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

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In answer to a question from Mr Everard, Ken replied: 'I think the firewood may have butted into the mare's rump. The breeching may have been too long.'

Senior Constable Black said: 'In response to a telephone message from Dr Larkins I went to the property of Mr Reuben F Jarvis of Cudgewa. In a paddock about 600 yards from Mr Jarvis's house I could see the marks where a cartwheel had passed over some object. A pair of heavy boots was lying at the spot, which was 57 yards from the opening into the paddock. Between the opening into the paddock and where the boots were lying I could see where the wheel tracks of the cart had passed over furrows... At the bottom of the paddock, about 600 yards from where the boots lay, I saw a spring cart upturned and some firewood lying underneath and beside it.'

Gwen was widowed at the age of 26. She wrote to Bill about Norman's death and from wherever Bill was then living and working he travelled to Cudgewa, to provide what help and consolation he could. It seems that before long he made up his mind that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Gwen, and not in Ayr, and give her and her fatherless child a home.

We do not know whether he returned to Ayr that September, but in order to acquire some capital and sever some family connections, he sold his quarter share in the family business to Len and Alma. Esther was very upset by this, by the fact that her eldest son intended to abandon not only the business but his wife and two young sons and move in with another woman down south. Bill was upset because he felt that Len managed to do him out of the full value of his share and that the amount to be paid in dividends to Zoe was insufficient to support her and the boys. Ill-feeling and resentment were rife, and the family rift was never fully healed. Zoe never forgave Bill for deserting her, and her bitterness influenced her attitude to his family for many years. Esther was less unforgiving, although Bill had betrayed his father's aspirations and her expectations, and his name. The Ayr Honeycombes and Bill hardly ever met again, except at funerals (although Alma kept in touch with him), and none of the older ones ever met Gwen. She was 'that woman' to Esther. To Zoe she was 'that bitch'.

Before Bill left Queensland earlier that year he had taken his two sons to their new schools; it was a first day for both. In February 1949 he had walked down the road with five-year-old Lloyd to Ayr State School, and then had driven 12-year-old John to a boarding school, All Souls School in Charters Towers, which was run by the Brotherhood of St Barnabas, an Anglican teaching order, although not many of the teachers were brothers. Then Bill drove south to Sydney.

When he and Gwen began living together we do not know. But her little daughter Pam is said (by Pam) to have lived with her grandmother until 1952,

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when she went to live with Bill and Gwen in Katoomba and where she went to school. Katoomba is in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, and Bill is said to have lived in adjacent Leura before settling in Katoomba, where he worked for a dentist called Kelvin Hutchinson, who ten years later would describe Bill in a handwritten reference as 'by far the best dental mechanic I have had the pleasure to be associated with.1 Bill had no hobbies, but he developed a sideline of fashioning jewellery, of cutting and polishing stones. Gwen also had a job: she was the manager of a dress salon and drapery shop.

Bill and Gwen eventually married in March 1962; he was 58.

Back in Ayr, Esther's health was fading: she was 70 in October 1949, and in that year she moved in with Alma and Lloyd Wilson and lived with them until she died.

After Bill's departure, Len became the overall manager of the machinery side of the business, and Alma ran the grocery store. Although Len, 43 in 1949, had ideas about expanding the business - he opened a machinery outlet in Home Hill - any major developments would have to wait until his mother died; age had made her averse to too much change.

The Home Hill shop was run by two of Ethel's married brothers. One of them, Len Keller, was a tractor mechanic; the other, Fort, managed the shop until he returned to Ayr, where he eventually managed the BP Depot. A sister, Myrtle, took over her father's accountancy practice in Home Hill and was the pianist for the Home Hill Choir.

Len's energies outside the business were devoted to church affairs and charities, to horse-breeding and the growing of roses and colourful annuals in the garden at Rossiter's Hill. In the last two pursuits he was assisted by Eddy Powell, who lived in a small house at the back. Every year Len travelled with Ethel to New Zealand, to look at horses at yearling sales. He told young Lloyd that one day he'd retire and breed horses and leave the grocery and machinery businesses to be run by John and Lloyd.

Both boys, when not at school, were co-opted to work for the Honeycombes. Lloyd's induction in the business began when he was about seven (in 1951).

