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

And in Echuca a six-berth brothel in the backyard of the Murray Hotel opened its doors that year.

According to the booklet, many of the settlers of the 60's and 70's came from the fertile area around Geelong, and were consequently disappointed by the poor results of farming on the Murray River's banks. Their high hopes were a mirage, such as they would see in summer shimmering on the plains.

Another booklet, Pioneers of the Echuca and Moama Districts, lists 43 local families, six of whom came from Geelong or thereabouts. Six were also of German origin, six were Irish , and 14 came from Scotland. The English settlers mostly came from Yorkshire, Devon and Cornwall. In the 1880's those families with the most land in the former runs of Torrumbarry and Wharparilla were the Mountjoys (3,900 acres), the Mooneys (2,600), the Chrystals (2,400) and the Mitchells.

Let us suppose that William occupied his land in February 1874, a month or so after his 77th birthday. Whenever it was, what he had to do followed a

119

However, the Port Phillip settlement down south was growing apace and avid for independence, ungoverned by the administrators in Sydney. This was achieved when the colony of Victoria came into being in July 1851, with a population comprising 80,000 white settlers and 6 million sheep.

A year before this, an enterprising ex-Tasmanian convict, Henry Hopwood, had bought a punt and began ferrying people and goods across the Murray River, near its confluence with the Campaspe and Goulburn Rivers. This was also the closest point on the Murray to Melbourne. The resulting settlement on the south bank, known at first as Hopwood's Ferry, was renamed Echuca -the Anglicised version of an aboriginal word meaning 'Waters-meet'.

Within three years the first paddle-steamer, the Mary Ann, appeared on the scene, opening a way to South Australia and the sea. Commerce and some comforts of urban life were established among the gum trees, as brick buildings, houses, hotels, churches, stores, took shape, replacing tents and huts.

In 1858 Hopwood built the Bridge Hotel, and when he died in 1869, he left a thriving town, now linked to Melbourne by a railway. This in turn linked up with the steamboats and paddle-steamers that had begun surging up and down the Murray in 1853, bearing increasing amounts of settlers, timber and wool. By 1863 there were 20 of them, and Echuca had a population of 300.

Less than 10 years after that the population topped 1600, and Echuca was Victoria's second largest port, though deep inland, with 240 boats a year tying up at its red-gum wharves.

Meanwhile, pressure groups in Melbourne sought to have the large original runs dismantled and made available to all. As a result, several Land Acts were passed in the 1860's that took away the tenure of the land from those squatters who had unofficially occupied it in the 40's.

The Land Act of 1869 enabled settlers like William Honeycombe to gain possession of 320-acre blocks through a kind of hire-purchase agreement. No deposit was required, but payments of 2 shillings an acre were required per annum until the full price of £1 an acre had been paid. The blocks were held on a three-year licence, during which they had to be fenced and 10 per cent of the land cultivated. Each settler also had to prove he had lived on his land for at least 2% years. If these conditions were complied with, the settler (also called a selector) could then apply for a seven-year lease, at the same rental as the licence - 2 shillings per acre per year. At the end of this period, if all the payments had been made, the settler could apply for a Crown Grant. Such were the conditions under which William obtained his land.

A little book commemorating the centenary of the Wharparilla West Primary School (in 1975) contains an account of one of these settlers, John Hattwell, who came to the area a few years before William. It was written as a class project about 1902.

'In the year 1871 my Uncle John came to the Terricks [hills west of Torrumbarry] and on 16 October 1872, he selected land on the boundary of

The new land they had all chosen to farm was at Torrumbarry, west of Eohuca, close to Victoria's irregular border with New South Wales, which followed the winding course of the westward-flowing and muddy Murray River.

What did Lawrence Mountjoy, his nephew, brother-in-law and father-in-law find when they and a farmhand or two drove out of Echuca by horse and cart to claim their selections? The land here was flat, a plain. There were no rolling, agreeable hills. It was nothing like the countryside around Geelong.

