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

Gavin Souter was a 14-year-old schoolboy at the time. In his autobiography, The Idle Hill of Summer, he writes: 'Most of the time in Mackay it was easy to forget the war, to ignore the few black-garbed refugees from Java who were living in the town, even to forget that the Americans among us were not tourists in uniform but military personnel who would soon be returning to the hardships and hazards of New Guinea. When something reminded us of these hazards, it came almost as a surprise... The fortress had caught fire in the air, and as it dived into the trees one of its wings came away, leaving a great opening in the fuselage though with most of the passengers were emptied into the bush before the final impact. On the afternoon of the second day after the crash I rode [on a bicycle] out to Baker's Creek.' Evading military policemen on guard at the scene, he approached the area of the crash. The trees had been cut down to a height of 20 feet, 15 feet, 10 feet and then suddenly there were no trees at all - just an open swathe of bare ground about the width of a flying fortress and about a hundred yards long. All over this ground were pieces of aeroplane, first the tail fin standing alone and lopsided like a big khaki sail; then

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the main part of the fuselage, torn and burnt; here and there four big engine nacelles with their propeller blades twisted out of shape; and everywhere a litter of aluminium panels and tubing, men's shoes, scorched rubber hose, broken dials and wiring, and pools of melted perspex. Keeping just inside of the trees, I worked my way around the perimeter of the crash, pausing now and then to look at pieces of clothing in the branches overhead, or to pocket small bits of aluminium tubing... I saw a wristwatch. Half its leather strap was missing and the glass was shattered. But when I picked it up I found the sweep hand was still moving and [it] told the right time... I wrapped the watch carefully in my handkerchief and put it in a pocket.' As no name was inscribed on the back of the watch, his parents allowed him to keep it, but not to wear it. A few weeks later he sold the watch to a colleague of his father for £10.

He said: 'We did not have any fresh vegetables up at Jacky Jacky, and most of the lads got carbuncles and sores; and we were sent back to Cairns to get more greens before being moved to other areas.' This happened at the very end of December 1942, on New Year's Eve. 'In Cairns we lost our brigadier and our CO and the 31 st Battalion was amalgamated with the 51 st, because they could not get reinforcements. It became 31/51 Battalion. That's when I lost my command of B Company. I was sent to a school of administration. I was getting on for 36, and to be in charge of combat soldiers you have to be very active, as you're dealing with fellows aged 18 to 21.'

There may have been another reason why Bob never saw any active service. He is said, by Gladys' son, Norman, to have been colour-blind. This would have prevented him from serving in New Guinea, and rendered him unfit for service beyond a 28-mile limit around the Australian coast.

In May 1943, Captain Bob was given three days' leave in Charters Towers, and after attending the administrators' course, he was detailed in July to be the officer commanding the 4th Australian Division Reception Camp on Thursday Island, some 30 miles off the most northerly point of mainland Australia, Cape York, which Captain Cook had rounded in August 1770 before laying claim to the whole of the eastern seaboard of Australia.

Bob flew to Thursday Island from Townsville on 4 August 1943, and he remained there, with one break, until March 1944, during which time his regimental seniority in the 31/51 Battalion was recorded as being 'next after Capt (T/Major) LR Tucker.'

He returned to Townsville from Port Moresby on a supply ship, the Gorgon, disembarking on 21 March. Townsville was by now a well-established staging-post for Australian and American troops and freight on the way to and from Port Moresby in Papua-New Guinea.

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Bob's war was now over. He was placed on the Retired List on 27 April 1944, and remained on it for three years.

While Captain Bob was on Thursday Island, Australia's war against Japan had reached its most ferocious peak. Thousands of Australians passed through the Reception Camp on the island, mainly on their way to New Guinea, where there was the most savage and sustained fighting against the Japanese - on the Kokoda Trail, at Milne Bay, in Salamaua, Morotai and Wewak, which was captured at last in May 1945. The last campaign fought by Australian troops in this war was the invasion of Borneo in June/July that year. Then the Americans dropped two atom-bombs on Japan, in August 1945, and the war came to a sudden end.

There were 79,000 Australian casualties in this war (61,000 in the army) out of the 993,000 who enlisted.

The GIs based in Australia went home, generally unlamented, although political and economic bonds had been forged that would govern Australia's future as a growing power in the Pacific. Charters Towers went back to sleep, only awakening for its first royal visit, that of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester in June 1946. And as if to mark the end of an era, Jupiter Mosman, the aboriginal boy whose golden find had founded a city and influenced the lives of thousands, died in December 1945; he was 85.

