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

Her death occurred in John's Street, Geeiong, at the home of a foster mother, Henrietta West. Evidently Mary Ann Honeycombe's indiscretion had been hushed up and tidied away - she married four months later.

Possibly, as with her Aunt Jane, her father and the rest of her family knew nothing of the matter. But as Richard is recorded as living in Geeiong in 1872 -and never thereafter - it seems as if the birth of Mary Ann's illegitimate baby that year and the subsequent departure of her family from Geeiong are somehow connected.

After this mishap, Mary Ann was despatched, or fled, to Benalla, some 160 km northeast of Melbourne. There, on 30 October 1872, at the Primitive Methodist Parsonage, she married a German-born farmer and widower, Charles Regelsen. Aged 34, his wife had died the previous year, after providing him with one child.

We know something of Mary Ann's life thereafter from the few letters her eldest son Charles Regelsen wrote to me from Newport, Victoria, in 1972.

Hesaid: 'Fatherdied 1914 (result of a fall), my motherearly in 1943. The family were 9, 6 or them girls, 3 boys; all the girls came first; the boys came last. I was the first, the twins the last... I am 85, my two sisters are older, Mrs Jenkins and Mrs Grieg. I am the only REGELSEN alive... George died of wounds in World War I, and is buried at Armentieres on the Somme. Dick passed away in 1943, as did my mother at 92... I left Victoria in October 1913. Transferred to Brisbane, was 18 years there, 9 in Adelaide, and three in Sydney; came back to Victoria... I was transferred from Adelaide to Melbourne at Xmas 1943, and spent 3VS years there in the Pay Corps... Wife died nearly 10 years ago, lived alone ever since.'

Such are the bare bones of family histories, lists of places, names and dates - unless we breathe life on them, substance and shape, from the dust and social histories of contemporary records and other facts.

Family legends and traditions can add some colour, but they are apt to be vainglorious and to contain errors of fact.

Elizabeth, Richard Honeycombe's wife, is said to have been related to a notable Test cricketer, Jack Ryder, who was born in Collingwood, Melbourne in

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Such a countenance had Elizabeth Honeycombe, nee Ryder. But there isn't a connection, as far as I know.

Legends can also become confused. One legend said that Richard's parents, in returning to England, were involved in a shipwreck and drowned at sea. Not true. Another legend said that it was not Richard's parents who died in this way, but those of his wife, Elizabeth - Ryders, not Honeycombes, who drowned.

This legend tells how Richard's abuse of his wife (and other sources say he was a heavy drinker and wife-beater) made her father so concerned that he, and perhaps his wife, voyaged to Australia to see Elizabeth and sort the matter out. Presumably her letters home indicated she was unhappy, even miserable. Perhaps they were streaked with her tears. Legend says that Richard refused to admit Mr Ryder to his house. Did the father ever actually see his daughter after travelling across the world? We do not know - nor how, if at all, the problem was resolved. But Elizabeth remained with her husband, and her father returned unhappily home, drowning in a shipwreck on the way.

If any of this happened, it must have occurred while Elizabeth's father was fit enough to travel and not too old - ie, while she and Richard were living in Geelong (1853-72). Elizabeth was 50 in 1872 and her father must have been 20 years older at least. But the difficulty of checking passenger lists for a George Ryder from Edinburgh would be great - not to mention the searching of lists of those who drowned at sea. So we will probably never know whether this dramatic and romantic legend has any truth in it at all.

Nothing has also been gleaned - so far - about the whereabouts of Richard and his family between 1872, when they were in Geelong, and 1877, when they are recorded as living in North Carlton, Melbourne, at Rose Cottage, 108 Nicholson St - a major thoroughfare running north from Parliament House.

Richard's father, William, had died on his farm at Wharparilla the year before. He was buried in Echuca on 6 June 1876, and one hopes that Richard, who would be 47 three months later, was able to be there. However, his father left him and his younger brother John but £5 each, and the smallness of the amount seems to indicate a distance, both geographical and familial, between the father and his two surviving sons. His grandsons - and John had not yet married - would nonetheless ensure that the family name not only survived and spread, but also prospered over the next one hundred years and more.

Richard's four sons would all marry and have children in due course. But in 1876, in November, one of his daughters died.

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This was Emma, aged 21, the first Honeycombs to have been born in Australia. She is said to have been a housemaid in a Dr Nicholson's home and, when his wife died, to have looked after their child. Emma died at home of bronchitis and phthisis - in other words, of TB. This Dr Nicholson is said (by Aunt Lil) to have lived in Benalla and to have attended Ned Kelly when he was wounded. Emma went to work for Dr Nicholson and his wife when she left school - aged 14 presumably. After Mrs Nicholson died, Emma herself became ill. Said Aunt Lil: 'She took sick and the doctor said to her: "Emma, you've got a nasty cough - I'll give you something for it." But she got worse, and he wrote down to our people to tell them how bad she was and he was going to send her home. And when he went into her bedroom, there was all the medecines on the chest. She'd never taken a drop!'