The early history of Echuca is an unusually romantic one for a Victorian outback town. Mining was never a disfiguring part of its fame nor made its fortune, which was gleaned from the Murray River, from the sheep that grazed and the wheat that grew on its banks, from the forests of red gum trees thereabouts that were hewn for their timber, and from the commercial double boon of railways and riverboats. The river drew the first white men into this wilderness, and at Echuca, on the river's southernmost bend, the first huts that were homes were built. But the process was slow, not a rush as in gold-mine towns.

It was Captain James Sturt and a boatload of men who first passed down the river in 1829. The year before this, in November, he had set out down the Macquarie River to solve the mystery of the inland sea that was supposed to exist somewhere in central Australia. For all the rivers so far discovered in New South Wales beyond the Great Dividing Range flowed west or northwest, away from the coast. On this expedition Sturt came across and named the minor Bogan, Castlereagh and Darling Rivers, but not their eventual mighty outlet.

A year later he embarked on what became an epic journey, in a whaleboat rowed by soldiers and convicts, that took him far down the Murrumbidgee River to its junction with another great river which he named the Murray. He followed the conjoined rivers, past their union with the Darling River, until he reached the salty expanse of Lake Alexandrina and the Southern Ocean. The expedition returned whence it came, reaching Sydney in May 1830, having travelled 2,735 kilometres in seven months.

The mystery of the west-flowing rivers was thus solved, and within 20 years, all the waterways of the complex Murray/Darling River system were identified and explored, and graziers began occupying the hinterland through which the rivers flowed, navigable for thousands of miles.

In 1842, when still part of the Colony of New South Wales, the district west of Echuca (which still had no name or existence) was divided up. Two of the large runs, called Torrumbarry and Wharparilla, were taken respectively by the Collyer brothers and by John Bett and George Mather, the common boundary of their properties being marked by a chock and log fence running north and south along a low ridge some 500 yards west of Wharparilla Road.

The Wharparilla run was gazetted in October 1848 as a Western Port Run, No 13, of 76,000 acres and carrying 12,000 sheep. But Bett and Mather can have made little impression on the 12 square miles of bush they owned. Even it they laid some of it waste with fire, the clearing of the charred ground, the uprooting of every tree, would have taken them years to accomplish. For the

In the lefthand margin was written: 'Subject to two months being allowed to remove fence.

It appears from later evidence that William, given the go-ahead in December 1873, was slow to occupy his property.

The summer months were not a time for clearing new land by burning it, nor was it the time for sowing wheat. Hay-cutting was already in progress; sheep-shearing had taken place in October. Perhaps William was delayed by illness (he was 77 in January 1874), or by some family complications, concerning Lawrence and Jane. For Lawrence Mountjoy had also selected some land in Torrumbarry - as had his sister Kuriah, who was married to William Trewin, and his nephew, Lawrence Harward Mountjoy, Caleb's 18-year-old eldest son. Caleb Mountjoy and his family would also occupy several blocks by 1878, in partnership with Thomas. For Caleb's tenth child, Anna Maria, was born there in that year.

It seems likely that all these Mountjoys, the Trewins, and William Honeycombe, moved north in 1874.

A plan of the Torrumbarry selections dated 1880 shows that both Lawrences, uncle and nephew, took adjacent 320-acre lots abutting the north side of William's block. Kuriah and William Trewin had two 322-acre blocks not far away. We know that Lawrence Harward's block was occupied by him by 1876, for so it appears in another land application, signed by his uncle, Lawrence Mountjoy, who describes himself as being then 'of Torrumbarry, Farmer.' And William Trewin witnesses William's will in 1875.

Another point - one of the conditions of selection was that selectors should reside on their land. So when William Honeycombe travelled north in 1874 to pay his rent, take possession of his land, and remove the offending fence, he was probably not alone. More than likely both Lawrences went with him, as well as William Trewin and some farmhands. Jane and Kuriah probably stayed behind, not joining their husbands until a new home was built and furnished.

