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

Six months after Lawrie's birth, his older brother, little Frank, was accidentally killed. Five years later, the family moved back to Charters Towers, and sometime after 1894, when Lawrie was six, John and Mary separated. She was declared to be 'of unsound mind' in 1900, incarcerated at Goodna, and eventually made her way to Nowra in New South Wales in 1904.

In 1900, Lawrie, aged 12, was taken care of by a baker's wife, Mrs Naughton. It seems that Lawrie stayed on with the Naughtons who became, in effect, his foster-parents. Although his father may have been in the vicinity, it seems that Lawrie, like John's younger children, was probably left to be brought up by others and to fend for himself. It seems certain that he never saw his mother again, nor his father, after 1903, when Lawrie was 15. Any education had long been abandoned by then and Lawrie was probably helping out in the Naughtons' bakery to earn his keep.

He appears in a football photograph in 1908 when he was 20, playing for the St Patrick Football Club in Charters Towers. He was a keen and skilful player, slight and fast, and even when he was cane-cutting with his eldest brother, Willie, in 1909, he continued to play football at the weekends. On 1 August he played for Ayr against Townsville.

In October, Lawrie returned to Charters Towers from the cane-fields at McDesme for a week. He had a girl-friend, Maggie, who had been causing him some anxiety. Said Willie in a letter to Esther. 'He is worrying that she may take up with someone else.' Apparently she did. On 25 October Lawrie returned to

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the cane-fields. Five days later Willie reported that Lawrie was not 'in a very good humour, he went into town... Lawrie said to Jack, by Jove, Susie is looking well. Poor Sugar. I smiled to myself.'

In Willie's last letter from the Rutherfords' farm at McDesme, he wrote: 'I do not think Lawrie is troubling about Mag much and I am glad too, as she would be no good to anyone... I seen Lawrie's gang's photo in the North Queensland Register last week, he is still working at Rutherfords, they were all at the races today.'

On 23 November, 1909, Willie and Lawrie returned to Charters Towers.

The following year, on 27 July 1910, Lawrie married Mrs Naughton's daughter, Lilian May Naughton, known as Lily. He was 22.

The wedding ceremony, performed at St Columba's Presbytery 'according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church', was far from being a romantic one, although the bride was but 15. She was probably in tears. For Lily was four months pregnant, and gave birth to a daughter, Gwendoline Maud, in December that year. Lily's age on that birth certificate is given as 15, as it is on the marriage certificate. It seems likely that the child was conceived when Lily was still 14.

Neither her grocer father nor her mother seem to have attended the wedding, which was witnessed by Maurice McMahon, probably one of Lawrie's mates, and Elizabeth Naughton, Lily's older sister.

Years later, Lawrie would tell his cronies in Cloncurry that the child wasn't his, and that he only married Lily to protect her honour and to legitimise the infant, he said that after the wedding ceremony he left Lily 'at the church steps'.

Presumably he married her for the sake of her mother, who had cared for him since he was six. He must have grown up with Lily, who would have been like a younger sister to him. She eventually moved to Brisbane where, it is said, she married a furniture salesman.

In later years it was said by Alma Reardon one of Lawrie's nieces and a former Miss Honeycombe, that Lily became a prostitute. Alma told how her son went to Melbourne (this must have been about 1940) and was accosted at the railway station by a woman. He was saved by a policeman, who intervened, saying: 'Lily Honeycombe - get away from that man! He doesn't want you.' Or words to that effect. When the son returned to his mother in Queensland he wanted to know who Lily Honeycombe was. Was she a relation? Alma assumed that the woman with the sweetly pretty name must be Lawrie's former 15-year-old bride.

Alma may have been mistaken. In 1940 Lily would have been 45 and not likely to be touting her wares at that age. And why in Melbourne? For she died in Brisbane in 1953. Coincidentally, there was another Mrs Lily Honeycombe in Melbourne at that time, who in 1940 was 46 and definitely not a prostitute.

Perhaps Alma's son misheard the surname, which could have been Vinniecombe, or Honeycutt or Honeyman.

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Soon after Lawrie's own wedding, and possibly in 1911 when, according to a letter written in Kalgoorlie by his father, John, he 'got into the railway department', Lawrie moved away form Charters Towers, severing virtually all his family ties.

He settled in Cloncurry, and for the next 50 years he lived there or thereabouts without ever apparently leaving the area, and becoming something of a loner in the hottest heart of the bush.