He said later: 'I remember working on the grocery side initially because they wouldn't trust me near the machinery. I began picking out bad onions and potatoes from the good ones - sitting in this pit full of stinking onions and stinking potatoes and picking out the bad ones and putting them to one side... From there I graduated to the job of unpacking cardboard boxes of supplies and putting the items on the racks - old ones at the front, new ones at the back - and

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dusting them. And then I would push the big broom, sweeping the store inside and out. On Saturday mornings I got paid - about two shillings a week... When I was about seven or eight I started playing football and rugby league; I was fairly big for my age. After football matches we'd collect the empty bottles people had dropped in the stands under their seats. We got money for them. Sundays were also spent on sport, or fishing and shooting - country pursuits... I was at Ayr State School from 1949 to 1956, and I used to walk past the shop every day. Our house was about 400 yards away.'

In the holidays, when he returned to Ayr, he stayed with his mother or with the Wilsons, Alma and Lloyd, with whom his grandmother Esther was living then. But he didn't have a proper home or home life. So when he went north to Innisfail, to holiday with the family of a schoolmate, John Stalley (which he did four times) he luxuriated not only in the lush tropical scenery but also in the warmth of a close-knit family. The father was rector of a local church and John stayed at the rectory. 'The mother was a delightful person,' he said years later. 'Always full of fun.' So unlike Zoe. He added: 'It was very pleasant to be part of a family like that.'

John left All Souls School in December 1952 when he was 16, a standard practice at that time. He could have gone further, but he preferred doing and earning to learning; and he was needed at the store. He had never thought of working anywhere else: Esther and Alma, and chiefly Len, had taught him well. Len also paid for John to learn Italian: it would be useful in the business. For most of the cane-cutters were first or second year immigrants, who invariably went on to buy small farms and holdings of their own. John would remember some of Len's instructions and advice for the rest of his life - such as 'If you want to know something, go and ask, and listen; most people ask, but never listen" -'Make sure you go to church on Sunday, because it's good for business.'

By now three stores were managed and owned by the Honeycombes. In addition to the Progressive Store in Munro Street (so named in 1922) there was a pioneering cut-price, self-service store in Queen Street called the Grocerteria, which was opened in 1952, and the Community Cash Store (the CCS), which was on the corner of Macmillan and Parker streets and run by Bill Aitken.

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Major changes were however, about to occur and the family's fortunes be transformed. Major events were occurring elsewhere: Australian troops were fighting in the Korean War and would soon be involved in Malaya; the first British atomic bomb was exploded off Western Australia; aborigines in the Northern Territory became officially Australian citizens; uranium was found near Mt Isa.

Although the coronation had been televised in the UK, the first TV station in Australia, TCN 9 in Sydney, did not start transmitting until September 1956. This was one technical and all-pervasive innovation that Esther Honeycombe never saw. For when her grandson John was a month short of his eighteenth birthday, Esther died.

Esther Honeycombe died in Ayr aged 74, worn out by years and long hours of seldom alleviated work, on 25 July 1954, a Sunday. Ethel said of her: 'She was a very hard-working woman; she really lived for her family. But she had a sense of fun.'

John said: 'I always had a high opinion of her; she was always very kind to me... I was there when she died. She died at home, in the double bed in Alma's main bedroom. I was living next door at the time, in her house. Alma was there, and Len, and the priest from the local church. About an hour or two before she died she said: "There's Johnny... He never could handle those horses." Obviously her mind had gone back to her days at Charters Towers when she was a young girl. She had a brother called Johnny; she thought she could hear him bringing the horses in.'

The funeral was on the Tuesday morning, 27 July, at All Saints Church. Bill came north for the funeral, staying with John in Esther's house; Zoe ignored him. Rene and Horace Horn came up from Brisbane and Bob Honeycombe and his mother Selina from Charters Towers. All three of Esther's husband's elderly sisters were there: Jenny Butcher, Annie Johnson and Nellie McHugh. So was a certain 'Mr T Weston' and some of the Chapmans, including a 'Mr John Chapman'. Was he Esther's younger half-brother Johnny, whom she pictured as she died? Was he the youngest child of Annie Chapman, whom she had christened John Valentine Black?

Mrs Rickard was also there: as Nellie Peel she was cared for by Esther when both were little girls. Nellie Rickard said, as the coffin went to its grave: 'Perhaps Esther will rest at last.'

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It was the last time all these descendants and relatives of John Honeycombe the goldminer and Irish Mary his wife would meet. As Len said, it was the end of an era -100 years in fact since the first family of Australian Honeycombes settled in Geelong.

Esther's grandson John recalled: 'It was July, one of the winter months, and everybody sat out in the sun, in cane chairs on the lawn, and he read the will in the garden at the side of the house straight after the funeral. Most of Esther's estate, however, had already been passed on to Alma and Len.'

