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

Late in 1871 John Thomas married Mary Bethel. Flush with money he took her off to Sydney for their honeymoon. No expense was spared. While they were there he heard of the Towers gold-rush. He rushed back himself and, after parking his bride with her mother in Ravenswood, joined the mob of prospectors milling around the as yet unnamed gold-field. In due course he discovered what became the Black Jack mine.

In a local history of Charters Towers, the Black Jack lode is described as being 9.5km southwest of Charters Towers and close to the John Bull mine. According to this history: 'The lode was first discovered and worked by Messrs John Thomas... C Riley and J Byrne, who obtained several crushings and then abandoned the mine. The first of these crushings, carried out on 15 October 1875 and consisting of 78.2 tonnes, yielded 99 ozs of gold... (The mine) was worked intermittently by different parties until 1886, when it created one of the strong mining booms in the field due to the discovery of a rich reef in the lower workings of the Black Jack PC. Immediately all of the surrounding ground was taken up... The boom only lasted three years and the mines were then let out on tribute. Around Charters Towers at that time, the tributers generally paid 5% of the gross yield of the gold to the owners for the first 12 months, then 10% per year for the following two years, under a three year contract. Several attempts at reworking did not meet with success.'

The Stockholm was a few miles north of the Black Jack mine and nearer the Towers. It was first worked in 1873 by a Mr West and a Swede known as Champagne Charlie. John Thomas and J Byrne acquired an interest in this mine and eventually took it over. About 1885 the Stockholm PC Company was formed and the ground was worked successfully until 1895, when returns fell away and it was let out to tribute. John Honeycombe was the mining manager of the Stockholm from 1894 to 1897, soon after which the mine was abandoned. It was opened up again in 1905 by the Brilliant GM Company, and a cross-reef was discovered in the deeper workings which surpassed the Stockholm reef in productiveness.

Black Jack's grandson, Bob, said years later: 'Other smaller mines, or shows as they were called then, were founded and worked by Grandfather Thomas. They were the Lubra and other smaller shows in the Block. His

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Gut it seems that Black Jack had little business acumen, losing what he earned in incautious speculation, and probably gambling. The thrill of discovery meant more to him than the tedium of digging and of managing a mine. At some point his mining and other interests were bought by his more shrewd and cultivated partner, the Hon EHT Plant, who went on to become one of the wealthiest citizens in the Towers, owning several mines and mills. He it was who built the most modern and well-equipped home in the town, Thornburgh House, completed in 1890, which in time became a leading Methodist-Presbyterian boarding-school, and remains so to this day.

Black Jack was, however, sufficiently wealthy at one time to buy a crushing mill, which he set up at Bosun's Creek near Rishton. Another Queensland pioneer, George Jackson, kept Black Jack's books and signed his cheques. One wonders how scrupulous he was. The under-used mill was moved in due course to Sandy Creek and renamed the Mary Louisa Mill. Black Jack sold out again - to the Honourable Plant. It was at Sandy Creek that Selina Thomas was born.

Although Black Jack became involved in other work - he was a teamster for a few years - he was apparently unable to exploit any of his undertakings to any lasting financial and social advantage. He ended his working life as a watchman and weigh-bridge attendant on the Brilliant Stockholm Block, and died at his home in Mill Lane on the St Patrick Block in October 1914. He was 89. He continued to work until nine weeks before his death.

After Bob Honeycombe married Selina Thomas, in August 1904, he continued to work in the mines, and would do so for seven years, earning six shillings a day, six days a week, moving from one mine to another as the gold-bearing reefs ran out. Lena had five more children. After Gladys came Mabel Florence (December 1905); Robert Francis John (June 1907); Lawrence Richard (February 1909); then William George and Donald Percival.

During these years there were two family weddings. Bob's sister, Jenny, married George Butcher in Cairns in 1908. A less happy and far briefer match was that of Lawrie and Lily Naughton, who married in July 1910.

Towards the end of 1910, Bob Honeycombe's time in the mines ran out. They had begun closing down the previous year, and hundreds of men, thrown out of work, had to find alternative employment. Bob became a lengthsman and pumper on the railways. He was probably lucky to get a job. It entailed a move to Hughenden, some 250 kilometers west of the Towers. He and his family journeyed thither, by rail, at the end of 1910 or early in 1911.

Being a pumper was less punishing, less damaging than being a miner, and although Bob was free at last of the fatal atmosphere of the mines, in which he had toiled for about 15 years, he was already infected with the miners' disease, phthisis. A wasting pulmonary disease, it now killed his brother, Willie.