How did the men get to Torrumbarry? Did they journey with their few possessions and basic farming equipment on a bullock dray? Or did they travel there with horses and carts? Most probably their heavy goods were sent by road, while they themselves made the journey more speedily, and noisily, by train.

Presumably the lease on Roslyn was sold, and Lawrence and Jane, and William, moved out of the homestead there. They had farmed at Roslyn for more than 15 years, the longest any of them had lived in the same place since coming to Australia; and the upheaval and the departure must have seemed momentous and sad. On the other hand, someone may have been subcontracted to manage the farm at Roslyn while they were away.

116

go at farming. Experience was not necessary a qualification. The Duffy Act of 1862 developed the concept of hire-purchase, allowing leases to be bought for 2/6 per acre per year over the period of eight years. But selectors were also required to cultivate ten per cent of their acreage (maximum 640 acres), to fence their land and build a home thereon. The Grant Act of 1865 allowed leases to run for seven years, with an option to purchase after three. Four years later the second Grant Act permitted the selection of unsurveyed land, and the maximum acreage allowed was reduced to 320, with payments now being spread over ten years - all payments contributing towards the total price of £1 per acre - three of these years being under licence and seven under lease. Those who held licences could apply for a Crown grant if certain conditions were met.

William's original request for 320 acres of land in Torrumbarry Parish (pronounced Torr-um-barree) is undated, which seems to indicate that the form was filled in at Echuca and handed over then and there, or that it was sent in with a similar application from Lawrence Mountjoy. Both hypotheses may serve, as neither William (nor Lawrence) would have probably applied for land they had not viewed themselves. William's block (Lot 10, Section 2) had been surveyed on his behalf for a fee of £7, and it is possible that the original form was filled in by the surveyor involved. Certainly William's written name at the top is not the same as his signature elsewhere.

His request was considered by a meeting of the Local Land Board in Echuca on 9 October 1873, and it was 'recommended that this application be granted, 2 months allowed to remove fence.'

What fence? Had it been put up by a previous claimant? Possibly by a neighbouring farmer? Or by William himself? Whatever the reason, William's original selection was soon reduced in size.

Early in December he received a printed reply, with relevant details written in, from the Office of Lands and Survey in Melbourne. It was sent to the post office at Highton.

It said: 'Sir, referring to your application under Section 19 of The Land ActJ869, I have to notify to you that (subject to such alteration of boundaries and area as may be required, prior to the issue of the license) the Honourable the Minister of Lands and Agriculture will recommend the issue to you by the Governor of a License to occupy the land specified in the margin here' - (320 acres). 'You are required to pay, within one month from the date hereof, to the Land Officer at Echuca the following sums, viz: yi Year's rent in advance commencing from the date of this notice... £16. Fee for preparation of license... £1... The receipt of the officer to whom such payment is made will be sufficient authority for you to enter upon occupation of the land pending issue of the license, which will be dated 5th Deer 1873... If payment be not made as above, your application will be deemed to be abandoned, and the land will be available for other applicants.'

115

Rivers. Indeed, the bad effects of bad weather may have influenced the move to Echuca of William, Lawrence and Jane. A determining factor may have been an unexpected event in August 1872 - snow.

The long era of exploration was also coming to a close, as the last deserts, mountains and secret places were seen, noted, mapped and named, the white expedition leaders ever depending on the skills and knowledge of their aboriginal guides for water, food and directions, for life itself.

The Forrest brothers traversed the southerly interior of Western Australia in 1870 and 1871. Then Gosse and Warburton set out independently from the telegraph station at Alice Springs in April 1873, attempting the crossing, by camel, of trackless deserts and wastes to the Indian Ocean. Gosse encountered and named Ayers Rock, but after eight months of tortuous wandering was forced to return, exhausted. Warburton's team succeeded in reaching the Oakover River, well to the east of Port Hedland, and then the coast.

