grandson.

It is just possible that Patrick Casey's father and Cornelius Casey's father were cousins, even brothers. The two families are, as far as we know, only linked otherwise casually and geographically, by Liverpool and Launceston. Lord Casey did not become a lord until 1960, long after Mary's death - although he had been an MP from 1931 and then a federal government minister.

Some families in England like to imagine they are descended from royalty, or from noble lords bearing the same surname. Mary very probably invented a family connection (or her father may have done) with the celebrated surgeon and Tasmanian JP, Cornelius Casey, or with his son Richard, the notable Queensland pastoralist and chairman of the Mt Morgan Company, which was actually launched in 1886, when the Honeycombes were living down the road.

Mary died in 1912, nearly 50 years before Lord Casey's ennoblement. It was her daughter, Jenny then married to George Butcher, who perpetuated this particular fantasy of the family's famous relation, recording it later as if it were fact in her husband's obituary, where she is described as 'a second cousin of Lord Casey1. Alas, not true.

It seems highly improbable that Mary Casey was ever a relative of the incipient lord, or that she was ever a ballet dancer or the Belle of the Ball. It seems more likely, given the general circumstances of her marriage to John in 1881 - she was 28, pregnant with her second child, and 11 years younger than he - that she may have been a dancer of another sort, in music halls or saloons.

After the marriage the record is fairly dour: five children to add to the first two, one of whom dies in an accident, and a hard impoverished life in various mining communities. Then, about the time of the birth of her seventh and last child in 1893 she is abandoned by her husband - there is a separation - and she has some sort of breakdown. For seven years she brings up her younger children on her own until in 1900 she is taken away from her children and put in a mental hospital for over two years.

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By this time the old sawyers' camp further west had expanded into a small community numbering about 320. It became known as Broughton Creek, and its simple dwellings dotted the western bank of Broughton Mill Creek. The settlement was further developed by David Berry with the addition of various grants of land (two acres each for the four main churches and 16 for a showground and a park), and in 1883 a grid pattern of streets was imposed on the existing houses, five blocks by five, the streets being loyally named after the British royal family. Various neat two-storey brick buildings with verandahs and other embellishments were erected, including a post office, two banks, two hotels, a court-house, a school, a butcher's, a saddler's, and a bacon factory. All were completed by the time David Berry died in 1889, at the age of 92.

Most of the newly created township, as well as the Coolangatta estate, passed on his death to a first cousin once removed called John Hay, born in 1840. This large inheritance was soon, however, hugely reduced by the executors' obligation of selling off great chunks of land to raise money for David Berry's lavish bequests. These totalled £250,000. Among the beneficiaries were St Andrew's University in Scotland (where Alexander Berry had been a student), and the Presbyterian Church. John Hay dutifully assisted in this task, and died in the process in February 1909. By 1912, all that was left of the Berrys' carefully nurtured domain was about 200 acres of land around the original homestead at Coolangatta.

Long before this, the grateful community of Broughton Creek had decided to recognise the local and personal munificence of the Berry brothers. In 1890, by an act of parliament, the town's name was changed to Berry.

A particular reason for gratitude was a grant of £100,000, given 'for the purpose of erecting and endowing a hospital for non-infectious diseases for the special benefit of the inhabitants of Broughton Creek (Berry) and the district of Shoalhaven and generally of all persons to whom it might be accessible.' A financial deal was made by David Berry's executors with the New South Wales government. This resulted in the David Berry Hospital Act of December 1906, whereby the state was given large tracts of land in north Sydney, in exchange for the erection and maintenance of the hospital.

Here Mary Honeycombe worked for a time, and here, in 1912, she died.

Those financial and other arrangements took some time to be realised, and in 1894, five years after David Berry's death, a temporary hospital, known as the Cottage Hospital, was opened in Pulman Street, in a disused store once run by James Wilson. At the opening of the Cottage Hospital, John Hay's half-brother, Aliok Hay, referred to' a time when Mr James Wilson was the only doctor in the district and in this building, a time when he used to draw teeth and

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Pulman Street before 1880 had been little more than a minor village track leading to Pulman's Farm, then owned by the Berry estate. Thereabouts, and by the Great South Road (now the Princes Highway), stood a council house, a constable's cottage, a butcher's shop, a bakery, stables, James Wilson's store, a curate's cottage, a one-room schoolhouse, and a wooden Catholic chapel that seated 40 people. The other religious groups met in the one-room schoolhouse. Most of these places were sold or demolished when the grid-pattern town was created by David Berry on the western bank of Broughton Mill Creek. A new timber Catholic church with an iron roof was built in Albert Street in 1884, and this was also used as a school by the Sisters of St Joseph, who came to the town in 1891. They lived in a six-room cottage nearby, with a separate apartment for the visiting priest. Perhaps their presence had something to do with Mary's move from Nowra or Lismore to the new township.