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In February 1911, Willie, Esther and their youngest child, Len, travelled to the hot but drier climes of Hughenden to stay with Bob, in a last-ditch attempt to thwart the deadly advance of Willie's illness. Bob's shanty by the railway was racked by his older brother's tortured bouts of coughing, as it would be one day by his own. Willie knew he was dying, and he wanted, towards the end, to die at home.

That was in March 1911. In June, Lena gave birth in Hughenden to a third son, who was christened William George, in memory of his uncle.

The following year the family moved back east, from Hughenden to Macrossan, some 20km east of the Towers and situated by the Burdekin River. Macrossan was little more than a railway station and sidings, a collection of shacks and a meat factory, where cattle were brought from surrounding stations to be slaughtered and sold.

It was in this year, 1912, that Bob's mother, Mary Honeycombe, died in far-off New South Wales. In the absence of his father, John, even further off in Kalgoorlie, and after the death of his elder brother, Willie, Bob had become the male head of the Queensland Honeycombes.

As if in recognition of his central role, he returned in 1913 to the family's home-town, Charters Towers, where he went back to work in the Lady Marie and Clarke's goldmines, to the north of Towers Hill. The family settled in Black Jack Road, Queenton, and there they remained during the First World War, although for a time they moved to Pinnacle Creek.

Bob's two eldest children, Gladys (twelve in July 1913), and Mabel (eight in December), were both at school now, Mabel having begun her schooling in Hughenden when she reached the age of six. Young Bob, who was six in June that year, started his education at the Towers Primary School. Dick was four, and little Bill two in June.

Gladys and Mabel went to the Girls Central State School. A High School had been opened the previous year, with 157 pupils, but the girls would never go there.

Mabel liked school - 'Sometimes,' she added - depending on the teachers. Girls played no sports then, but were instructed in decorous and no doubt sweaty drills for half an hour on two days a week. And once a week there were sewing and cooking classes. The sewing became knitting when war broke out, and on Saturday afternoons the girls sat in the Red Cross hut knitting socks for soldiers. Sunday School was a regular event, one that Mabel enjoyed.

She said of her father at this time: 'He never backed horses. He never drank. He never smoked, only a cigar occasionally. He was more interested in going out fossicking for gold on his days off, Saturdays and Sundays." Perhaps he managed occasionally to crush some grains of gold from a stone to augment his family's meagre meals. There was no money for luxuries or niceties. Bob had to provide for himself, his wife and six children on less than £2 a week.

Mabel's brother, young Bob, because he was a boy, had a different kind of childhood in Charters Towers.

Born there in Duke Street on 14 June 1907, Bob was barely seven when war was declared. He was an enterprising and active little boy. His main interests as a child were gardening and looking after the goats, chickens and ducks owned by the family. 'I should have become a farmer,' he said. Horticultural shows attracted his close attention in the town, and enable him to turn his gardening skills to some profit. He said: 'I used to grow french beans and earned a few bob selling them at sixpence a pound. Every Saturday morning I would take them to the Crown Hotel and sell anything up to ten pounds worth. Then I would go to the matinee and buy myself a penny ice-cream.'

These were theatre matinees. The Towers abounded in operatic and dramatic societies then, and every evening performance was filled with uninhibited miners' families, revelling in the unsubtle scenes of sentiment, humour and romance that allowed them to forget their weary hours of daily labour. Public holidays provided similar occasions of mass enjoyment. Picnic excursion trains, organised mainly by church societies, would carry about 1000 people into Townsville for a day by the sea, or on an outing to the Burdekin River at Macrossan There were Sunday School excursions as well. These were one-day events. No one ever went on holiday.

On Saturdays, outings of another sort took place. Bob recalled: 'I had a little sulky drawn by a goat. Many children had them. On Saturdays we would go out in them, cut wood and bring it in. We lived in those days on Black Jack Road, where there was plenty of space, and everybody had goats.' He also had a dog. The first was a fox terrier 'which used to catch all the rats.' Then he had a mongrel called Scamp.

But Lena's children were not allowed to run wild. The girls were not even allowed outside the gate on their own. 'We were brought up fairly strictly," said Bob, 'and were not allowed too much freedom.' In those days mothers used to frighten children if they were naughty by saying, 'I'll call a policeman.' To young Bob a policeman then was 'a big bad man, like a big bad wolf,' who wore a khaki uniform buttoned up to the neck and a white helmet. Most of the policemen were Irish, according to Bob - 'hefty, tall men, with big feet.'

