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of the Melbourne University, where I had also been employed and which had been officially
opened in March the previous year. I called a meeting during the 'Smoko' time, viz, between 10
and 11 o'clock in the forenoon, and reported our interviews with the employers - that Mr
Cornish, contractor for the Parliament House, would not give in. I then insisted that the
resolution of the Society should be carried by physical force if necessary. The majority of
masons employed are Society men, and we can easily coerce the minority. It was a burning hot
day, and I thought the occasion a good one. So I called upon the men to follow me, to which
they immediately consented - when I marched them to a new building then being erected in
Madeline Street, thence to Temple Court, and on to the Parliament House, the men at all these
works immediately dropping their tools and joining the procession.'
Over a thousand workers were involved in this lengthy march, which concluded at the
Belvedere Hotel, in what is now Eastern Hill, where a meeting resolved not to return to work
until the recalcitrant contractors (there were in fact two) accepted the principle of the eight-hour
day. This they did, and the workers' triumph was celebrated by them and their families at the
Cremorne Gardens on
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12 May with festivities that included dancing, fireworks, and platefuls of plum pudding and roast
beef. The march became an annual event and is celebrated now by Australia's Labour Day.
Did Richard Honeycombe at the age of 26, take part in the masons' march as he would aver 60
years later? Was he actually in Melbourne then?
Let us refer back to his letter written when he was 87, long after the events of 1856, and when
corroboration was difficult and nearly all his contemporaries dead. He is wrong about the
direction of Stephens' march, which ended at the Belvedere Hotel; and the festivities at the
Cremorne Gardens took place the following month. He admits he never joined the Association,
explaining, very vaguely, that it was not 'convenient' at the time. And yet he claims he helped 'to
fight the eight hours agitation to the finish'.
No records of the events that year, or of trade union affairs thereafter, ever mention his name.
And two of the newspaper obituaries recording his death as 'one of the last of the Eight Hours
movement pioneers', also note that he 'did not walk in the original Eight Hours' Procession" and
that his name was not 'enrolled on the scroll of honour at the Trades Hall'.
It seems to me that Dirty Dick was not only lying about his involvement in the march and union
activities in 1856, but that he was not even in Melbourne at the time - despite what his daughter,
Louisa, said about her father being 'brought out to work on the building of the Victorian
Government House'. Louisa was the youngest of Richard's nine children and was not born until
the end of 1885. By 'Government House' she must have meant what she is reported to have
said -not Parliament House, part of which was built of brick in 1856, though the rest of it,
including the west facade, was not completed until 1892.
The first Government House was a prefabricated wooden house, like a Swiss chalet, occupied
by Charles La Trobe in 1840. This 'cottage' was situated in Agnes Street, Jolimont, and
restored in 1964. The second was the already existing home of a wealthy merchant. Called
Toorak, it was leased by the government and enlarged at enormous expense, a barracks, new
stables, coach-houses, driveways and other building's being added to the place at a cost of
£29,000. It was occupied by Sir Charles Hotham in June 1854. Italianate in style, the house, on
St George's Road, Toorak, was the home of five successive Governors, until it was relinquished
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