The first white men to see this inhospitable land, and to be seen by the aboriginal tribes who had roamed therein for some 60,000 years, were Burke, Wills, King and Gray, in January 1861.

After setting out from Melbourne, with others, in August 1860, these four had made the fatal journey from Cooper's Creek to the Gulf of Carpentaria, which Burke and Wills (almost) reached in February 1861. They were prevented from crossing the continent and obtaining their goal, the sea, by impenetrable mangrove swamps. 'It would have been well to say that we reached the sea,' wrote Burke, 'but we could not obtain a view of the open ocean, although we made every endeavour to do so.'

William Wills was 27, the son of a surgeon and born in Devon; the expedition's surveyor, he eventually became its second-in-command. Robert O'Hara Burke, born in Galway in 1821, had been a captain in the Australian army and a police superintendent in the Castlemaine district. He was described by a contemporary as a 'careless dare-devil sort of Irishman of very ordinary physique. He wore a long beard, over which he dribbled his saliva.' It was Burke who named one of the rivers the foursome found on the journey north after a female Irish cousin, Lady Elizabeth Cloncurry.

When he, Wills, King and Gray failed to return to Melbourne, several

relief expeditions set out to find them. The only survivor was the former soldier

from India, John King. The other three had died of heat exposure and starvation

towards the end of June. •

William Wills, dying at the deserted depot at Cooper's Creek, scrawled a farewell letter to his father in Devon, which ended: 'I think to live about four or five days. My religious views are not the least changed and I have not the least fear of their being so. My spirits are excellent.' The last entry in his diary two days later ends: 'My pulse is at forty-eight, and very weak, and my legs and arms are nearly skin and bone. I can only look out, like Mr Mioawber, "for

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King, a living skeleton, was found by Alfred Howitt's expedition in mid-September. Some aborigines had rescued him and kept him alive.

Another expedition leader, John McKinlay, of Adelaide, reported to the authorities on his return that there were 'magnificent pastures' near the Cloncurry River, and copper ore. A third expedition, led by William Landsborough, also found good grazing land, and it was his description of them a few years later that inspired a pastoralist named Ernest Henry - they met at Burketown, where Landsborough was the police magistrate - to seek these pastures and claim them as his own.

It was Ernest Henry who blazed the particular trail to Cloncurry that Sugar Honeycombe and many more would follow a generation later, a trail that would lead eventually to Mt Isa.

Ernest Henry had served as an ensign in the Crimean War. Arriving in Melbourne in 1858, he moved north to Moreton Bay, which had been established in 1824 as a penal settlement by the then Governor of New South Wales, Sir Thomas Brisbane. The settlement was abandoned 15 years later and reestablished up-river, where it took the name of the river that flowed past it, Brisbane. The first emigrant ship arrived there in 1848, and 11 years later the hinterland to the north and west was separated from New South Wales and designated Queensland.

In this year that the state was born, 1859, Ernest Henry took part in an expedition of exploration up the Burdekin River from Townsville; and over the next four years he bought up three great tracts of land, the last a property far to the west of the Burdekin, which he named Hughenden. All three stations failed for various reasons, and Henry sold up and moved on, looking for minerals now as much as good pastures. Then he happened to meet Landsborough in Burketown, an isolated community on the edge of the Gulf, and resolved to investigate the alleged potential of the country by the Cloncurry River, some 400km to the south.

In July 1866, Henry and his partner, Roger Sheaffe, set out, and in October they reached an isolated rocky hill on the river which Henry named Fort Constantine after a fort of that name in Sebastopol in the Crimea. Venturing upstream for several miles, he found what he thought was a copper mountain by the river - Black Mountain. But the two hundred-weight of ore that he diligently dug out and sent on a dray to Clermont for assay, turned out to be silicated iron. Undeterred, he returned to the area the following year, and in May 1867 he found the real stuff, on a grassy rise across the river from Black Mountain. Pushing aside the turpentine bushes, he saw an outcrop of gossan. On chipping the rock he disclosed some thin red veins of native copper.

This became the Great Australia Mine, great in name only, as its output was never large; greater were the handicaps of working there, of heat, dust,

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flies, thirst and isolation. But here Henry built a home for himself and his wife, the first dwelling in the area. Hudson Fysh described it years later as 'a small shack at the mine, with bloodwood uprights and saplings stretched across for wall plates, the sides sheathed with bark, a thatched cane-grass roof completing the structure.'

