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

In 1909, Bill Honeycombe, aged 30, was probably coughing, sometimes violently, every day. He was dying. He would be dead in two years' time.

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35 m The Best Little Wife in the World

He and Esther and their four children would have lived very poorly up to then, out on the Black Jack or other mines, or in Charters Towers itself. Their homes would have been hot and uncomfortable, like the clothes they wore. They would have lived in small two-room shacks, with an outdoor kitchen and an outhouse toilet, and perhaps with some goats and a small vegetable garden to supplement their food supplies. Other supplies were purchased on credit in 1909 at the store run by AJ Simpson on the Mt Leyshon Road.

It seems the Honeycombes were always in debt. To bring in more money Esther, in Bill's absence in 1909, took in a lodger, a Miss Yearwood, and did odd jobs like baling (feeding) horses. Esther was a worrier, about bills and family problems and the health of the children, who in 1909 were beset with colds and other minor complaints. When Rene spilled a bag of sugar, Esther burst into tears.

On Monday, 21 June, 1909, Bill set off early from Charters Towers on horseback, making for a cane farm a few miles from Ayr called McDesme. Pronounced locally 'McDime', the farm is said to have been so named by its first occupier, a Scotsman called McDonald. He apparently took the McD of his surname and added the initial letters of his four children - E, S, M, E. In fact the original owner of the 1,210 acre cane farm was a James Mackenzie, who took possession in 1880. Old MacDonald never had the farm. Another story is that the initials of the seven daughters of Archibald Macmillan made up the name. Macmillan was the Superintendent of Works for the district and a major landowner and sugarcane farmer, establishing the Airdmillan estate and the first sugar mill.

In 1909 McDesme was run by Arthur Rutherford. He was born in Charters Towers in 1879, in the same year as Bill and Esther. He was the eldest of the Rutherford children, who included Ernie, Lenny, Lilian and Ruth. Arthur is believed to have moved to Ayr about 1905, two years after the settlement was devastated by cyclone Leonta and had virtually to be rebuilt. He married Mary Soper, the eldest of the Soper children, in 1905. Her father, John Soper, a brickmaker, helped construct the Seaforth Mill and the Poole Island meatworks before working on the Inkerman estate and then settling as a farmer at McDesme. It is said that Arthur Rutherford was an engine-driver when living in Charters Towers and that he and Bill were friends. A very jovial man, who liked bush poetry, he would have been sympathetic to Bill's illness and financial problems and may well have suggested that Bill cut cane at McDesme.

The McDesme farmhouse stood on blocks beside a lagoon. There was a little shop opposite the farmhouse, and the McDesme School, which was built by the fathers of families who lived locally (including John Soper and his cousin

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Charles Carcary). The school opened in June 1905. Like a furnace in summer, it had a back verandah, a paddock for the schoolchildren's ponies, and toilets at the front, in view of the road.

She wrote: 'I remember that during Cyclone Leonta (March 1903) we children were locked in a room on the farm on the banks of the lagoon. We were given food and drink but not allowed out... In the "wet" the lagoon became very high and as the lagoon divided the farm from the workhorses, they had to swim across to the stables. I don't remember learning to ride but remember swimming horses across, on horseback. When the Burdekin River flooded it used to come into the lagoon, and at times came to the top step of our house. We were all shifted across to Sopers'. Dad and a farmhand remained at home... We had a boat and paddles and in the "wet" rowed across to Rutherfords' to go to school. I went there for a short time, but as soon as I could ride well enough I rode my pony to Ayr State School... We each had our own ponies. We were sensibly clothed and well-fed, but had very little money. My mother was a good gardener and grew all our vegetables. We also had mangos, bananas, citrus fruits, custard apples, etc. Mum made all our clothes - boys' too - staying up late at night to make them. Dad was up at about 4.0 am to feed horses and pigs and milk cows. Mum made butter and having chooks sold eggs. Egg money bought a German piano, and we girls in due course all learned music... I was about 13 or 14 when Dad sold out and we shifted to Craigielea, a house close to the railway line at Rossiter's Hill.'

Such was life on McDesme when Bill journeyed thither from Charters Towers in June 1909. He rode on 'a grand horse' called Nigger, and took with him a pregnant mare, Silver, which may have pulled the dray carrying his and his companions' kit. They were Jack, who also had two horses, Kate and Ben, and Bill's younger brother, Lawrie, aged 21. Bill's few possessions, carried in a box, included two good shirts and a bottle of cod liver oil for his cough.

It is possible that Jack was one of Esther's brothers (known to her as Johnny) and that he was Annie Chapman's last known child. John Valentine Black, who was born in 1887. In June 1909, and probably calling himself Jack Chapman, like all Annie's children in their later years, he would have been 22.

