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

In June 1922, he was 80. And in July the wheel came full circle for Bert Facey: he and his family took possession of a 1200 acre farm near Narrogin.

Was it now or in the following year that old John Honeycombs was hospitalised? We don't know. His last years are largely a blank. No doubt his mind and body wore away, as the last of his friends departed from the town or died. For when he died, his death certificate contains no family details - nothing about his parents, his wife, his children, his place of birth or even his job. On the certificate is written ten times Unknown.

Perhaps he was ill for so long before he died that no one knew much about the one-eyed man with the odd sweet name? Or did no one care?

In the last year of his life, 1923, the death of Ned Kelly's mother in April, aged 95, attracted some attention, as did the wedding, two weeks later, in London of King George Vs second son, the Duke of York, and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Of more local interest was the visit to Kalgoorlie in May of the new 40-year-old Australian Prime Minister, Stanley Bruce, former war hero and leader of the National Party. He was given a civic reception.

All John was given was a hospital bed. His world, his life had shrunk to that, and all he had done and seen and thought and planned and desired and known were the stuff of his dreams: phantom scenes and images of his English childhood, of the voyage out, of gold mines, men and women and his family, faces gone and soon to be for ever forgotten.

John Honeycombe, aged 81, died of an enlarged prostate and cystitis in the Kalgoorlie Government Hospital on 30 October 1923. More than 70 years had passed since he sailed with his parents from England and first saw Australia, whose hard hot earth he would mine for most of his life.

He died obscurely and alone, a year before his third son, Bob, died and two years before his much older brother, Richard. It seems more than likely that he was never visited, in the 20 years he spent in Western Australia, by any of his family. Nor did he visit any of them. Nor, it seems did he think much of them now, for he died intestate.

Not that he had much to leave them, as his personal effects were worth a mere £9. Of the 14 estates dealt with in November by the Curator of Intestate Estates in WA, John Honeycombe's was one of the lowest, and probably included a remnant of the money his son and daughter had sent him.

He was buried in Kalgoorlie Cemetery in Lyall St after a brief service conducted by the most celebrated priest on the gold-fields, Archdeacon Collick, now aged 55. The following year Collick became a Canon and moved to Fremantle, where he lived until 1950, dying in poverty in Perth nine years later when he was 91.

Was Collick personally acquainted with John Honeycombe and did he feel duty bound to give the dying of this lowly old miner a certain dignity? Or was

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John merely a relic of the Archdeacon's parish? Who attended the service? Perhaps Miss Reid, who ran the lodging-house in Hannan's Chambers, was among the mourners, and the manager of the Palace Hotel. Perhaps Henri Wessel played something suitable in the hospital chapel on the harmonium or piano. Most probably next to no one knew that he had died.

No one visited his grave for 50 years, until his great-nephew, Bob, from Charters Towers, sought it out in 1974, and I in 1987 from England.

The cross still marks his unnamed grave, and the red earth heaped over him in 1923 has somehow resisted the torrents of winter rain and retained its hillocky shape. Hannan's Chambers is now the Windsor Guest House, and Kalgoorlie is cleaner, smarter and air-conditioned. Much is changed. But the chimes of the Post Office tower in Hannan St continue to toll the hours away.

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John Honeycombe's eldest son, who was baptised as William John Casey Honeycombs, was born on 9 February 1879 in Charters Towers - two and a half years before John married Mary Casey. John was 36 when William John was born, and his mother was 25.

William John, who was known initially as Willie and later as Bill, spent the early years of his parents' marriage in the family home on the St Patrick's Block, where his two younger brothers, Frank and Bob, were born. Then in 1884 the family moved to Crocodile Creek, where Willie first went to school and where little Frank died. They remained in the area until 1893, when Mary Honeycombe and her children returned to Charters Towers.

Willie was now 14 and may have been working in some goldmine for a year, ever since he left the school at Crocodile Creek in July 1892. In the Towers he probably went to work in the Black Jack or Stockholm mine, or in some mine where his father had contacts or friends. But before long his mother suffered a mental breakdown, and in 1894 his father took him and his younger brother Bob to Melbourne and Geelong, to see his relatives there - his brother Richard and his sister Jane.

They may have travelled south by train; they probably journeyed thither by boat - from Townsville to Brisbane, and then on to Sydney and Melbourne. But they could have made the journey by boat and train, to the wonderment of Willie and Bob, who had never been out of Queensland, and had possibly never even seen the sea.

That sense of discovery and excitement, on which their father, a far-travelled goldminer, must have thrived, would have been multiplied in Melbourne, now a crowded metropolis, full of noise and smells and civic grandeur, and still suffering from a two-year depression that had closed hundreds of businesses and put thousands out of work. Those workmen who might have once earned seven shillings a day, were now lucky to earn half as much.