By this time (by 1895), James Wilson's old store in Pulman Street - he built a new one in Queen Street - had been turned into the Cottage Hospital, with six beds for men, three for women, a surgery, a dining-room, accommodation for the matron, and bathrooms featuring a novelty - taps with both hot and cold water.

The question is - did Mary Honeycombe work at the Cottage Hospital before the new hospital was built?

She probably came south to Nowra In 1904 to live with her 71-year-old mother and unmarried sister, Norah, or possibly with one or more younger bachelor brothers. Presumably, if Mary was well enough to travel to Nowra, she was also well enough to work. And at some point she moved to Berry where, as we know, there was a small Catholic community. Perhaps the Sisters of St Joseph helped her to obtain work as a domestic at the Cottage Hospital. If so, she could have been there anytime between 1904 and 1909, when the new hospital was officially opened. It is not inconceivable that Mary convalesced for a time at the little Cottage Hospital in Pulman Street, and that this led to her working there when her health improved.

The opening ceremony of the new hospital was performed on 18 September 1909 by no less than the Premier of New South Wales, the Hon Charles Gregory. Among the onlookers, one imagines, was our Mary, a small, inconspicuous figure in black, her face lined and gaunt, and her features as impassive and as blank as her eyes.

The David Berry Hospital was, and is, situated in 30 wooded acres on a ridge east of Broughton Creek, near the site of the old tannery and on what is now Beach Road. It cost £57,900 to build and equip. The first medical officer was Dr Lewers and the first matron Mrs Perkins. There were 30 beds in separate male and female wards, and an operating theatre. The matron's flat was above the north-facing entrance, a Victorian horseshoe-shaped arch. There was accommodation for nurses, and a staff cottage, in which Mary Honeycombe

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The 30-bed hospital is much the same today, although it has been renovated and re-equipped and the theatre has been closed. The views from the windows of low hills and meadows are rural and pleasing, with a wealth of fine trees in the grounds, azaleas and jacarandas. In the summer, drifts of darting dragonflies sparkle in the sun, and the strident singing of cicadas assails the ear. In some aspects it echoes the mild Irish countryside that Mary never knew.

Here, as Mary toiled through the last years of her life, she heard of Lawrie's ill-fated marriage in 1910, and in the following year, in March, of Willie's early death.

We know she kept in touch with her children by letter during these years. For her daughter, Annie, spoke many years later of receiving letters from her mother when she was in her teens (Annie was 13 in 1904). And there is a Christmas card, sent by Mary to Bob and his wife, Lena. It says: 'From Mother. With love to all my Dear Grandchildren'. This implies that at least two or three of them had been born by the time the card had been dispatched, and this would date it to 1909 -1912. There is no post mark, which would have shown the date and place of origin. But the fact that the card was kept - for sentimental reasons, no doubt - seems to indicate that it was the last communication Bob's family received from her before her death.

Soon after Willie's death, in March 1911, Mary's mother, Winifred, died in Nowra, and was buried there beside her husband, Patrick.

As Mary crossed herself above her parents' grave, did she have any premonition that her own burial would soon follow her mother's - that the three of them, who had lain so closely together so long ago in a ship's damp belly, would soon be reunited in the same dry earth?

A year later, in the damp Australian winter, Mary caught a chill, and a few weeks after her 59th birthday in August, she died.

Her death certificate gives the cause of death as pneumonia and cardiac failure. It describes Mary as an 'invalid pensioner' and gives her occupation as 'domestic duties'. Her doctor, Karl Georgs, who was then the medical officer in charge of the David Berry Hospital, had not seen her officially since 3 August. She was clearly of not much concern to him. Dr Georgs was a Prussian, and changed his name to George when the Great War began.

Mary Honeycombe died on 1 September, 1912, and was buried in Nowra two days later, in row 5A in the cemetery in Kalendar Street.

She was buried in a grave at one remove from her parents' resting-place. The allotment had been bought, by an unnamed person, the day before. The funeral service was conducted by the priest of St Patrick's Church in Berry, Father Bernard Sheridan, and the burial was witnessed by Richard Solway and John Mcgrath.

Who were they? Probably grave-diggers, or undertakers, not members of the family. So where were Mary's sister, Norah (by then Norah Harvey) and her

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No stone bears Mary's name on her grave, nor is there any numbered marker among the weeds. The stone that James put up on his parents' grave has fallen, and the cross has broken off. Their grave is forlorn, like others in the cemetery. There is no mention of Mary on the Caseys' stone - Norah and James had left no room for it - and nothing commemorates her passing. Any flowers were dust long since.