1877 was the year in which the first 'Test' cricket match was played against England - in Melbourne in March. Australia won by 45 runs. In May a general election returned a radical, Graham Berry, as the new premier of Victoria. More importantly, in 1878, the telephone came to Melbourne; and in New South Wales, near Bourke, the first man-made artesian bore was sunk, solving the problem of watering cattle and arid outback land. Elsewhere, in

1879, Alexander Forrest discovered the Ord River in northwestern Australia, as

well as millions of acres of good grazing land in the Kimberleys; and an £8,000

reward was offered for the apprehension of Ned Kelly's gang of four. He was

caught at Glenrowan the following year and hanged in Melbourne - 'Such is Life',

he allegedly said. Born in January 1855 of Irish parents, he was but 25. Also in

1880, Peter Lalor, chief protagonist at the Eureka Stockade, became speaker of

the Victorian Parliament; and the white population of Australia exceeded

2,230,000, most of it contained in five cities around the coast.

In this three year period the Honeycombes continued to reside in Nicholson Street, and would have been aware of the above events from their reading of the Melbourne papers. They may also have read about two American inventions: the bicycle, and electric light, which first completely lit the streets of a city (Wabash, Indiania) in 1880. But they would nor have read about the (then) significant opening of the first successful Woolworth's store in Pennsylvania.

Richard Honeycombe was 50 in September 1879. The following year he embarked on a new occupation as a grocer. We know very little about this enterprise, except its address, 73 Nicholson St, and that Richard, his wife and

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their remaining children, lived there for the next five years. Few people had holidays then, although they might go off on day outings by train, or spend a day, fully clothed, at the beach.

The first to marry was the third son, Thomas. His bride, who wasn't pregnant, was Catherine Maria Morris. She was 20 and he, a stonecutter, was a few months short of his 21st birthday. They married in Adelaide on 22 June 1880. It was work, presumably, that had taken Thomas to Adelaide. But the young couple were not there for long. In 1881 they were in Melbourne, living in Richard's former residence at 108 Nicholson St, and here their first son, George Henry, was born, on 24 August 1881. He would become the Town Clerk of the northern Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy.

They had two other children - Elizabeth Mary, born in February 1883, and Thomas Gordon, born in January 1889 - and although they remained in Nicholson St until 1891, after that date Catherine Honeycombe's address changed every second year or so.

Where was Thomas? He was in South Africa. In his absence (and more of that later) Catherine, it seems, had to earn a living to support herself and her three children. On two occasions the street directories tell us she ran a ham and beef shop - in Brunswick St, North Fitzroy, in 1897, and at 241 Nicholson St in 1899.

Three months after Thomas's wedding in Adelaide, his eldest brother, George William, married in Melbourne, on 24 September 1880.

Aged 27, he painted railway carriages and lived in Seel St, Windsor. His bride was Eliza Soutar. Born at Hotham, she was now 25, a dressmaker, and lived in Albion St, South Yarra; and it was in Albion St that the couple would live for most of their married lives. They were married at 7 Izett St, Prahan -'according to the usages of the Independent Denomination of Christians.' Eliza's father, William, a Scot, was a carpenter. He would become Lord Mayor of Melbourne in 18 .... It seems that neither set of parents attended the wedding, as it was witnessed by Thomas Soutar, brother of the bride, and by the wife of the officiating minister.

The couple's first home was at 23 South Caroline St, South Yarra, and it was there that their first child, and only son was born, on 13 December 1881. Named William, he would become an accountant in later life. His only son, Robert, would be renowned as the first Honeycombe to become a professor (of Metallurgy) and to be knighted by the Queen.

George and Eliza also had three daughters, May, Louisa (Louie) and Annie Florence (Nancy).

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May and Nancy were members of the Australian Church and were married (in 1919 and 1923) by the Church's founder, Charles Strong. May described herself as a 'lady' - her husband, Charles Fox, was a 'boot clicker'. Nancy's husband, James Williams, was a 'stock buyer'; she was a milliner.

May was married at the Australian Church's temporary home in Armadale, Nancy at the Church's main edifice at 19 Russell St. All three of George Honeycombe's daughters were older than their husbands, and all three claimed, when they married, to be younger than they were.