During the war, on 8 April 1942, Don Honeycombe had married Myrtle Doris McMillan in Chillagoe; he was 23. She was one of the five children of Percy McMillan, a stockman, and his wife, Lillian. Don and Doris moved to Warwick in southern Queensland, where their first child, Lynda, was born in January 1943. Their two other daughters, Daphne and Rhonda, were born in Charters Towers, where Don and Doris would remain for the rest of their lives.

Don was a ticket clerk at the Towers railway station from 1943 to 1956, when he became the Chief Clerk at the Charters Towers goods-shed. In 1962 he was elected to the City Council of Charter Towers and served the Council for nine years. In his last three years on the Council he was Chairman of Health, initiating and carrying out the modernisation of the sewage system, and the construction of a new swimming-pool. An appeal was launched for the latter in 1968, and the pool was built as a memorial to the Kennedy Regiment. An Olympic-sized pool, set in gardens, it was officially opened in February 1972. In August the following year, a new goods-shed was built, costing $175,000. Don was still the Chief Clerk there. He retired in February 1982, after 46 years with the railways, and 100 years after the first train steamed into Charters Towers Station.

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After the war, the managerial progress of his older brother, Bob, continued at a steady pace, and he was employed on the railways in ever higher grades. He had returned to Townsville in 1949 as the assistant station-master; and it was in Townsville that Bob's wife Esther died suddenly in July 1953. She was 46. Bob would be a widower for 30 years.

Throughout the 1950s, Bob had continued to 'act up' on the railways, relieving senior personnel at Ingham, Tully, Innisfail and Sellheim. Then - 'I got a higher position, station-master's grade, and went west, acting as second-class station-master at Cloncurry, and first class at Mt Isa. Then I did two years as a traffic inspection officer.' In 1958, Bob was chosen to be the Queensland Railways' Goodwill Officer; the title was later changed to Commercial Officer. This was a new public relations post, aimed at acquiring new customers and business for the Northern Division of Queensland Railways. Scores of men applied for the job. Bob got it, and according to the North Queensland Register, filled the position 'with distinction for 15 years until his retirement.'

In the post-war years three Honeycombes worked for the railways in Queensland; Bob, Don and their uncle, Lawrie. Bob and Lawrie once worked for the railways in Cloncurry at the same time, although it seems they seldom met.

Bob had been sent there specifically to reorganise the train service, which had become somewhat lax: local trains never left on time and no one cared. On his arrival, Bob announced that this state of affairs would change, beginning with the 3 pm branch-line train from Cloncurry to Kajabbi. No one took any notice. The day dawned; the hour approached for the 3 o'clock train's departure. Parcels for rail delivery remained unprepared; passengers lounged in the nearest bar. The warning bell rang; the final bell rang; no one stirred. But on the last stroke of three the train steamed slowly out of the station, to the indignation and amazement of those passengers who were left behind. The next branch-line train left for Selwyn at 6 am the following day. Well before its departure, parcels and passengers lined the platform. Remarked Bob: 'The situation continued so, for several weeks.'

Inefficiency was endemic in Australia then, as the country licked its economic and social war-wounds. But the railways' biggest bug-bear was a natural one, rain. Most of it arrived in torrents in association with cyclones, causing floods that destroyed railway bridges and tracks.

One of the worst floods occurred in Queensland in March 1946. Golden Heritage records: 'At Townsville, the Ross River rose 15 feet over Aplins Weir, an all-time record. The railway line between the city and Cardwell was wrecked,

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several bridges being completely demolished. In many places the rails, held together by sleepers, were strung through trees well outside the railway fences... The flood in the Burdekin rose to 40 feet in one hour... At Macrossan, the Burdekin reached 71 feet 6 inches, only 10 feet below the rails.'

Bob's uncle, Lawrie, died in 1962 - as did Mabel's husband, Sam Kettle, on 5 May; he was 59. Sam's last job was as the engineer in charge of the Towers waterworks.

Sam and Mabel had lived in 212 Gill Street since 1928, in a house that he built and equipped with furniture he made himself. Mabel lived there until she died. 'I wouldn't part with it for anything,' she said. 'We saved and Sam worked hard to build our house.'

They had two daughters, Joyce and Dulcie. Joyce was a premature baby, not four months old when she was born and very small. But with care she lived. 'Sam was a good-living man,' said Mabel. 'Happy-go-lucky, not like me. He used to get mad with me being quiet. Everybody liked him... He never drank when we first married. But he liked plenty of company, and he used to have a drink at the hotel a couple of doors up. He didn't bring it in the house, not in those days' When they went out together, it was to the pictures. Sam was also a freemason, like Bob and Don Honeycombe.