The three young men reached McDesme on Monday evening. Bill and Jack shared a tent. They cooked their own meals, something that Bill, who soon took charge of the cooking, was not accustomed to do. He didn't like cooking -'a man could not get very fat cooking his own tucker1 - and he didn't like 'batching', living as a single man or bachelor.

His first letter to Esther was written on Thursday, 24 June. He would also write notes to all of his children and would usually include a few lines to them in his letters to his wife. These are carefully penned on foolscap pages, most letters being two full pages in length, with his concluding and consistent avowals

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of love written down the lefthand margin. To begin with, he writes on Sundays and Wednesdays. This changes, after his one weekend break at home, to Saturdays and Tuesdays.

In the letters Bill refers to 'poor Will' and 'poor Alma' and most often to 'poor little Len'. It is a happy event when Will gets eight marks out of ten for some work he's done at school.

On that first Thursday Bill writes: 'We have arrived and have everything pretty well rigged up about our camp. We got here last Monday about 6 oclock and had tea and breakfast at Rutherfords. We had a good trip down. It is pretty rough down to the Reid [River] and from the Reid to Clare is bonser Road. All plain and lagoons on it... Our horses are eating the feed and like it. Arthur [his boss] says I will get £30 for Nigger. I told him I would sell him after the season and he says he might be able to sell him for me. He says he wouldn't mind having Silver. They have 1400 tons of cane to cart here and Arthur says he is sure there will be more. There are Camps all over the place waiting for the cane to start, a lot of them are loafers and beer bums, and the first pay they get they will be off on the spree... That Mick O'Brian you heard me say was coming down here, has his wife down here they are living in a tent they have no children... Lawrie is starting to cut with his gang on Saturday I think he will be leaving here tomorrow. We are camped alongside our stables. We are getting on alright. I feel splendid.'

Although Esther and Bill are only 90 miles apart as the crow flies, letters between the camp and Charters Towers take about three to four days to get delivered, via Ayr by horse and train.

Bill's next (three-page) letter is written in his tent in the afternoon of Sunday, 4 July. He says that his gang start6d cutting cane the previous Wednesday. He and Jack are employed in carting the cut cane and loading it onto railway wagons, or trucks.

The first sugar cane was grown in the Burdekin River delta in 1879, when the Burdekin Delta Sugar Company was formed. The first sugar mill was built five years later on the Airdmillan estate. This mill soon closed. But others were created in 1884 - those on the Pioneer, Seaforth, and Drynie estates - and the watering of crops by irrigation began, thanks to an ample underground water supply. The Kalamia mill, outside Ayr on the road to Alva Beach, was another. To begin with, Kanaka and Chinese labour was used extensively on the farms, but opposition to non-whites occupying land and jobs was gathering force, resulting in various measures of anti-Chinese legislation until, in 1901, the first

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parliament of the new Australia put a virtual stop to all Asians, including the Chinese, entering the country as immigrants. White Australia was the rule, and now the cane-fields were farmed, as elsewhere, entirely by whites.

In 1909, the Rutherfords' cane was sent to the Pioneer Mill. It was laboriously cut and carted. Bill and Jack worked 'terrible long hours' from about 3.30 am to 7.30 pm. On Saturdays they worked form dawn to noon. The cane grew in blocks. Nine acres of it was 14 feet high - 'the longest down here, it look alright to see it standing straight up in the dray.' The two men were paid according to the weight of the cane they cut.

Wrote Bill on 4 July: 'I don't mind working long hours when the money comes in, but it used to make me disgusted coming home and cooking our tea in the dark... Jack was terrible disgusted too.' Bill had received a letter from Esther on Thursday evening, but failed to reply straight away as 'we were too tired to move.' As 'my darling letter1 was read in his tent - 'I could feel the tears come before my eyes.' He calls her 'the best little wife in the world.'

He reports that Hughie has joined them - 'He bought a spring-bed like ours' - and that on the previous Sunday ('I always feel my heart ache for you on Sundays in the evenings') he and Lawrie, Jack and Ernie Rutherford went shooting six miles down-river - 'but never seen anything... Today we washed and are writing.' He assures her, presumably in response to a remark about his excited departure: 'I hope you will not think I was wishing to go for I was not. All the pleasure I look forward to is when shall I see you.' And he tells her: 'My cough is no trouble at all now. I still take Cod Liver Oil and I feel splendid. I am sure I am getting fat.' She has to be warned: 'Don't have Old Aitken doing anything for you because he will only come around when he is drunk the miserable old bugger.' And he adds: 'I hope you will not be wild with what I am saying.'

Best wishes are sent to Esther's mother, Mrs Annie Chapman, and to Nell, one of Esther's younger sisters, in this letter, and it ends: 'I am always thinking of you all. You always are the first. But cheer up the time is going by and then we will be together again. I should feel terrible lonely if I was down here by myself. Well my Dear little woman I must close I feel that I could write all the evening to You So Goodbye and God bless you Kiss our little ones for me from your ever loving husband...'