John, who was 52 in June 1894, must have taken his sons to see his older brother, Richard (65 in September) in Footscray. Maybe they lodged with him. Richard's four sons had all married by then and had young children of their own. John certainly took his sons to see his elderly sister and their Aunt Jane, who lived in rural comfort in a spacious house called Fernside on the outskirts of Geelong. The Mountjoys' home, with its servants, stone walls, staircase, garden, orchard, inside toilets and proper baths, was a world away from the gold-miners' shacks in Crocodile Creek and Charters Towers known as home to young Willie and Bob.

They were handsome boys, taller than their tiny aunt, and made a good impression on her, for, as we know, she offered to educate Bob, and perhaps

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Willie as well, and give them a temporary home. Jane Mountjoy was 68 (her husband was 74); compared with the other Mountjoy wives, she had led a barren life: she had had no children, and her daily routine had revolved for years around her husband, her home and tta« ohuroh. Although she had probably not seen John for up to 20 years, lie, being the youngest, may have been her favourite brother, and his sons might have reminded her of the secret son she had born and abandoned in England over 50 years ago.

Whatever the reason, John and his two sons returned to Queensland - a fatal move in many ways, as it led to Willie's early death. And Bob's. If Willie had stayed down south, not only would his whole future have been vastly different and his life extended for many years, but also the lives and futures of Honeycombes yet unborn.

Willie, and now we should call him Bill, returned to the dust and lamp-lit dark of the mines. Whether he now lived with his mother, his brothers and sisters, we do not know - probably not. He probably lived with other young bachelors in shanties near the mines where he and they worked. As his father probably moved away from Charters Towers about this time, Bill became head of the family and must have viewed with some alarm, as well as concern, his mother's developing dementia. But he was becoming close to another family, to one of the daughters, and would soon acquire a family of his own.

In 1898, when he was 19, Bill began courting Esther Chapman, and he married her on 21 January 1899, a few weeks short of his 20th birthday. She was eight months younger than he.

A photograph taken on their wedding day shows them both looking, and dressed in, their best. Esther, who is wearing a spectacular high white confection on her head, stands and stares unselfconsiously at the camera. Her face and left hand seem large in proportion to her torso; she looks quite small. But her features are handsome and well-defined. Bill, with a very short haircut and a pale rose in his button-hole, sits rather uncertainly, his hands partly clenched. He looks wistful and mild. Both resemble their mothers, and as a couple seem happily complementary. Both were also born illegitimately. And as Esther's mother, Annie Chapman, will later feature largely in the lives of the John Honeycombe children, her history may be briefly touched on here.

Esther's mother was born as Johanna Black in Woolongong, New South Wales, on 9 October 1846. A Roman Catholic, she was known as Anna or Annie. A photograph of her as a mature woman shows her to have been handsome, like her daughter, with large eyes, ears and mouth.

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Twenty years later and pregnant, she married a William Parsons in Queensland; their first child, William was born, and died, that same year, in October 1866. A year or so later, she married or claimed to have married, Thomas Weston in Brisbane - or at Roma, some 400km west of Brisbane - in January 1868.

Then in 1875 Annie Black/Parsons/Weston appeared in Charters Towers, less than three years after the area was officially declared a goldfield. Here in March 1875 she bore an illegitimate son, Robert, to a 30-year-old gold-miner called Edmund (or Edward) Chapman. She was now 28.

Edmund Chapman was born in Kent in England in March 1845. His father, Robert, was a shepherd, and the family emigrated to Australia on the Agricola, reaching Moreton Bay (now Brisbane) in March 1853. The youngest son, George, who was one year old, died during the voyage.

There seems to be no basis for the Chapman family legend, apparently begun by Esther's mother or alleged father, that the name had originally been Champion and had been altered for some reason - but why? - to Chapman, and that they were descended from a Richard Champion, one of the founder members of the East India Company, via a Valentine Champion, an indigo planter in Bengal. This Valentine had in fact married a teenage girl, Mary Ann Pickett, in Calcutta in 1833. They had five sons. Mary Ann died aged 29 in 1847, and two of her sons, and her husband, died the following year. The eldest son, born in May 1836 in Tirkut in the state of Bihar, was Edmund George Champion. He came to Australia in 1858, arriving in Melbourne on the Result he was 22 and his occupation was 'trader1. This Edmund is clearly northe Edmund (born in 1845) that Annie Black/Parsons/Weston cohabited with in Charters Towers. The dates don't tally. And why should a wealthy trader with such a distinguished name want to downgrade his name to Chapman? It seems that Annie, who was somewhat loose with facts and husbands, invented the Champion connection, seeking, as Mary Casey (her cousin?) did, to add lustre to her children and herself. She might have come across the well-established Edmund Champion in her travels, or have been a servant in his house.