The third of Richard's sons to marry was the youngest, Jack, on 15 February 1883. This wedding, by license, took place at St Luke's Parsonage (C of E) in North Carlton and was performed with the written consent of the bride's father, a baker. She was 20, a 'machinist' born at Collingwood, and her name was Jane Olive Clark. Jack was 21. His father, Richard, is again apparently absent, Jack's brother, Thomas, acting as a witness. Although Jack's trade is given at his marriage as 'mason', he had temporarily become a carpenter by the time the first of his five children was born, on 16 December 1883, in North Fitzroy. From there the family moved to North Carlton for a year or so and then to Footscray - from where Jack followed his older brothers, Richard and Thomas, to South Africa. Unlike them he stayed there for many years; his family joined him; and when his wife Jane died there in 1918 he returned to Australia.

Richard was the last of the four brothers to marry, and his marriage was preceded by that of a younger sister, Harriet (known as Ettie) who married a carpenter and joiner, Joseph Steel, in March 1883, when she was not yet 20. Joe Steel who was born in Ireland, was a railway-engine stoker, who had wanted to be a policeman (according to Aunt Lil) but wasn't tall enough. He and Ettie had ten children, one of whom, Florence, married Ernest Williams, a footballer of some renown. Ettie, who was close to her sister, Louisa, was a bit of a wit; she always had something to say. She would be sharp, but never cross.

Richard's bride was Fanny Mary Jones, who had been born in Collingwood and was a domestic servant; she was 25. Her father was a brassfinisher. Dick was 28, a stonemason, and lived in Barkly St, Footscray. Richard and Fanny, who were married in the Collingwood Registrar's office on 1 February 1886, settled in Footsoray - until he too went to South Africa. Fanny remained in Footscray, at various addresses, throughout her married life and widowhood, a total of 56 years. She and Richard had three daughters and one son, whose descendants dwell in Melbourne to this day.

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The following year he reverted to being a stonemason and moved to 76 Albert St in Footscray, with his wife and his oldest and youngest daughters, Elizabeth Jane (called Jane) and Louisa. Both were unmarried: Jane would be 38 in 1886 and Louisa 21. Richard lived there for 40 years, outliving not just his wife but three of his sons.

The house, on the corner of Walter Street, faced east. Built of bluestone blocks, it had a slate roof and an iron picket fence at the front. At the back were some fruit trees and an almond tree. It isn't there now, having been destroyed when a tram depot was built.

Footscray was a filthy place in those days. It was the most highly industrialised district in Melbourne, which at that time contained 40 percent of the population of Victoria - which was in turn the most highly industrialised of the colonies. 45 percent of the workforce of Footscray were in manufacturing; 16 percent in quarrying.

By 1886, nearly half of Melbourne's more smoky, pungent and offensive factories and other establishments (known as the 'noxious trades') were situated in and near treeless, swampy and smelly Footscray - slaughterhouses, tanneries, boiling-down works, bone-millers, works dealing with hides, skins and wool, and those that made soap, candles, glue and manure. Their tall chimneys spewed smoke, and gallons of blood from abattoirs flowed into the Saltwater River (now called the Maribyrnong), as did factory refuse of every kind. Not surprisingly, the Melbourne Regatta was moved from the Saltwater River to the lake in Albert Park in 1886.

The Footscray Independent described an odorous outing on the river in 1887: 'At high tide there is about a foot of water, and at low tide, the water is absent, and the substratum of five or six feet of black seething mud is exposed to the action of sun and air. The water was black and stinking, the banks covered deep with inky slime, with a most odious stench; bubbles of gas were constantly rising with a rotten effluvia, and some small fish that had found their way into the putrid waters were swimming, dead or dying, on the surface... Here comes in a large box drain, with a stream of mingled blood, water, and offal in masses pouring into the river... A dead sheep, swollen ready to burst, floats close in shore, and on the banks stand a couple of night carts. The Apollo Candle Works... closet accommodation for all [200 employees] is set on the bank of the river and fitted to discharge into its waters... Above the Railway Bridge... pieces of rancid fat, paunches, lights, dead lambs, dogs, etc line the shores, that are burrowed in all directions with the holes of water rats. The gut factory pours in a stream of excrement and gut scrapings... Next, the glue works swamp the shore with hair and parings from hides... Just above is Bennett's slaughtering and tallow works... Offal in all stages of corruption, from the pluck quite fresh, to the rank putrefaction of slime and coagulation, giving off deadly gases... is spread out to an appalling extent.'

Some outsiders referred to Footscray as 'Stinkopolis', or - when the Council tried to change the name to West Melbourne - as 'Worst Smelldom'.

It was almost as bad on land. Richard's house in Albert St was within sight and sound of the Williamstown railway line and less than a kilometre from the river.