Progress was very slow on every front. The discovery of gold in the Selwyn Range south of Cloncurry drew other miners to the area, and by 1870 there were about 100 Europeans and 40 Chinamen scattered about the baking bush and torrid hills. The Great Australia's output was still quite small - 22 tons of ruby oxide ore and native copper in 1872 - and it was not until 1876 that the collection of huts and tents that dotted the red earth near the mine were officially tidied up and laid out as a township called Cloncurry. The first general store and the first hotel, the Royal, had been opened four years earlier, the former by Ernest Henry.

There was never a rush of prospectors to 'The Curry', as the settlement became known. Gut shallow scrapes of alluvial workings scarred the landscape here and there: Soldier's Cap, 30 miles east; and Gilded Rose, 10 miles southwest, which would one day be uselessly owned by Sugar Honeycombe.

Although Ernest Henry discovered two more copper mines, at Argylla (1880) and Mount Oxide (1882), while others discovered copper at Hampden, near Kuridala, at Duchess and Mt Elliot, the problems arising from climate, transport costs, terrain and distance proved all but insurmountable, and the whole area soon declined. The output of both gold and copper was small, and the cost of every means of transport, whether by bullock, horse or camel, was prohibitive. Cloncurry was in the proverbial middle of nowhere and the heat was also extreme. In fact, Australia's highest ever temperature was recorded at Cloncurry in January 1889, when it soared to 127.5 degrees Fahrenheit (53.TC) - in the shade. The Great Australia, which Henry sold to some Scottish investors in 1884, packed up production - although smelting was now being done on the site - three years later, just as the alluvial gold-fields in the district petered out. Ernest Henry retired with his wealth to Sydney, dying there, aged 84, in 1920.

1884 was also notable for the arrival of the first Cobb & Co coach in Cloncurry, where some 500 people now lived, sheltering from the sun and slaking their thirsts at one or more of the six crude structures that called themselves hotels; soon there were eleven. Before Cobb & Co, mail had been

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But up to 1908, bullock teams and long camel-trains remained the main carriers of equipment, supplies and ore. At one time there were about 500 camels in harness in the Cloncurry district, controlled by about 40 so-called Afghan drivers, most of whom were not from Afghanistan but from neighbouring Baluchistan. They had their own camp and mosque at Cloncurry, beside the Chinatown section of Coppermine Creek.

'The grand Australian bush' was described by the writer, Henry Lawson, in his short story, The Bush Undertaker, as 'the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands.'

This could well have applied to the Cloncurry region in 1896, the year that story was published and the year in which Henry Lawson married in Sydney; he was 29.

The year before, another popular writer and a visitor to Queensland, had sat by a waterhole near Winton, south of Hughenden, and composed new words for an old tune that became Australia's anthem. He was Andrew Paterson, and the first collection of his poems, The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses, had been published earlier that year. Writing in magazines, he used the pseudonym 'The Banjo.' The song he wrote in Winton, where it was first sung in public, was Waltzing Matilda.

In 1900, the year that Henry Lawson and his wife sailed to London to improve his literary standing, Cloncurry, according to a much later writer, Geoffrey Blainey, was "the scene of more unfulfilled promises than any other town in Australia.' It was, he wrote, 'an oasis of 40 or 50 shimmering iron roofs; its wide streets were crossed by a tartan of wheel-tracks the year round. Along these dusty streets passed mobs of lean cattle on their long trek south to Adelaide and Wodonga, or east to Hughenden and Townsville, strings of camels with Afghan drivers, buck-boards and carts from the stations, and long horse teams with wagons of ore. On busy days you could count 60 horses outside the rickety forge of RC Hensley, the town's versatile blacksmith, undertaker, newspaper owner, wheelwright and agent for Cobb & Co coaches. In the stillness of sunset when the muezzin cried the hour of prayer and the Afghans knelt by the verandah of their mosque, you could count scores of their hobbled camels with loads of ore and provisions beside them. In this land of long distances and no railway there were more carriers than any other tradesmen except miners.'

But in December 1908, 21 years after the railway-line from Townsville reached Hughenden, a train steamed at last into Cloncurry, amid general acclamation, although the line would not be open to regular traffic for another year.

SU:

Sheep and cattle farming also boomed with the arrival of the railway, and branch-lines spread out into the bush, to Selwyn, Duchess, Malbon, Dobbyn and Kajabbi. Eventually, over a quarter of a million cattle would roam the extensive grazing properties in Cloncurry Shire, and over a million sheep, although this number in recent years has been much reduced by the old enemies, drought and dingos, and a general conversion to cattle.

