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

Other means of communication that came after the railway, the motor car and the telephone, also helped to save Cloncurry. As did another mechanical miracle, that early in December 1919 flew out of the south like a monstrous mozzie, landed, stopped and was silent - an aeroplane.

It was a De Havilland BE 2A, flown by two officials of the Defence department, Captain Wrigley and Sergeant Murphy, who were on their way from Melbourne to Darwin, to greet the winners of the England-Australia Air Race sponsored by the Australian government. Their flight, the first ever made across Australia, was also undertaken to check on facilities on the southward route that the Air Race competitors would take in overflying the continent.

Wrigley and Murphy had set out from Melbourne on 16 November, and at Cloncurry the engine of their biplane was overhauled and serviced. It is inconceivable that Sugar Honeycombe, now aged 31, was not among the hordes of people who came out to the new airstrip to view this extraordinary machine, something they had read about, seen pictured in newspapers, but never with their own eyes.

The plane remained in Cloncurry for about a week. Its intrepid crew then flew it on to Darwin on 11 December, the day after Keith and Ross Smith landed at Darwin in their two-engined Vickers Vimy aircraft, having flown around the world from Hounslow in England in just under 28 days.

Their flight gave them a place in aviation history and won them a £10,000 prize. En route they had made 24 stops and it had taken them a week to get from Singapore to Darwin. With them were their two mechanics, Wally Shiers and Jim Bennett. It was 16 years since the Wright brothers' fragile flying machine had laboured into the air for 12 seconds in North Carolina. Now the Smith brothers, aged 29 and 27, bom in Adelaide of Scottish parents and both former Australian Flying Corps pilots, had built a bridge through air and over oceans that would soon allow the grandsons of those emigrants whose voyage out had taken 120 days, to be home in 21. Seventy years later, those days would be cut to 21 hours.

At sunset on 13 December 1919, when the Smiths landed at Cloncurry for refuelling and maintenance checks before they swept on triumphantly southwards to Sydney and their knighthoods, where was Sugar? Surely he was once again at the airstrip among the excitedly bemused onlookers, staring at those oddly garbed Australians who had been in England but three weeks ago? The plane was marked G-EAOU, which meant, according to Ross Smith, 'God 'elp all of us'. The townsfolk had heard about aeroplanes: they had featured

heroically in the war. Now here was a real one - the second within a week! - and for the second time Clonourry heard the clatter of propeller and the rattling roar of engines as the biplane took off on the Tuesday, flying south with swiftly diminishing sound until it was a silent dot in the huge sky, and then so suddenly gone.

That night in His Majesty's Hotel, and in the Royal, they would have joked about going home to see the family in England or the folks down south. Perhaps Lawrie, leaning on the lamp-lit bar, thought for a moment of his father, John, in far-off Kalgoorlie, and wondered how he was.

Lawrie would never fly anywhere. He never had enough money for a start, and little inclination to leave his self-appointed home. Yet Cloncurry, following those two aerial arrivals that December, was about to win more historic firsts in aviation.

Several former AFC pilots apart from the Smith brothers had hoped to take part in the Air Race. Among them were two who had to drop out when their financier died. Instead, they found themselves, on behalf of the Australian government, surveying the Darwin to Charleville section of the race from the ground. These landed precursors of Wrigley and Murphy were Paul McGinness and Hudson Fysh. Heading north from Longreach via Winton, they had rattled into Cloncurry on 18 August 1919 in a battered Model T Ford, which somehow succeeded later on in taking them all the way to Darwin. At Cloncurry they established a depot for the Air Race entrants and had an air-strip cleared, the one soon to be used by Wrigley and Murphy and the Smith brothers in December. Somewhere along the way, perhaps in Cloncurry, Fysh and McGinness had an idea.

According to a local historian: The trip through northwest Queensland awakened in Fysh and McGinness the need and opportunities for an air service operating in the area. The climate of northwest Queensland, with little fog or cloud, provided ideal flying weather nearly all year round: in the wet weather, aircraft could operate between isolated rail-heads, whereas motorised traffic could not because of boggy, unsealed roads. Due to the huge distances and poor communications between centres in the northwest, air travel would greatly reduce travelling time. When Fysh and McGinness returned to Brisbane they set about establishing their airline.'