Bill tried to find someone to take the letter into Ayr that Sunday evening, but failed. 'I could hardly go to sleep I was that disappointed.' So he explains in his next letter, written at a table on the night of Wednesday, 7 July.

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He says they still get up about 3.30 am, but are now back at the camp between 5 and 6 pm, which gives them VA hours for dinner. Cooking their tucker is not Bill's favourite pastime, although he now claims: 'I can cook not too bad.' He does the cooking while Jack grooms and feeds the horses. He approves of Miss Yearwood lodging with Esther - 'Also keep Nell or Mother [Mrs Chapman] with you I like to think you are not lonely1 - and says he expects to be home a month or so before Christmas. He writes that Lawrie paid them a visit the previous night and will stay the night on Saturday. Lawrie has been writing to his girl-friend, Maggie - as Bill has observed. Now he remarks: 'He thinks a lot of Mag by the way he talks he is worrying that she may take up with someone else.'

His next letter is written sitting on his bunk about 3.0 pm on Sunday, 11 July. Now he is really homesick.

'I hate Sunday it is so miserable on a Sunday here and I feel so lonely without you all. When we are working I do not feel so bad.' They never leave the camp, he says, but later this Sunday they are taking the Rutherfords' trap into Ayr to post their letters. He confesses: 'It is miserable doing our own cooking' - particularly after a morning walk along the river - 'It seemed so horrible coming home to the Old Camp and getting our own dinner... I often think of the nice dinners you used to cook.' He urges Esther not to worry about when and how her letters get to him - 'Write when you can... I treasure your letters like gold.' He adds: 'It seems so hard to be away from you for so long. But we will have better times when I get back. I don't think I will leave home again...'

On Wednesday, 14 July, Bill writes: 'We are still Carting away, working long hours still, but when we finish this block of Cane I think we will have better times, last week we made about £3-18-0 for the week, so that is good, we finished at Sundown tonight... We have had very little Cold weather and my blankets are lovely and warm and my bed is comfortable.' In this letter he comments on her news. 'I am sorry to hear Tom has gone out to the Bluff again' - 'I suppose Emily felt a bit jealous of Miss Yearwood... Dont keep her if she is any trouble to you' - 'I am glad Old Aitken has gone away.' He adds: 'Tell me if I should write to my dad I dont know when I wrote last to him.'

In fact he wrote on 28 May. This had eventually prompted John Honeycombe's reply, written from Kalgoorlie on 6 July, which evidently failed to reach Bill until 28 July, when he tells Esther: 'I also received one [a letter] from Dad... he is getting on alright, he sent me the Asthma cure which I will keep safe, he said he thought I would find it was only a cough I had. I still have the cough, but it does not trouble me much.'

Rene has also written to him, and he now sends her a reply: 'Dearest little Renie... I am glad to hear you got put up at school and you liked the picnic at

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Sandy Creek School. You be a good girl to Mamma for your dada's sake and Alma too and I will like you such a lot... Tell Will to chop mamma some wood. I know you are all good... Tell Len I will bring him plenty of Pears from your Dear Old Dad.1

Eventually she invites them to dinner [on 25 July] and Bill concludes: 'She is not too bad in some ways.'

The previous week he and Jack earned about £4.3.0, but were told to stop overloading the railway trucks. 'We are only allowed to put up to 2 ton 14 cwt on a truck and we have been putting over 3 ton 3 cwt.' They are supposed to send in a limit of 55 tons a week. The 60 to 70 tons they have been loading has consequently kept them working late every evening. None of the gang thinks much of cane-farming. 'It has a lot of failings when you see into it,' writes Bill. On one occasion they work in the rain all day.

Esther must have inquired about what they were eating, for Bill writes, on 21 July: 'Well my Dear we have the Butcher and baker. Baker every day and Butcher 3 times a Week, we have good tucker. I make stew and Currie sometimes when we get home early and sometimes steak and onions. Roast beef for Sunday and a tin of Pears and duff.'

By now, Bill has used up the cod-liver oil and has bought something called 'Syrup of Hypophosphitis' for 4/6. Jack has had a fever. As Bill writes, the train that passes the camp twice a day to collect the cane from Pioneer Mill 'is just passing now 9 oclock at night with all our cane in.'