The family would have been living then in a hot, small house, made of galvanised iron, wood or brick. It would have had a fence about it and a garden in the back yard, a vegetable garden, with coops and huts for the chickens, ducks and goats. The yard also contained a well, from which water would have been drawn for household use. There was no running water. The house would have been situated near the railway and near Bob's particular place of work. This was to cut down on travelling, as transport in those days was minimal locally. All the miners working in a particular mine lived as near to it as possible. When the mine closed, the workers scattered to other areas. Such public transport as there was consisted of horse-drawn buses. It was always cheaper to walk, when every penny counted. Horses as such were far too costly for most workmen to buy or maintain Bicycles had appeared in Charters Towers in 1892,

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'Dad said he wasn't going to buy a bike like that,' remembered Bob, who when he was about 12 [in 1919] made his own bike out of bits he bought and found, the whole thing costing him about 10 shillings. 'I bought parts here and there for threepence... Or if someone had a broken frame I might get that for nothing. People also dumped things in paddocks and gullies. That's where I found many pieces of my bike. There were no garbage dumps then. I rode that bike for years...'

Young Bob also used to scout around for bottles. 'I used to collect kerosene and beer bottles. The brewery would give us a penny each for these as beer bottles... There were more kerosene than beer bottles, because in those days people had no electric light and used kerosene, which came in bottles, for lantern and kerosene lights.' He easily turned kerosene bottles into beer ones by washing them in the effluent that ran out of the Towers brewery at the back, and then present them to a man at the front. Because they now smelled of beer, he would pay up, a penny a bottle. The local store would also buy them.

Bob acquired bottles, and pennies, another way. He gave lantern slide shows. The necessary contraption he bought for 7/6 and the slides he made himself. 'On Saturday nights kids in the area would come to my place and I would show slides in a little tent made out of corn sacks.' They would pay a bottle or a penny as they went in. They left the tent at the other end.

A more general pastime among Towers' children, and of the rougher children in every mining settlement, was playing tricks on the Chinese.

'I was never directly implicated,' Bob averred. 'For the most part I kept out of trouble, But boys would watch out for Chinamen carrying the usual baskets across their shoulders, two baskets at each end of a pole. Lads would race out and swing on the baskets. I stayed out of reach, as the sufferers would quickly pick up stones and throw them, and their aim was not too bad... Another prank was to sneak up on the poor old Chinese driving a horse and cart. Lads would pull the back pin from the cart, and fruit and vegetables would cascade over the road. They would run for their lives as the driver dismounted, roaring and reaching for a stick or stones.'

Brought over originally from Canton in the late 1840s as a cheap and diligent labour force to replace convict labour, especially in the bush, the Chinese soon flooded in, lured, like the Europeans, by the dream of making a fortune out of the gold-fields and enhancing their status back home. By 1860 one out of every nine men in Australia was Chinese. Being so alien in dress, appearance, religion, customs, and cuisine, they soon became common objects of abuse, envy and fear. Their addiction to gambling and opium (instead of alcohol) were deemed great evils. They were also believed to be insanitary, and corrupters of virgins. Besides, all the gold they dug out of the ground was gold lost to the whites and taken back to China.

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Eighty years after this, Bob would remember how it was at the time of the First World War.

'A lot of the Chinese were moving away then, as were the miners... I believe many of them went back to China. Many died... Most of them seemed to be middle-aged. There were not too many young among them, and there weren't many females. Most were male. I think their wives were in China.1

He went on: 'I believe that at one time there were about 2,000 Chinese around the Towers. Many of them had market gardens on Millchester Creek about two miles from the Post Office. Further down, in another area near the Broughton, there were another three or four hundred... They lived in communities of their own, and the whites looked down on them, called them 'pigtails'. Most wore pigtails of course. But they were very good to the poor. The only rich people in those days were those who made money on the stock market: mine managers, businessmen, graziers. Most people were poor... We used to look forward to Christmas, when the Chinese would give people bottles of ginger, pineapples, water melons, bananas, all on the house, although they were very poor themselves.'

Another section of the community to be maltreated were the truly native Australians, the aborigines, who had occupied the island continent and Tasmania for some 90,000 years. By 1788 many tribes, tongues and customs had developed among them, and although a Stone Age people, they were no more savage than the whites who viewed them with such disquiet and disgust.

Geoffrey Blainey, in The Blainey View, comments that the differences in their regional diets were 'more marked than the differences in the whole Western world today. In Paris and New York the basic ingredients cooked in the average household today have much in common, but the basic foods eaten in 1788 in the Western Australian deserts, the swamps of Arnhem Land, and the Darling Downs, were not the same.' They had many different languages, and had invented tens of thousands of words, most of which have now vanished. But, as Blainey notes: 'If long journeys could have been made in aboriginal times, a traveller would have encountered at least thirty different languages in following the shortest route between Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.' He adds that their weapons and implements were as diverse. 'Even the boomerang, which is now seen as the hallmark of the aboriginal hunter, was in fact unknown in Tasmania and some parts of the Australian continent, and rarely used in many

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places. The digeridoo, a wind instrument... belonged to the north-western and northern coast, and its haunting sound was quite unknown to most tribes.'