They were not the first to think in these terms. A year before this, Reginald Lloyd had tried to launch a similar venture, without success. But when in 1921 the government asked for tenders for a subsidised mail and passenger service from Charleville to Cloncurry, Fysh, McGinness and Fergus McMaster won, and on 2 November 1922 the first regular airline service in Queensland was inaugurated. Paul McGinness piloted an Armstrong Whitworth FK8 biplane made of wood and wire from Charleville to Longreach, accompanied by the company engineer, WA Baird, and carrying 108 letters as freight. The next day, with Fysh as the pilot and Alexander Kennedy, aged 87, as passenger, (he paid £11 for the privilege), the plane set off on its 5% hour flight to Cloncurry, stopping off at Winton and McKinlay on the way.

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The new company was wordily called Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services - Qantas, in short.

The old passenger in cap and goggles on that first Qantas flight was more than an identity locally, and Qantas was just one of many Queensland entreprises he had helped to get off the ground. A doughty Scotsman, Alex Kennedy was one of those pioneers who had literally made a mark on the land; who had set out, like Thomas Mountjoy, into the unknown land with everything he owned, including wife and sons, on a bullock dray. That had been 43 years ago. Now nearly 90, he was the wealthy owner of thousands of acres of pasture on Buckingham Downs. He had shares in the Duchess Mine, which his son Jack discovered in 1897 (it eventually produced over £2 million worth of copper) and he owned or had shares in other mines. His ashes and those of his wife lie in a memorial cairn beside the road that passes their Devoncourt homestead.

Paul McGinness left Qantas a fortnight after the first official flight. He had refused to abide by a board resolution that pilots should abstain from downing any alcoholic drink while on duty. His later ventures, like sheep-farming, gold-mining and tobacco-growing failed, as did two marriages, and Hudson Fysh blocked all his attempts to return to aviation, even as a caretaker at an aerodrome. McGinness died of a heart attack in January 1952 and was buried in Perth without any honour, with his first wife and their daughter as the only mourners, and one wreath, from his second wife. Two days later, a Lancastrian plane, setting out on the first Qantas flight to the Cocos islands, flew over the cemetery. And that September a Qantas Constellation inaugurated the first flight from Sydney to Johannesburg. By this time Hudson Fysh was both chairman and managing director of Qantas. He was knighted in 1953 in the Coronation Honours List.

Sugar Honeycombe must have known both Fysh and McGinness and the Kennedy clan, at least by sight. For between January 1920 and May 1022 he had a certain status: he was manager of the Royal Hotel.

The first hotel of that name, and the first in the district, had opened in 1872 on the banks of Coppermine Creek. It burned down, like other hotels -some of which were deliberately set on fire when the copper boom went bust and insurance pay-outs afforded a modest bonanza - and rebuilt in stone in 1914. Annie Guerin managed the Royal for a year, from April 1917, and then Louise Halligan ran it for six months. Lawrie paid the necessary £10 license fee and took over the running of the hotel on 21 January 1920. It should be noted here that Annie Guerin, whom Lawrie is said to have much admired and courted, became the licensee of His Majesty's Hotel in August 1918, when she left the Royal, and remained as such until 1963, a period of 45 years.

The other hotels that flourished during the Great War included the Prince of Wales, the Post Office, the Grand, the Imperial, the Palace, the Exchange, the

Union, and the Mount Pisa. At one time there were 15 hotels in the Curry, among them a place called Bugger the Rocks.

Lawrie must have been a proud man when he became the manager of the Royalin January 1920; he was not yet 32. It was a historic establishment, having been in existence for over 50 years, longer than the town itself. But what had led to this financial and social elevation? How did the lowly railwayman achieve such distinction? Or sufficient funds? Had he been lucky at cards or at the races? And was it at this time, as the story goes, that Lawrie owned a racehorse or two?

As yet we don't know the answers. But Lawrie's affluence came at the wrong time, as the copper industry went bust, as the jobless went elsewhere, and the town went into a slow decline.