Two years after Sam's death, Mabel was asked by the headmistress of St Gabriel's College for Girls, if she would be a house-mistress there. A boarding-school, it had been run until 1962 by the Sisters of the Society of the Sacred Advent. 'I gave it a go,'said Mabel. 'I liked mixing with the girls.' But after three years - 'I did not want the job any more.' The following year, 1969, the Principal of Blackheath College for Girls, a church school founded in 1920, approached her. Mabel succumbed and was house-mistress at Blackheath for 10 years. Blackheath was co-educational then in its classes, having joined forces with Thornburgh in 1939. 'It was an easy job,'said Mabel. 'I never had to do any work other than keep the girls in order.' She was never aware that the man who built Thornburgh, the Hon Plant, had once been her grandfather's partner.

Uncle Lawrie's death in Cloncurry in 1962, when he was 74, served to emphasise the early loss of his older brothers, Willie and Bob, who had died as long ago as 1911 and 1924. Lawrie's three married sisters, Jane Butcher, Annie Johnson (she had remarried) and Nellie McHugh, were still alive in 1962. But they of course had lost their natal surnames years ago, and with Lawrie's death, the surname John Honeycombe had given his seven children all but disappeared from that generation. It was now up to Willie's two sons and Bob's

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three to pass it on. For Lawrie had never remarried after his short-term marriage to Lily Naughton and had fathered no sons.

The last Honeycombe of that older generation to die was in fact Black Jack's daughter Selina (Lena). Bob senior's widow, Lena Honeycombe, died a month after her 83rd birthday, in November 1964.

Gladys' son, Norman, would recall later that his grandmother in her later years 'wore glasses all the time' and was 'a very quiet woman.' She was small and gray-haired, he said, and didn't like being called Grandma; and she 'would never open her door at night in the Towers.' She was also one of the women (the others were John Honeycombe's daughters) who sustained and perhaps improved on some of Mary Honeycombe's delusions. Selina told her son Bob that Mary was 'a good-looking girl, a dancer, and came from a good family.' She told Bob that they were related to the Casey in Parliament (he was an MP in the late 1930s) and that when he was ennobled in 1960 that Lord Casey was a cousin to Bob's father. None of which was true.

With Selina's death, another link with the past was severed, a past that seemed in 1964 as ancient, odd and largely incomprehensible as the lives of the aborigines or, for that matter, the colonists of the First Fleet. For Lena had been born in a long-ago, long-skirted time before cars and planes and electricity, before radio and TV.

In 1972, Charters Towers celebrated its centenary. Honeycombes had lived there for almost as long, the first child of John and Mary Honeycombe, Willie John, having been born there in 1879.

The last Honeycombe by name to be born in the Towers was Rhonda, the third daughter of Don and Doris; she was born in 1951.

Don's oldest brother, Bob, retired on Christmas Eve, 1973, after nearly 50 years in the service of Queensland Railways; he was 66.

The District Superintendent of the railways wrote to Bob at the time: 'You have carried out the responsibilities of the position (of Commercial Officer) with great dignity, tact and competence.' One of the staff at the new Towers goods-shed wrote a poetic Farewell, characterising Bob as 'a noble man, with a friendly grin... We'll never know how good he was, until he really is retired.' And the North Queensland Register said: 'Wherever a rail link joins settlements and sidings, wherever railwayman gather, his name is known.'

The Honeycombe connection with Queensland Railways, through Lawrie, Bob and Don had lasted 70 years, through the great days of the age of steam and the construction of many bridges and tracks.

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A year after Bob retired, in 1974, he embarked on a journey in search of his ancestors, visiting England and the Channel Islands for the first and last time. His travels also took him to Perth, Kalgoorlie, Bendigo, Berry and Bouldercombe. He corresponded with many people and derived a good deal of pleasure from collating and writing up the results of his explorations of the past.

In July 1983, his great friend, Arthur Titley, known as Tiger, died, aged 74, after a six-month illness. Arthur had been Mayor of Charters Towers, apart from a three-year break, since 1964, and had been a friend of Bob for over 50 years, ever since their first meeting in the local militia. Bob cancelled a research trip to the south when Arthur's illness worsened. He wrote: 'I wanted to be near Arthur at the end.'

He himself had less than a year of life left. He died on 11 March 1984, at the age of 76.

His nephew, John Honeycombe, wrote to me in April: 'He died quite suddenly, after a series of strokes. Beth and I went up for the funeral, which was quite large. The Masonics had a grave-side service, and the Military played the Last Post. There were a number of military personnel in attendance. Bob held the rank of Captain in the Army Reserve. Bob, like his brother, Don, was a freemason, and had been so for more than 50 years. He was buried on 14 March in Charters Towers cemetery.'