Only an entry in the cemetery's register for burials notes where, in the bitter brown earth, Mary Honeycombe lies.

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What now of John? There is a gap in his recorded story between 1897, when he was still manager of the Stockholm mine, and 1904, when he turns up in Western Australia. By then he was 62. By then both Willie and Bob were married and had already provided him with four grandchildren.

Where did he go in the missing years? Did he seek out Mary, for the last time? More than likely he passed once more through Melbourne and Geelong, revisiting his older brother and sister, Richard and Jane, before turning his face to the golden west, to the last gold-fields found in Australia, from which he and many others never returned.

The first gold rush in Western Australia centred in 1885 on the Kimberleys, a mountainous region over 2,000 miles north of Perth. The next major strikes were in 1892 and 1893, at Coolgardie, 330 miles east of Perth, and at Kalgoorlie, another 25 miles further east. There had been several other finds. Prospectors had been nosing about the vast trackless interior of Western Australia since the 1860's, poking about 'for colour1. Not a few had come from other gold-fields, restless seekers, wanderers, who moved away from diggings when machines moved in and businessmen took control.

In the wastes of Western Australia they followed in the tracks of surveyors and explorers who sank wells and charted the tenuous life-line of water-holes, without which no seeker after gold could exist. Some prospectors never returned, speared by aborigines, or dying of thirst and fever, their nameless bones marking a luckless claim.

Tales were told of gold found and lost. In pursuit of such stories, several prospectors struck gold in 1887-88 in the Yilgairn gold field, at Golden Valley, Parker's Range and Southern Cross, where gold was found on New Year's Day, 1888. But it was a tale told of gold to be found even further east that lured Arthur Bayley and William Ford from the new mining town of Southern Cross at the end of 1891.

They had met at the Croydon diggings in northern Queensland back in 1887, Bayley was 22 then, and came from Charters Towers. Did John Honeycombe know of him or his family? If so, did Bayley's letters home inspire John to seek his fortune, for the last time, in the golden west?

Bayley was 13 years younger than Ford. They had intended waiting at Southern Cross for rains to replenish the waterholes before setting off. But news of a find at Ullarring drew them thither: it yielded nothing. They and their horses then moved, slowly, some 120 miles to the south-east, to the oases of the Gnarlbine Soak, a regular and natural water supply discovered by one of HM Lefroy's expeditions in 1863. On the way they found a little gold at a place later

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called Black Flag, but lack of water prevented any further investigation. However, after two days of rain at the soak - it was now August - they decided to return to Black Flag.

The three decided to follow, and more by luck than bush-lore found Bayley and Ford at work on Fly Flat. They were not made welcome, and having camped by a rock-hole called Koolgoorbidee, or Kulgardi, by the natives, began prospecting on their own account.

The chums were outraged when they found out what had happened and protested strongly. But a pegged claim was sacrosanct. They had been betrayed by their own naivety and ignorance, and were advised by Bayley and Ford to peg out an adjacent claim. This they did, while Bayley set off for Southern Cross to make their rectangular claim official. Ford stayed behind to guard it.

So it was that Bayley's Find was made and named, Kulgardi becoming Coolgardie when Warden Finnerty rode out to examine the site and assess its possibilities. The chums had indeed found the cap of the reef, but it was now Bayley's, not Talbot's, and took his name, Bayley's Reward.

His version of what happened at Fly Flat was as follows: 'On Sunday afternoon, while fossicking around, we struck the reef... On Monday we pegged out a prospecting area on the reef. That morning a party of three men came on the scene. They had followed us from Southern Cross. That day we obtained 300 ounces from the cap of the reef. The party who had followed us stole about 200 ounces from our claim, so we had to report it. For that purpose I went into the Cross carrying 554 ounces, which I showed to the warden. The field was then declared open.'

It was 17 September 1892. There was great excitement and activity at Southern Cross, and the warden's office ran out of miner's right forms (each cost £1). That night it rained.

The West Australian newspaper reported on the 18th: 'Everybody who can raise a five or ten pound note or horses, is off to the new find... A party started

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at daybreak this morning on horseback, quickly followed by others on foot humping their swags. The pluck of the latter is greatly to be admired' - (It was about 120 miles to Flag Flat) - There are no stores on the road and no stores at the rush... Others have followed on horseback, and still more accompanied three teams, which are to carry provisions and tools at a shilling per pound... A 200 gallon tank, and also a cart for water, have gone... More teams leave tomorrow, the first team having out a track for the second. It is reported that 120 camels, fully laden, leave York on Wednesday.'