In 1874 John and Alexander Forrest journeyed in the reverse direction, setting out on horseback from Champion Bay near Geraldton with two other whites, two aborigines, 20 horses, and rations for six months. They were lucky; rain fell as they were about to expire from thirst, and a waterhole was found. They also survived three attacks by aboriginal tribes. Most of their horses died or were abandoned on the journey; but after seven months of extreme hardships they reached the telegraph station at Peake in South Australia.

The last great overland expedition was made by a former post office clerk turned jackaroo and bushman, Ernest Giles. Twice he had tried to cross the hot centre of Australia from east to west, and failed. On the second trip, one of his men, Alfred Gibson, died, and Giles gave the desert that killed him his name. Such was his own hunger and desperate plight that Giles, lost for a time and alone, ate a baby wallaby alive. But his third expedition, using camels rather than horses, succeeded in reaching Perth in 1875. Not satisfied, he returned the following year by a different, more northerly route, thus traversing Australia twice, from Adelaide to the Indian Ocean and back. Given 5,000 kilometres of land in the Northern Territory as a reward, he gambled and drank his life away, dying in poverty on the Coolgardie gold-fields in 1897.

As Gosse and Warburton struggled variously for survival in the torrid heart of Australia, in 1873, far away in the sweet October spring of Geelong, William Honeycombe waited to hear about his application for land from the Local Land Board in Echuca.

After Victoria was separated in 1851 from New South Wales, a series of Land or Selection Acts had been passed by the Victorian government, which allowed virtually anyone (excluding women with children and lunatics) to have a

114

He was assisted in this enterprise by Lawrence Mountjoy, who selected some adjacent land. This seems to indicate that both men had a business or working relationship and that William had not only worked on the land at Roslyn, while living with Lawrence and Jane, but that he may have had a financial stake in the farm.

But what possessed them both, at their age, to leave Roslyn, Highton and Geelong and take on the back-breaking task of farming on unbroken ground, we shall never know.

They must have had some good reports from friends or family who had visited Echuca. Perhaps they were influenced by John and Harry Mountjoy, Richard's sons, who had moved north to Raywood and thence to Neilborough in 1873 - Echuca and the land that was being opened up thereabouts was less than 50 kilometres to the northeast. John and Harry may indeed have made an exploratory trip the previous year. It is perhaps significant that William's application for land west of Echuca was made about the time of John's marriage to Eliza Niffenecker, at Highton, in August 1873. The wedding feast, as Richard Mountjoy had now been dead for seven years, was probably held at Roslyn up the road.

Perhaps there was something amiss with Roslyn itself that prompted the move to Echuca. Perhaps it was just time for a change.

It was certainly a time of more than usual movement in Victoria, as the outer reaches of the colony were opened up and were made more accessible by better transport, better roads and above all by the ever-extending railways: Echuca was linked to Melbourne in 1864. Those who had had some success in mining or in trade looked to invest some of their profits in the newly available land. Those who had farmed in a small way wished to increase their holdings and improve their families' prospects. Few succeeded fully, and properties changed ownership frequently, most settlers returning to the towns, defeated by their losses in stock and finance and in family members. For drought and disease, fire and flood, harsh conditions and the heat, all ensured that only the fittest survived.

Geelong itself was slowly moving towards the 20th century. Trees were planted in Moorabool St in 1868 to commemorate Queen Victoria's birthday, and Yarra St was similarly 'beautified' in 1872 with elms and oaks. Two years later every home was at last provided with piped water, although it was not until 1884 that water-carts were employed to settle the dust; sea-water was used. A symbol of mobility, the velocipede (a kind of bicycle), appeared in Geelong in 1869. Parks and tea-gardens were opened in the 1870's and a horse-drawn bus service began.

1869 was the year of the great drought, which was followed in September 1870 by heavy rain and severe flooding along the Barwon and Moorabool

West of Echuca

What, in the meantime, had happened to William Honeycombe, to Lawrence Mountjoy and Jane?