He was buried beside his wife, Esther, and a fine white monument was set up beside hers by his younger brothers and his sister, Mabel.

Lengthy tributes to him appeared in the local papers and in a news bulletin issued at Ingham by the 31st Infantry Battalion Association in June, which began - 'In many ways Robert Francis John Honeycombe was a big man. Big in stature, big of heart - Bob went through life shedding a feeling of goodwill amongst all those with whom he came in contact...' This obituary concluded: 'Bob Honeycombe simply liked people, liked to talk with them, liked to listen to them, liked to help them. Vale Bob, we liked you too.'

Of all the Honeycombes, in Australia and elsewhere, Bob had shown the most active interest in the family's history, spending the last ten years of his life in carrying out much useful research across Australia, acquiring facts, photos and documents. So it was doubly sad that his death prevented him from attending the first international gathering of the Honeycombes in England in September 1984, an event more pleasurably anticipated by Bob than any other.

Mabel Kettle wrote to me on 2 April, 1984: 'We used to see each other every week and he always had news one way or another of the family tree and of

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And then most of the family history material he had so diligently assembled disappeared.

Mabel wrote again on 14 May, enclosing an obituary notice. 'Don has just called and told me what has happened. He said that Bob's house had been disturbed. Someone had picked the lock and broken in and taken the Heritage Papers. And there was not one other thing disturbed in the house. So whoever took the Heritage Papers must have known the run of the house, and where Bob kept them. It is heart-breaking I must say. Bob had just about put all of his life savings into the Heritage, and was very very very proud of it all... I am very upset over the whole thing.'

All was not lost, however, as Bob had sent copies of nearly all his research material to me in England. But all the original photos and documents, which he had wished when he died to be passed on to Rob Honeycombe of Ayr, had gone.

Why were they stolen? Did someone mistakenly think they were valuable (when they were invaluable only to the Honeycombes)? Or was there some family secret that someone had to suppress? Mabel thought she knew who took them - 'I may be wrong, so one has to be sure. So I just keep all to myself and wait and see and hear.'

Her patience was rewarded, and when I visited her with Rob Honeycombe (John's youngest son) in January 1988, she produced several parcels of documents tied in white ribbon, which seemed to contain all the material that had disappeared. And she did so with a sweet smile and not another word.

Mabel Kettle continued to write to me, endeavouring to answer my continuing queries about her family's history. Her last letter was sent in June 1989. She had been very ill and was hospitalised in Townsville.

She wrote: 'Dear Gordon - these are some of the answers to the questions on the family tree you have asked me for. I hope you can understand them. No Gordon, we never ever carried water from over Clark's Goldmine hill. We has our own well in the yard (our own) yard, where our parents use to bail the water for our household use. The reason for our parents being moved around from house to house at all times was because he was only temporary in the railway at the time so that meant another house where he was told to go. I think he had four temporary transferred. Yes Lady Marie Goldmine was connected to Clark's Goldmine, one could go down Clark's Goldmine, and come up at Lady Marie mine. Aunt Nellie and Aunt Annie did stay at the Chapmans, till it was time of age to go to work. This is all the news I can think of just now. I am well again, will be going home in the near future. With best wishes, keep well - Mabel.'

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She died four months later in Charters Towers, on 3 October 1989. She was 84. But Bob's Heritage Papers which she, and he, had wanted young Rob Honeycombe to have, never came to him. They had disappeared again.

3( Sugar in the Currv

One would like to know why John and Mary Honeycombe christened their fifth child Lawrence Sydney, and which parent had the final say.

Apparently it was John. For most of his children bore Honeycombe family names. None of them had any obvious Irish associations, apart from the second name of the eldest daughter, Jane Winifred, later known as Jenny. Winifred was Mary's mother's name.

Why Lawrence Sydney? Was either a friend of John? Or was it his wish to mark the birth of his fourth son, on 11 April 1888, by giving him a name that might commemorate the 100th anniversary of the finding and founding of Sydney in January 1788? In the event, the baby was called Lawrie and the boy later nicknamed Sugar.

He was born in the heat and dust of the diggings at Crocodile Creek. On his birth certificate some of the details (provided by Mary) are wrong: John was nearly 46 years of age, not 43; Mary was 34 not 29; John wasn't born in Gloucester, England, and she was not born in Tasmania. John's occupation is given as "mining manager" when it may just have been miner. And they were married in 1881, not 1878.