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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.
It was also a time of endings - of transportation in 1868, when the last convicts were landed in
Western Australia, and in 1870 of Britain's military presence, when the last British troops left the
colonies from Sydney's Circular Quay.
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
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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
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