Curiously, on Edmund Chapman's death certificate (he died in 1900 in Charters Towers) the informant, who gave his name as Edmund George Chapman, described himself as a 'friend', not a son, which he must have been -the illegitimate George Chapman, whom Annie bore in 1878. Perhaps (Edmund) George was unable to acknowledge the lowly status of his real pappa. He also claimed that the dead man, Edmund Chapman, was 65 and had been born in British India. The likely truth is that Edmund Chapman was 55, having been born in 1845 in Kent.

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All the girls later used the surname Chapman, as did their younger brother John. Caroline, as Carrie Chapman, married one of the Butcher boys (as Willie Honeycombe's sister Jenny did); Nellie Chapman (Margaret Ellen) never married; an older sister, Cis, married an Aitken. As a family the 'Chapman' children were evidently fairly close. For Esther would keep in touch with most of the others throughout her life - whoever their fathers were. She employed one of Sis Aitken's sons, and two Chapmans and a Weston attended her funeral as far as we know.

But why were Esther, Carrie and Nellie baptised as illegitimate Westons, after the birth of two illegitimate Chapman boys? Had Annie Black/Parsons returned to Tom Weston, whose last child she had officially born in 1873? Were the girls really his? Or was Annie merely bestowing on them her most recent 'married' name, that of Weston, to give the three girls some legitimate status? The problem is further complicated by the fact that Annie's last recorded child, who was born on 25 February 1887, was named as John Valentine Black.

Esther's father, according to a family legend, is said to have been a well-educated Englishman, who went to Cambridge University. This can't have been Edmund Chapman (or his father, the shepherd). Could it have been Tom Weston? We shall not know until a marriage certificate for Tom and Annie is found, and maybe not even then.

Annie certainly never married Edmund Chapman, although she assumed his surname, calling herself Mrs Chapman. All her children also became Chapmans, and are recorded as marrying and being buried as such.

Could the fact of the matter be that Annie Black/Parsons/Weston/Chapman was a part-time prostitute - who gave birth to at least ten children and gave them the surnames of her current 'husband' or protector as each was born? But then why call her last-born John Valentine Black? Unless she was temporarily without a 'husband' or had no idea who the baby's father was.

Perhaps we slander her by imagining this. There may be some other explanation for the confusing surnames her children bore. For Annie Chapman later achieved some respectability as a midwife. And she was known by the younger Honeycombes as Granny Chapman - which again suggests an aura of respectability as well as respect.

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There is much we would like to know about the connections of Annie Black/ParsonsM/eston/Chapman with the Honeycombes, even with Mary Casey. For the maiden name of Annie Chapman's mother was also Mary Casey. Could this Mary Casey have been Patrick Casey's sister? And could Annie Chapman and Mary Honeycombe have been cousins?

This would explain in part why Granny Chapman was so closely involved with the Honeycombes. For she looked after John Honeycombe's two little daughters from 1900 for several years; and in 1909, she it was who received Willie's telegram ('c/o Mrs E Chapman Thompson St opp Pyrites Crossing') telling Esther of his return home from the cane-fields of McDesme.

Perhaps Granny Chapman was like one of those strong, hardy, resourceful women of the outback described by Henry Lawson, and also a woman of much fortitude and warmth. What a tale she would have had to tell of her early life, and of Charters Towers - of the troubles of John and Mary Honeycombe, and of Willie and Esther, of Bob and Lena; of Lawrie and Lily; and much more. She knew them all.

Esther's childhood in Charters Towers seems to have been an impoverished one, with an absent or out-of-work father. For at the age of eight she was taken away from school and employed as a companion or maid for four-year-old Nellie Peel. The Peels, it seems, were well-to-do. Esther's mother was clearly not. Whatever her occupation was it was evidently insufficient to support her brood of children as well as herself, the father(s) of her children not being helpful either. Or perhaps the education of her daughters was deemed much less important than that of the boys. Annie Chapman was a midwife in later years, having learnt her occupation from experience, one imagines, and not from any training. It was an occupation that would be occasional and not well paid - if paid at all.

Presumably, when Esther married Bill in January 1899 the Chapman tribe and all the Honeycombes, except for father John, were there: Bill had five surviving brothers and sisters, and Esther more. They were both still in their teens - though Bill would soon be 20. Irish Mary, his mother, would probably have been in tears. Bill, a gold-miner, was a nice-looking, fit young man: he had served in the local militia the previous year and he was also a volunteer with the Charters Towers Fire Brigade. There is a photograph of him in the winning team of the Ladder Race competition at Easter 1899.