The will had been drawn up two years earlier. In it, Esther left her piano to Alma, while all the rest of her furniture and the contents of her home were to be divided equally between Alma and Rene. The house itself was to be sold for removal and the net proceeds divided equally between her four children, Rene, Bill, Alma and Len; the land on which the house stood (Allotment 9 of Section 50) was given to Bill, Len and Alma as joint tenants thereof. The rest of her estate was to be divided between Alma and Len. A loan of £5,000 to Len was 'forgiven' - cancelled. He also received a legacy of £500. Rene was given £400 and £50 in annual instalments over the next ten years. Esther's grandchildren (including John and Lloyd) and great-grandchildren (via Rene) received £50 each. She had three life insurance policies, and was worth in all - and what a difference from the 25 shillings she is said to have had in her purse when she came to Ayr - just over £13,400.

Esther had tried to be fair, and Bill was not forgotten, although he inevitably felt aggrieved at the far greater rewards bestowed on Alma and in particular on Len. He lingered in Ayr for a few weeks, but no further amends were made. Bill was deeply hurt. When he returned to Ayr in December that year for Lloyd Wilson's funeral nothing more was gained. Instead, he was persuaded to sell his share in Allotment 9 to Alma and Len, for a sum that he felt was unfairly low. Although Alma kept in touch with him, and later his second son, Lloyd, it was only Lloyd's education and job prospects that thereafter brought Bill north, and when that was resolved he stayed away.

In the meantime Len, having announced the end of an era, added: 'We've got to change too. It's time to get out of groceries, and into farming and land.'

'It was a very difficult decision to make,' said John. 'But it was the right decision, as cane farms have prospered and groceries haven't - in 1956 the chain store BBC opened their first store in Ayr. We couldn't have competed with them."

On 18 October 1954 Len and Alma accepted an offer for the Progressive Store and the CCS shop on Macmillian Street from Coutts Ltd - to include 'the goodwill of both businesses (if any), all fixtures, fittings, refrigeration, scales, trucks, bacon cutters and all other plant and equipment together with stock-in-trade.' Coutts agreed to pay just over £8,000. The sale of the Grocerteria in Queen Street was also initiated, and the store was eventually sold to Coutts,

plus trucks, fittings and stock, for £3,750 in March 1955, a clause in the contract specifying that Coutts had to remove all Honeycombe signs and 'not use the name Honeycombe in any way with the future conduct of the said business.'

With £9,000 of the money Len received from the sale of the three stores he and Alma bought the second cane farm at Hutching's Lagoon.

Len was able to make such wholesale changes because his mother was dead and Alma's husband was ill. He was now the man in total charge. Even John was away from the scene.

Eighteen in August 1954, John had travelled to Sydney for a two-week holiday; on Mount Kosciusko he saw his first snow and had a snowball fight with a friend. Then after his birthday he went off to do his National Service at a military training area south of Brisbane. A few months later John received a telephone call from Alma. She said: 'You better come home and help look after things. Len's had a nervous breakdown.'

This occurred in October, and must have been occasioned by Len's business worries and the radical decisions concerning the selling of the grocery stores - something that his mother would not perhaps have wanted. There was something else. Len was 48 on 14 October, and a few days later he received a letter from the District Registrar in Charters Towers in response to one from him asking for a copy of his mother's birth certificate. It said: 'I am unable to find any record of this birth. However, Birth entry 1375 records the birth of an illegitimate female child MARY ESTHER who was born to Johannah formerly Black now Weston. The date of birth is 3 October 1879.'

Len's mother had called herself Irene Mary Esther Chapman when she married; now it transpired she was neither Irene nor a Chapman. It was all too much for him. Ethel took Len north to the Atherton Tableland to recuperate, and John took over the business, assisted by Alma. Then Lloyd Wilson died of a heart attack on 15 December; he was 54. Len and Ethel did not attend Lloyd's funeral, and remained up north until just before Christmas. The sale of the three groceries was finalised on his return.

John remained in Ayr for a year before going south to complete his National Service. He moved permanently into Alma's house, siding himself with 'those bloody Honeycombes' as Zoe referred to her husband's relations. She was now taking in lodgers to supplement her income.

Although Len had rid himself of much associated with his mother, he still sought to elevate her memory and to commemorate her life with something more socially significant than a gravestone - to this day the only one in the Ayr cemetery that bears the Honeycombe name. It says: 'In loving memory of Irene Mary Esther Honeycombe, beloved mother of Rene, Alma, Bill and Len... Always remembered.'