One major improvement was made, however, to the townspeople's general health in 1921, when a well, nine feet wide, was dug in the sandy bed of the Cloncurry River. Water was pumped from it to a reservoir on high ground and supplied to the town by a network of pipes. Other, older wells were filled in and outbreaks of typhoid reduced, although the worst would occur in 1928, when out of the 90 people who were affected, 17 died. A few businesses in the early 20s had electricity, powered by petrol-fired generators. But the streets would not be illuminated by electric light until January 1937, and the most of the town's hotels and houses were lit at night by candles and kerosene lamps.

Lawrie left the Royal Hotel in May 1922, when Madeline Jackson succeeded him as the next licensee. What was his subsequent entreprise? Was it in this year or soon thereafter that he seized the chance, as mines were abandoned, of buying a mine called the Gilded Rose? It is said that he soon gave it up and sold it for £10 to a man who then struck lucky and made £1,000 out of it.

Another source tells a similar tale of Lawrie's lucklessness - that he had a share later on in a mine in Mt Isa, sold it also for a tenner, and spent the rest of his life regretting it. For Mt Isa in time became a metropolis, and because the mining operations around it eventually covered some 41,000 square kilometers, it entered the record books as the largest city in the world (population 26,000), about the size of Switzerland.

Mt Isa's history is a recent one, and began in February 1923, when a lone prospector, John Campbell Miles, set out on horseback from Duchess, heading for the Northern Territory via a small pastoral township, Camooweal. For a while he followed a dirt-track along the dried-up upper reaches of the Leichhardt River. When his horses scented a pool of water in the river-bed he set up camp in the shade of some gums. His horses wandered during the night, and when he walked out to look for them on the morning of 23 February, he chanced on a piece of silver-bearing rock. He sent several specimens back to Cloncurry for examination at the Assay Office, where the largest rock served for several weeks as a doorstop. When it was finally assayed, it was found to be rich in silver-lead ore. News of the find soon spread, and men from shut-down copper mines, from

remote cattle stations, arrived and began pegging out leases and gouging the veins of mineral ore in the surface rock. Lawrie Honeycombe was one of them.

He took out a lease on 10 acres of land in the parish of Norden (mineral lease no 2498) from 1 January 1924, with the purpose of mining for silver and lead. We don't know how well he did. But the lease was transferred to Mt Isa Mines in June that year.

For five months Lawrie's temporary home, and those of hundreds of other prospectors thereabouts, would have been a lean-to of boughs wrapped about with hessian, or a hut constructed out of packing-cases, flattened petrol-tins and oil-drums. The leases that he and all the others purchased would have cost 10 shillings an acre. But they would cost their owners a great deal more in terms of hardship, sweat and grief. Within six months Lawrie, who was 36 in April, had had enough. He sold his scratched-out little mine. One wonders whether it was one of those that went on to make the fortunes of those men who persevered, as finds of silver, lead, copper and zinc proliferated in the spinifex?

Mt Isa Mines went on to become the largest company in Queensland, one of the largest in Australia, and the biggest in the English-speaking world producing silver and lead. Lawrie might have had a share in this. But he sold what he had for cash in hand and, turning his back on unimaginable wealth, rode back to Cloncurry and a good hot bath.

No doubt he was glad to have made some profit out of his time as a gouger. No doubt he was happy to be rid of heartless toil and to rest his damaged knee. Perhaps some trouble with it hastened his return. And perhaps it was not until he relaxed in a bath at the Royal or His Majesty's that he heard of his father's death in October in distant Kalgoorlie. Perhaps the news reached him at Christmas-time, in a letter from his ailing older brother, Bob, in Macrossan. Within a year Bob himself was dead.

Lawrie's isolation was then complete, apart from the holiday visits of his 'daughter1 Gwen. His parents and his brothers were now all dead, and his three married sisters, Jenny, Annie and Nellie, were far away. In August 1924 there was another ending - the last Cobb & Co's coaches to run made a final trip from Yuleba to Surat in Queensland.

A vivid picture of Cloncurry in 1925 is provided by Tom Cole in his book Hell West And Crooked. At the age of 19 and newly arrived from England, he became a 'ringer', or stockman, at a cattle station in the Northern Territory. To get there he travelled by train from Brisbane to Townsville and then on to Cloncurry, a journey that took him three days.