More permanent buildings, made of stone, were erected in Cloncurry itself: a courthouse, banks, churches, stores, a new hospital and as many as 15 hotels. They began to replace their wooden and iron-roofed predecessors from 1908. The arrival of the railway speeded the process, and helped to swell the population. The local council's problems multiplied as the councillors tried to cope with conflicts of tenure between miners and graziers, inconsistent water supplies, increased traffic on the unsurfaced roads (still little more than tracks), and inadequate sanitation. The latter resulted in frequent outbreaks of typhoid and other diseases. There was day-long bustle, excitement and noise, sometimes lasting deep into the starlit night. Sleepy Cloncurry was now very wide-awake.

Into this hotch-potch of activity came Lawrie Honeycombe in 1911 or soon thereafter, travelling west from Charters Towers by train, with his few possessions in a bag, or swag. He was probably sent to this chaotic new town in the back of beyond by his new employers, the Railway Department, to work as a shunter in the expanding railway industry there. Cloncurry, once the rail-head, was now a busy depot, with several branch-lines radiating out from it. On Lawrie's arrival he would have found a lodging in a cheap hotel or boarding-house and bought himself a drink. He would have asked questions and wondered what life would bring him. Confused by the change of scene, he would have been optimistic about any outcome, relieved no doubt to be far away from certain family crises and scenes of female betrayal. Here, no one knew him, although people soon latched on to his peculiar nick-name and surname, Sugar Honeycombe. These at least would make people remember him.

Little is known about his early years in Cloncurry. But as time passed, he acquired a reputation as something of a character; and when he died he was a well-known local 'identity', as they say in Queensland,

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Two incidents associated with Charters Towers blighted aspects of his life out west: an injured knee and his marriage. The knee had been damaged in a football match, and the injury resulted in what seems to have been a recurring cartilage problem; it would trouble him for the rest of his life, and prevented him from enlisting for service in the Great War. His empty marriage seems to have made him wary of women, if he was not so already, and because of it he was prevented from marrying anyone else, although he had it in mind. On the other hand, he may have used his marriage as an excuse to avoid a second such alliance. He and Lily apparently never obtained a divorce, although in due course she remarried in Brisbane.

It is possible that Lawrie's arrival in Cloncurry did not occur until 1915, when he was 27, and when the shortage of fit young men increased job opportunities for those who had not adventured overseas to fight on foreign soil.

The copper mines were flourishing then, despite labour disputes over contract and piecework rates. The wartime demand for copper had forced its price up from £66 a ton in 1914 to a peak of £135 in 1916, and the smelters were busy. In 1918, the best year for copper businessmen in the Curry, the smelters at the Hampden mine, at Mount Elliott and Mount Cuthbert, treated some 190,000 tons of ore. The field's total output was valued at almost £1,400,000. Over 2,000 men were employed that year in the mines and smelters, and altogether some 7,000 people lived and worked in the area between Duchess in the south and Mt Cuthbert in the north. Kuridala - its earlier name, Friesland, had been changed in 1915 because of its German association - was now a thriving township with a plenitude of commercial interests, as well as four churches, a state school attended by 280 children, and the most modern hospital in northwest Queensland. In 1918, according to Blainey, 'the iron roofs of the town stretched for nearly a mile. At night the lights of the smelters pricked the darkness like the lights of a liner at sea.1 Wilhin three years those lights were all but extinguished, and by the end of the Second World War Kuridala was a ghost town.

What happened? At the start of the Great War the Copper Producers Association had made a favourable and exclusive deal with the British government. When the war ended, the British relaxed their price controls on copper and let them be determined by market forces. In five months they nearly halved. There was a slight renewal in 1919, but the depressive economic aftermath of war, together with pay strikes, shipping disputes, defective managerial decisions and rising overheads as production and profits declined, soon compelled the closure of the smelters. The copper industry finally

collapsed in 1920. The jobless departed, although some small companies survived, as well as some individual diggers, known as gougers. Mt Elliott Ltd bought up its rivals, Mt Cuthbert and Hampden-Cloncurry, in a bid to consolidate and retrieve some of its flagging fortunes. But in 1930 this entreprise was abandoned. Eventually, in 1943, all Mt Elliott's machinery and equipment was bought by Mt Isa Mines for a miserable £2,300. If it had not been for the lifeline of the railway and the need for some centralised community to serve the growing sheep and cattle industry, Cloncurry would have become another Kuridala.