He and Esther had four children. The first, Irene Helen, was born in December 1899 - she was always known as Rene. The second, Alma Annie, was born in February 1902 at the Honeycombe home in Pyrites Road; Mrs

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The third baby, a boy, who was bom on 28 March 1904 in Charters Towers, was named after his father, William John, and later known, like his father, as Bill.

Later that year Bill Honeycombe wrote a letter to his young wife Esther - it and others penned in 1909 have survived - and suddenly Bill and Esther and their children become much more than dim figures and names on a page.

We are lucky to have these letters; they were kept by Esther and passed on to her children. For letters are innately ephemeral, instant rays of communication, written for the most part without thought of perpetuity. Yet how we treasure any remnants of the correspondence penned by members of the family even 50 years ago, let alone letters written 100 years ago or more. For what seems trivial and personal becomes to us a historical document, casting a shaft of light on a family, a town, a place, an event, at a time, a year, a week and on a day long since forgotten but not without interest, even outside that family. And how much do we value those letters that form a series, a regular description of people at a place and at a time we never knew.

Such a series is made up of the 40 letters that Bill Honeycombe wrote in 1909 to his wife Esther, as he worked for five months on a sugar-cane farm near Ayr, which was then a hamlet, 60 miles southeast of Townsville and few miles inland.

Since he was 14 or even earlier Bill had toiled as a miner in the Charters Towers gold-fields. But by 1904, when he was 25, the underground gold-bearing reefs were becoming exhausted: production diminished. Many mines were let to 'tributers' and where thousands had been employed, now there were hundreds. In October 1904, the Towers gold-fields suffered their worst disaster when an underground fire swept through the Brilliant PC mine: seven men died. The tragedy marked the end of the Towers' golden years and the beginning of its decline, which accelerated in 1909, the very year in which Charters Towers was declared a city. Between 1909 and 1916 mines closed down one by one, until only a few remained, on tribute. Then they too faded away.

Bill's letters to Esther in 1909 are preceded by a solitary letter that has survived from 1904. It was written in August, when Bill, according to the Post Office directory, was working at or near the Black Jack mine, 9km southwest of Charters Towers.

It isn't clear whether he and his family were also living in the vicinity of the Black Jack mine. But earlier that year, in March, when Bill's first son was born, the family were living in Drew Street, Charters Towers. The baby was born at home, and the midwife was Mrs E (Edmund) Chapman, Esther's mother.

Bill's letter, written on 9 August 1904, was occasioned by the fact that Esther was away on a visit, perhaps to relatives in Townsville or Ayr. Their eldest child, Irene Helen (Rene), who was four, had stayed behind with her father, or perhaps with Mrs Chapman. Esther took with her Alma, aged 2V5, and the baby, who was six months old.

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'We are getting on alright. Reenie is quite conientedj, I feel lonely without you my Dear, but I know it is only for a while... Fred and I were down at the Weir on Sunday morning and I had dinner at Carries and we went out in the afternoon so I had a day out and we went up to hear Dunsford and Burrows meeting last night... I feel like one who has been away from his sweetheart for a long time... Well my Dear this is only a short note remember me to Cis and all the rest and kiss the little ones for me. If you come home by the early train take a cab home if you have any money left... Good Night Darling xxx Your fond Husband Bill Honeycombe.'

It seems that Bill continued to work at the Black Jack mine up to and including 1911 - although we know that his old Aunt Jane who wrote to Esther in July 1909, addressed her letter to 'Mrs WJ Honeycombe, Pinacle, c/o AJ Simpson, Mt Leyshon Road, Charters Towers'. This suggests that Bill, and the family, were then at Pinnacle Creek, and that this was Bill's last mining job before he found work on the cane-fields near Ayr.

The family by then numbered four - the latest, and last, Leonard Lawrence, having been born at Charters Towers on 14 October 1906. He was born at Pinnacle Creek, and Mrs Chapman was present at the birth.

Bill's 30th birthday was in February 1909. By then he had been fatally smitten by a disease called phthisis, a common miners' complaint. A deadly legacy of underground gold-mining in those days, it was a wasting disease which accompanied pulmonary tuberculosis and became an industrial synonym for TB. The drills boring into the quartz reefs of mines produced a fine dust that slowly corroded the lungs. In the hotel bars of gold-field towns or on the road, men would be racked by spasms of violent coughing: old-timers would hold onto posts and fences, their lips blue, their faces drawn.