John Lack, in A History of Footscray, writes: 'Virtually none of the streets, footpaths or rights of way were formed, these tasks being left to municipal councils. By the late 1880's... only three of some 200 streets had been metalled for their full width, one-third of the rights of way were unmade, and two-thirds of the street channels [gutters] were neither paved nor properly levelled. Footscray's residential areas simply stank. Stormwater, household slops and refuse, and sewerage, seeped beneath houses or formed stagnant pools around them... Addressing itself to the problem of nightsoil, Council slowly abolished cesspits and introduced a single-pan system, arranging in 1887 for the emptying of closets at least once a week. But as neighbouring shires refused until 1891 to allow the deposition of nightsoil, Footscray had perforce to retrench it into the public reserves and gardens, themselves areas of non-porous soils. For years after, urine and faeces festered at railway station privies, or drained into nearby streets and creeks.'

The death rate from typhoid was very high in 1887 (11 out of 1,000) and nearly 60 percent of children aged less than five died that year.

There was nonetheless a strong and proud community spirit, of the 'We can take it' kind. People lived and worked locally and communally enjoyed themselves, mainly in pubs, at football and the races; Aussie Rules Football had begun in 1858. Most were home-owners. For property was fairly cheap - a four-room cottage with a large garden could be rented for 12 shillings a week, or bought for less than £300. Although the roads and streets were poorly made and still dimly lit by gas, weatherboard workers' homes, and shops, sprouted along major roads, and spread. A fertile population rose rapidly to over 19,000 in 1890 - 50 percent of whom were under the age of 21. By no means all of the workforce, however, were on a 48-hour week. In the factories of some of the noxious trades, women and boys might toil for 56-nours, earning as little as 5/6 a day.

In 1888, Richard Honeycombe, his wife and two unmarried daughters, and his scattered and married offspring - Mary Ann Regelsen in Benalla, George in South Yarra, newly-wed Richard junior in Footscray, Thomas and Jack in North Carlton, and Harriet in Geelong - variously celebrated the Centennial of the white settlement of Australia.

Festivities began on 26 January, then known not as Australia Day, but Anniversary Day. The Argus said: 'Australia confronts the world today with a record of 100 years, with a marvellous past, a prosperous present, and a future of boundless possibilities.'
What, one wonders, did Dirty Dick, now approaching 60, know or think of that marvellous past? What did he know of prosperity? What possibilities of

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Which, if any, of the morally improving centennial events in Footscray and Melbourne did he attend? Were he and his reduced family among the thousands who flocked into Melbourne's Centennial Exhibition that opened in August that year? Did he wonder, as some did in 1988, what the fuss was all about? What was being celebrated? The arrival of a bunch of convicts? The subjugation of the aborigines and the seizure of their land?

There was little sense of national identity then: the various colonies competed and quarrelled and Western Australia was still run by New South Wales. Most people, in the towns or in the bush, were more concerned with survival - with feeding and clothing their families and staying in work. Of more present and future significance to Australians in 1888 was the first appearance of electric street lighting in a town (Tamworth in New South Wales), and the linking of Brisbane to Newcastle by rail. The link to Sydney was effected the following year.

In 1890, the white Australian population, added to infinitesimally by Richard's grandchildren (they numbered 12 that year), passed the 3 million mark; Western Australian acquired its own Constitution and its first premier, John Forrest; and a maritime strike, involving stevedores and ships' officers, provoked strikes by shearers and miners that almost resulted in a general strike - union leaders were arrested and troops used to bread picket lines - and foreshadowed worse economic troubles ahead.

At the end of that year, on 29 December, Richard's youngest daughter, Louisa, escaped from Albert Street by marrying a 27-year-old coach-painter (the same trade as her eldest brother George), called William Allen. She was a dressmaker and 25. Again, as with all their other children, neither of her parents witnessed the signing of the register. The bridegroom came from Maryborough, a railway town between Bendigo and Ballarat, and his father was a miner. As his mother's maiden name was Hannan, can we suppose, if not prove, that she was related to that most famous of Irish Hannans called Paddy, who would discover gold at Kalgoorlie in two years' time?

It was perhaps about this time, so the story goes, that Dirty Dick, in sawing a branch off a tree overhanging the street, stood on the wrong end, and fell, almost impaling himself on a fence.

Meanwhile, fetid Footscray became a city, proclaimed as such (because its annual revenue exceeded £20,000) on 20 January 1891 - much to the Footscray Advertiser's disapproval and disdain.

It said: The town has become a city certainly, according to its rating value, but it is a city without a cathedral, a city of 45 public houses and a Mechanics' Institute of weatherboard, with a small library, mostly yellow backs and about 100 subscribers; a city dreary in the extreme, with hardly a single tree planted in its streets to relieve the monotony of the landscape; a city of bone-mills, but no picture gallery, museum or statues; a city of 19,000 people, but without bowling green or lawn tennis ground; a city of lodge members by the

thousand, but without a hospital... a city of wealth, but without a single grammar school, high school or college; a city of harsh sounds, but without a peal of bells.'