In the previous chapter, William and Lawrence were last heard of in 1868, the year in which Thomas Mountjoy launched his Temperance Hotel. They were then both named as being on the committee of the new Wesleyan church at Highton. William was 71 that year; Lawrence was 48 and his wife Jane 42. Her stonemason brother, Richard Honeycombe, was still in Geelong. But soon Jane and her father William would be the last of the emigrant Honeycombes to remain in Geelong. And then he would also leave.

Two years earlier, Richard Mountjoy had died, and the first of that family's links with Cornwall had been severed.

There is no gravestone bearing Richard Mountjoy's name in the Highton churchyard, although, as a Wesleyan, he must have been buried there. Three of Caleb and Louisa Mountjoy's boys had already been interred at Highton, all under the age of eight. Three more of their children would be buried there, including their oldest son. And in due course Jane would follow Lawrence to an adjacent grave. However, in 1868 both still had many years to live.

So had William's second wife, Elizabeth the schoolteacher, who in 1869 was back in Melbourne, where in February she was admitted to the Benevolent Asylum in North Melbourne, suffering from 'debility'. Said then to be 60, she was discharged in July that year, then readmitted in August for four weeks. In December 1871 she was readmitted for six months, and then spent nearly two years in the asylum; from October 1872 to September 1874. It seems that the second Mrs Honeycombe was slowly going insane. She would die in the asylum in January 1898, aged 86, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Melbourne Cemetery, as alone and unattended as she had been when she arrived in Melbourne as a poor immigrant in 1851.

Did she ever try to see her husband, or try to get in touch? After all, she bore his name for 46 years, although she spent only three of those years with him as his wife. Did he ever wonder what happened to her? She outlived him in fact by more than 20 years.

But in the 1870's, as her mental instability increased, along with the months, then years, that she spent in the asylum, her former husband, who had allegedly died in Ballarat, embarked on a mad last venture that would hasten his death.

In the last few years of his life, this tough little Cornishman, who had toiled for most of his life in England as a stonemason before emigrating to Australia in 1850 at the age of 53, took on his greatest challenge. At the age of

112

What now of Richard Honeycombe, William the stonemason's eldest surviving son, from whom the main line of Australian Honeycombes are decended? What of him? He was known, by some, as Dirty Dick.

A stonemason, like his father, he was a short, gaunt, irascible man who drank too much and abused and beat his wife. Yet she and he became one of the oldest married couples in Australia, and their progeny eventually produced a Town Clerk of Fitzroy and the first Honeycombe in the world to become a knight, dubbed as such in London by the queen.

Richard, the fifth of his parent's children, was born in South Devon, in Newton Abbott, and baptised on 26 September 1829, eight months before the accession of William IV to the throne on the death of his brother, George IV. The next nine years of Richard's childhood were spent in Devon while his father plied his trade of stonemason in and around the village of Newton Abbott and llsington, where William was employed by the Haytor Granite Company and eventually sacked by them in 1834. He remained in Devon, however, for five more years, living in Exeter for a time, until the family moved to Bristol, in 1839 or early the following year.

There, William set up in business with George Wilkins as masons and builders, residing at 1 Hillsbridge Parade. The last of William and Elizabeth's children, John, was born there in June 1842, when Richard was 12 years old.

The family were living in Meadow Street in 1843 (as was George Wilkins), remaining there until 1846, when Richard's older sister Jane became pregnant and the family's association with George Wilkins ceased. In 1846-47 the Honeycombes were living in Dove Street. But about then Richard left home.

He was 17 in September 1846. For three years or so he had been working as a stonemason's apprentice, possibly under the guidance of his father or some other master mason. But in 1847 he moved to the north of England to Carlisle, led there by a sense of adventure, by another stonemason, or by the promise of some interesting work. There he lodged with a Scottish family called Ryder, and there he married one of the daughters, Elizabeth, in circumstances that became a family legend.