On 25 July, Bill writes: 'We are still carting away, we got on a good bit better last week, we were done at Sundown that is early here. We get paid on Tuesday next and as soon as we square up with our tucker bill I will send you the remainders which will not be much as they keep back 25 pence and we have only been working 3 weeks and 3 days and we had to keep Hughie 1 week when he came here... There is a split up in a lot of the gangs here... some are trying to get away without paying the store bill... all the scum from Townsville and Stewarts Creek gaol come here [as cane-cutters] and you see some of the worst looking hounds ever you saw loafing around for a feed... Hughie got paid today £5 cheque, he is banking all the rest that is to come, he has a good job. he gets horse feed that is cane tops and cuts them up. Jack and I cut our own.'

It was usual to feed cane tops and molasses to the horses. Hughie is concerned about the maintenance of the Chapman garden in Charters Towers, and wants to know if the tomatoes there are npe.

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Lawrie, says Bill, is a bit thin: 'He has to work long hours too.' But he says: 'I can eat well and I cook good tucker as we can get everything we require.' Lawrie was fit enough to play football for Ayr in Townsville against that town on 1 August, a match not watched by the others, who preferred to spend Sunday writing and recovering from the labours of the week.

According to Bill - 'Ayr is a one horse place.'

The first tucker and bread bill amounted to £6.4.0 for the month, not including the butcher's bill. Bill and Jack paid £10.8.4 each, and £3 each is subtracted 'per cent'. The tucker bill also includes the corn (2 bushels) that they have added to the diet of their 'shatters', the horses that pull the carts - Nigger, and Kate or Bess. But, on Monday, 2 August, Bill is able to send Esther £6.10.0 in an envelope, taken by Arthur Rutherford as far as Ayr. He keeps 5 shillings for himself. That will dome.'

The weather is cold and rainy. But Bill and Jack are now getting up at 4.0 am and are home at sunset.

On Tuesday, 3 August, Bill writes: 'There is a dance on over at one of the Farmers' place tonight. I can hear the music from here, it is a bit of a party between some of their friends. Noakes is the name. Ernie Rutherford went. When I hear music it makes me think of my Dear ones away up there." Further on he writes: 'It is a never failing love I possess for you, is it not. that is one good point I have although I have failings the same as we all have.'

He never fails, however, to vary the twice weekly affirmation of his love for his wife - not like Jack, who writes to Susie only once a week, as he 'cannot find anything to say.'

The separation makes Bill increasingly introspective. In the previous letter (1 August) he also wrote: 'Well my Dear I have no more to tell you, only a bit of smooging, or love I should say, the Old Old Tale of love. I must always say it. I think I must have a bit of Foreign blood in me. I am that passionate always was...' Bill's mother, Mary, was Irish.

Deliberately, he stayed away from any women he encountered, apart form old Mrs Rutherford, never attending the occasional picnic or dance - 'I always love you and are true to you my Dear.' Referring to himself as 'a jealous old fool', he urges Esther in turn 'not to go out too much... Go out a little. I would not like you to always stay in.'

His cough, he says, is 'a bit better the last couple of days it does not bother me much. I think half of it is indigestion. I have been taking some Indian Root Pills.' As well as the cod-liver oil. Esther had sent him a second bottle. On 14 August he is more specific about 'the rotten old cough.' He writes: 'When I go back I will see old Smith again, and I may get rid of it. see down here we get wet a bit handling the cane wet with the dew. but I dont seem to ever have a cold just cough a bit towards morning the same as when I was home and sometimes a bit thorugh the day not much.'

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In this letter Bill develops a thought, expressed before, that he and Jack could'get home for a couple of days... if we could get someone to drive.' He adds: 'I think the boys of Rutherfords could do it.'

The reunion was a joyful one. After his return to McDesme, Bill writes on 24 August of his four children: 'Don't they love me dear. I feel so pleased when I think how you all love me... It was lovely and I feel in better heart now.' He continues: 'Oh didn't we have a bonser time dear. I shall never forget it and how lovely you looked at the Station to meet us.'

It seems that on the Saturday night they went into the town and he drank too much - 'I feel a bit sore when I think of it.' Maybe they danced. When he left on the Sunday afternoon, Esther remained on the back verandah of her mother's house, waving goodbye; the children were in tears. This letter ends: 'Oh my Dear how I do love you. God is good to give us such true love. I am not religious but I feel I have to thank someone for it... When you put the kiddies to bed kiss them all for me and just fancy I am giving you this big long kiss when you turn in... God bless you and Good night.'

This letter's opening is slightly different from all the others. It begins: 'My Dearest little Wife Esther' It continues: 'We arrived back safe and well in our dirty old camp alright.' Hughie met them at Ayr station at 7.0 pm and drove them back to the cane farm, where 'old Mrs R' made tea for them and suggested that the men bring their wives to the camp some other weekend. 'I felt first rate, not very downhearted. I try and not worry too much but I cannot forget the happy time we had.' He goes on to tell her that they are now loading five trucks, and this will bring in a better wage, especially as they are only using one horse now (which will eat less com). He sends her £5.10.0 via Mrs Rutherford.