'I left the train at Cloncurry,' he wrote. 'I asked the stationmaster when was the next train to Duchess. "The next day," he said. "If it gets back!" He didn't say from where: I assumed from Duchess. I stood there for awhile collecting my thoughts, then asked him where the nearest pub was. "Up the road a bit," he said. I set off in the direction he indicated, lugging my suitcase... There couldn't be anywhere like this in the world, I thought. The heat was

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'I arrived at the hotel. Three unsaddled horses were tied up in the shade of a gum, and their saddles lay at the foot of the tree. A subdued hum came from the direction of the bar as I pushed through the door. It took a while to become accustomed to the gloom. Five or six men at the bar turned and looked at me as I came in.

'It was an unusual scene. They were unusual men. One lay stretched out on a bench, snoring, flies hovering over him in a black cloud. From time to time the beat of his snoring changed slightly as a few flies disappeared into his mouth. Another held the floor reciting a classic and anonymous bush poem: "We was going down the Hamilton with a mob of travellin' stock, The days was fuckin' dusty, The nights was fuckin' hot. The cattle they was rushin', the horses fuckin' poor, The boss he was a bastard, And the cook a fuckin' whore."

'A round of applause greeted this masterpiece of elocution, and they refilled their glasses from a bottle of rum that stood on the counter.

'One of the men, who appeared to be a stockman, called to me: "Come and join us, stranger"... He held out his hand and said: "I'm Steve Johnson... What will you drink?" I introduced myself. "I'm Tom Cole," I said, "and I'll have a cold beer."

'"Well, you'll be bloody lucky to get that," he replied. The barman went to a box-like contraption, covered in damp hessian, that swung from a wire from the ceiling and took out a bottle of beer. Feeling it he said: "It's pretty cold." Steve laughed. "It's probably just off the boil"...

'I poured a glass, and thought Steve wasn't far wrong. Before I'd drunk half, flies started to drop into the glass; and as fast as I fished them out, more dropped in. One of the men said: "You're better off drinking rum. They're not so keen on rum... It's not as if they were real bad this time of the year"...

'The man on the bench gave an explosive cough and flies shot out of his mouth like tiny black cannonballs...

'They talked of nothing but cattle, horses, the tremendous cattle runs. Anything less than 5,000 square miles hardly got a mention. Alexandria Station was 10,000 square miles... Victoria River Downs was 13,000 square miles -slightly larger than Belgium!

'They talked of Western Queensland, the Northern Territory and the Kimberleys in Western Australia as though they were their back yards... They spoke of droving trips with a thousand bullocks, 1,500 miles from start to finish, six months on the road, bores broken down and waterholes a caked claypan -three and four days without water, and not loosing a beast. They talked of floods, raging bushfires, cattle stampeding at night and horsemen falling in the lead of galloping bullocks...

The afternoon drifted by, and then the blessed relief of night. Suddenly there were no flies.'

34?

It was about this time that Lawrie owned or managed a soap factory. Possibly he used his Mt Isa earnings to buy into a business or set it up. The factory was situated on the corner of Station Street and Ham Street. Across the road was the Cloncurry/Kajabbi railway-line. Lawrie had a partner called Paddy Mow. It was not a fortunate entreprise. In 1925 a cyclone struck the town. The soap factory was damaged, presumably, like other buildings: the Methodist Church, for instance, transported eight years earlier from Townsville, was blown down and the new parsonage wrecked; the wooden grandstand at the racecourse was also destroyed.

Before long there was a disagreement and Paddy Mow walked out. Some mishap or lack of supervision resulted in a seething soap vat boiling over and filling the gutters in the street with molten soap, where it solidified and provided soap free for all. The soap factory business fell apart.

No doubt this made the customers in hotel bars fall about: here was another jokey tale to be told at Lawrie's expense. But it meant that he was in financial difficulties once again. He had to find another job, something that was becoming increasingly difficult. He was probably in debt. Nonetheless, in association with Fred Anios and Frank McNally, he acquired a share in another mining lease (No 3056), in the parish of Knapdale, in January 1926. The yearly rent was £2.10.0, and the minerals to be mined this time in the five-acre plot were copper and cobalt.