Without discussing the matter with Alma, and thereby upsetting her for a while, Len paid for a new marble-topped altar made of brick to be installed in the rebuilt All Saints War Memorial Church. The raising of funds for the rebuilding of the Anglican church, the third on the site, had begun in 1949, and it was designated a war memorial as donations were consequently tax deductible; the

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old church became the parish hall. The new church, and the altar, were dedicated on 25 September 1955 by the Bishop of North Queensland, Bishop Shevill; young Lloyd, aged 11, was the Bishop's cassock boy and server. The altar was remodelled and moved forward in 1974.

But such interior memorials are virtually unregarded compared with the large signs that now crown several premises in Townsville and Ayr. For Esther's grandson, John Honeycombe, built wisely and well on her and Len's achievements, and the family name is not only known throughout the Burdekin but blazoned over the several million-dollar businesses dealing in real estate, used cars, and farm machinery, and owned and managed by the Honeycombes today.

And yet, as with others who came to Australia from other lands, in other times, who made their mark and helped to shape their new homeland in many ways, it is the official recognition of achievements that pleases most - and may endure - the bestowing of a name on a place, a farm, a town, a city, a mountain, a river, a piece of land however great or small. Batman, Collins, Murray, Eyre, Flinders, Wickham, Bass, Gibson, Leichhardt, Sturt: these names - and many more - belonged to men who came and saw and conquered and, in great or modest measure, are commemorated throughout Australia today.

You will need a magnifying glass and a detailed map of Ayr to find a place called Honeycombe. But there it is, on Rossiter's Hill, a little road on the edge of the land that Len once owned. The Shire Council in the 1970s, recognising the part that the Honeycombe family had played in the prosperous development of Ayr, named this road Honeycombe Street.

In doing so they linked the family's future to its past. For the only other place in the world called Honeycombe is the house in Cornwall where Honeycombes lived seven centuries ago. That house gave its name to the family who lived there then, and now, many generations later, the family's name was given to a street, a hyphen of land on the other side of the world.

So a line was drawn between two dots, a fragile faint uncertain line that invisibly flowed from John via Bill and Zoe, Esther and Will, John and Mary, to William and Elizabeth, and connected them all to their misty Cornish ancestors, who knew nothing of Australia, nor of what their children's children would see and know and do in another country so very far away.

Although we glimpse their yesterdays, and record and remember some of our own, we see ahead no better than they. We only know that life goes on, the line goes on - but whither? And who will stand on an alien shore a hundred years from now, as William did, and wonder what the next few years will bring?

99 ■ Thereafter

Len Honeycombe died of a heart attack in 1973. But he never fully recovered from his nervous breakdown and the events of 1954. His confidence was impaired as well as his mind: he felt less able to cope.

He was 50 in October 1956. Although he continued to supervise the two farm machinery businesses for another 14 years, during which he also began selling cars as well as trucks, his interest in these entreprises waned as his certainty in himself and his mental health declined, the latter veering between moments of elation and paralysing negativity. He became manic-depressive; and although Ethel, Alma and John became experts at calming him down or bucking him up, he was occasionally difficult to control. 'There was no telling what he would do when he was on a high,' said John. 'He might want to buy this or sell that. The business was affected in some ways.'

Every year Len and Ethel went on a trip, mainly to Melbourne or New Zealand, these trips coinciding with yearling sales. He had a personal income from the properties he owned. In 1969 he and Ethel travelled to England. They stayed in Berners Hotel in London for part of June and July. I saw them twice and they saw me read the ITV News at ITN.

I was 32 then and remember little about our meetings, except that the older couple were rather old-fashioned and quiet. Through me they also met Peter and Joyce Honeycombe of Walthamstow. It was the first time different branches of the family tree had met and the first time Len and Ethel heard about some of the history of the Honeycombes, about Cornwall and Honeycombe House.

Len officially retired in 1970, and his nephew John, 34 that year, assumed the leading role in the management of the family business. One of the first things he did was to close the Home Hill machinery shop the following year. 'With the increase in modern communication,' he said, 'it just wasn't viable to have two outlets 10 kilometres apart.'

On 11 February 1973 Len and Ethel were on their annual trip to the North Island of New Zealand, visiting horse studs and friends and staying as usual in Greerton, part of Tauranga; Len was 66.

The Ayr newspaper, The Advocate, said: 'They had been motoring around the town of Greerton during the day. On their return to the motel, Len decided to lie down as he felt a little tired. A short while later, Mrs Honeycombe found that he had died while resting.'