In 1983, Bob Honeycombe recalled the last days and expulsion of what was left of the tribe that had once walked free and ruled the bush around Charters Towers.

'The ones I remember best are the aborigines like the old-timer, King Billy, who wore a brass plate around his neck. He was king of the tribe which lived at Sandy Creek, where my mother was born. There were about 40 or 50 in the area. My mother was afraid of them. But they were harmless, very timid and shy. I can remember them walking from Sandy Creek into town to collect their rations. On their way home, my mother and others would give them tea and bread. The aborigines would call in on people to see what they could get. My mother always gave them something, although we were very poor. There was no government assistance or aid for the aborigines in those days. They lived off the land... They made props for clothes-lines and sold them for a shilling. They'd cut your wood too for a shilling. That's how they earned their money.

'I remember the first gathering of the aborigines by the police from Sandy Creek... They would be carrying their possessions in sugar-bags. All the workers in those days carried sugar-bags. There were no suit-cases and a sugar-bag was your carrier. The black kids would have a dress or pants on and no underwear. I remember those poor souls: some were old, some young... I recall seeing the policeman on his horse with all the aborigines behind him. I was told they did not want to go. But they were taken from the area where they and their ancestors had lived for many years. They had no homes and they were put all together in some small paddock... All the aborigines were gather together from different areas, and it was arranged that they should be kept on Palm Island, where they were cared for by the government. They were put on long trains and sent to Townsville, and then shipped to Palm Island, about 20 miles off Townsville... In those days the aborigines did not live long.'

The rounding up and deportation of the local aborigines occurred in 19..

At the outbreak of the First World War a clearance of another kind had taken place when thousands of young white Australians enlisted voluntarily - and continued to volunteer their lives and services throughout the war. There was no compulsory conscription in Australia.

Young Bob's father, Bob senior, tried to enlist, but was advised against this by a local doctor as 'his health was not that good.' Also, he was married. The doctor said - 'Let the single fellows go.' 'He was very disappointed,' said his son.

In about 1905 Bob Honeycombe had joined the local militia, serving with B Company in the Kennedy Regiment, and he may well have thought that he

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would be accepted for war service. He had attained the rank of corporal. His daughter, Mabel, said: 'My mother told me he used to go away sometimes to a camp, and she said she liked to polish his buttons on his uniform.'

War was a glamorous thing then, promising action and excitement, travel and glory. None thought they would actually die, nor that their leaders had feet of clay and that the fighting was inane. The war also provided a welcome escape from the grinding drudgery of work and the endless niggling debts and responsibilities of domestic life. Thousands of Australians volunteered, responding to the battle-cry of the leader of the Labour Opposition, Andrew Fisher - 'We shall pledge our last man and our last shilling to see this war brought to a successful issue.' They responded to the old dream of Empire and of defending 'England, Home and Beauty,' and for the first time in the young nation's history there was a banner, a cause and a war to unite them. 'Australia will be there!' they sang. The new nation needed its battle honours, its blood sacrifice, and at Gallipoli it got them.

By 20 August 1914, over 10,000 men had enlisted in Sydney. A medical officer at the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne wrote on 17 August: 'Some I have to refuse and they plead with me and almost break down. In fact, some do go away, poor chaps, gulping down their feelings.' He added: 'Such awful mouths the Australians have, many of them. You couldn't fail them for teeth too rigidly, or you'd never make up your battalion.'

In Queensland, as Bob Honeycombe fretted in Charters Towers and read the papers that proclaimed 'OFF ON THE GREAT ADVENTURE', Driver BA Cripps began a diary.

He wrote: '4 August 1914: Troops mobilised at Townsville. Members of rifle clubs and those who volunteered came in at all times. 7 August: Received orders to leave by the SS Kanowna for Thursday Island. 8 August: Busy all morning loading troopship with stores. Had a few minutes talk with Jan [his girl friend]. Ship left wharf about 12 o'clock midst the most enthusiastic farewell that Townsville had ever seen. 14 August: The troops were issued with ball cartridges last night ready for an attack which is expected from the Germans.... 16 August. We left the harbour [on Thursday Island] about 10 o'clock tonight with all lights out as it was rumoured the Schamhorst was about. Our destination is unknown. The boys have started a paper on board called the Latrine Leader and the WC Chronicle.'