How long this venture lasted we do not know. But before long Sugar Honeycombe was back in the Curry. His next entreprise was the most enduring. From about 1927 to 1936 he made use of the skills he learned as a boy while lodging with the Naughtons in Charters Towers: he became a baker.

One of the earliest bakers in the Cloncurry had been a storekeeper, Georgie Young, who also ran a Chinese boarding-house. Another baker later on was a character called, appropriately, Ah Fat. Perhaps Lawrie took over a business previously run by someone else and kept it going as long as he could.

But the town's population was diminishing yearly and other businesses continued to close. By 1937 he was a baker no more. Perhaps the business failed. Or he may have sold out before it did. But once again he had to find another job, something was increasingly difficult. And he was probably in debt. Yet there were always old mates to advise and assist, and he next found work with his former employers, Queensland Railways.

Although some lines had been closed (in 1919 and 1920), Cloncurry was still the main rail depot in the area, and with the rise of Mt Isa - a new line thither from Duchess was opened in 1929 - its continuance had been assured. So Lawrie rejoined the railways, by whom his young nephews, Don and Bob, were also employed at this time.

He would remain in the Curry, and with Queensland Railways, for the rest of his working life, which slowed and slid into a long decline in pace with the

t-V.

town. He was a number-taker on the railways at first, then a shunter, then a guard. Being a number-taker meant he had to check on contents, destinations and availability of wagons and carriages. Although as a guard he must have travelled to other towns and as far away as Townsville, it seems that he seldom got in touch with his relatives. It was only because his nephew, Bob, was similarly employed that they occasionally met. Gwen was now married and would visit him no more.

Throughout most of this period Lawrie's home was a single man's room in a railway-owned boarding-house, and he used to augment his income by doing odd jobs and repairs. In his spare time he helped out at sporting events as a minor official and sometimes as a coach. He enjoyed participating in both outdoor and indoor games. He was already a regular player of card games and billiards, snooker and pool. When he aged, he frequently acted as the marker at various competitions involving these last three games.

Meanwhile, the sight and sound of aeroplanes flying in and out of Cloncurry had increased, although some of the attention they used to excite had waned. Nonetheless, the solo flight of "The Boy from Bundaberg," Bert Hinkler, from Croydon in England to Darwin in February 1928, would have revived memories of the Smith brothers' epic; Hinkler's flight took under 16 days. Wonderment at the advances in aviation must have increased when Charles Kingsford Smith and three companions flew across the Pacific in a monoplane, Southern Cross. They set out from Oakland in California on 31 May, and after a total of nearly 84 hours in the air, with stops at Hawaii and Fiji, they landed in Brisbane on 9 June.

Earlier that year, in May, a local flying event occurred that would also enter history, when a de Havilland with a doctor on board flew from Cloncurry to Julia Creek. It was the first official flight of the Flying Doctor Service.

The concept of such a service originated in the mind of a young AFC pilot, Clifford Peel, during the Great War. He wrote about it in a letter to a Presbyterian minister, John Flynn, who belonged to the AIM, the Australian Inland Mission. Their ministers tended to the spiritual needs of those who lived in the outback - much as the Bush Brothers (the Brotherhood of St Barnabas) had done since 1904. Even up to 1902 Cloncurry had remained an outpost of the Anglian parish of St James in Townsville. Flynn had traversed the outback on horseback since 1912, and the suffering of those unfortunate people whose illnesses and injuries could never be relieved by adequate medical care made him anxious to find some solution. The great distances involved were the great problem. Peel's letter gave Flynn the idea of solving it with air transport. From then on, he endeavoured to develop a service that would fly a doctor to an outback patient and carry that person back to a hospital. With the founding of Qantas in 1922, the means became more possible, and Flynn sought the help of Hudson Fysh. But financially the whole scheme was too much for the Presbyterian AIM, and the two-way communication by wireless was impossible to set up on outback properties that had no electricity. Then, in 1927, a friend of Flynn called Alfred Traeger devised and perfected a small radio set that was