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and sold. The third Government House, the present one, was built in the Domain, south of the
Yarra River, in 1874. With bluestone foundations, it was modelled in part on Queen Victoria's
palatial Italianate home on the Isle of Wight, Osborne House, and cost, with its furnishings,
nearly £145,000.
Richard, who specialised in bluestone, might well have been employed in 1874 on shaping
masonry for this house - and not the first two, as both existed before he came to Australia. And
when Charles Regelsen refers to Richard's involvement with the building of the Princes Bridge,
he could not in fact have meant the first bluestone and granite bridge, begun in 1850, but the
second, completed in 1886.
154
The fact remains that Richard and his family disembarked at and settled in Geeiong, not
Melbourne, and that six of his children were born in Geeiong, between 1855 and 1865. A great
deal of building in stone was taking place at this time (the Geeiong Town Hall was completed in
1855), and Richard had no need to seek work in Melbourne. He may have left his family in
Geeiong while he was employed on some special project in Melbourne - but this is unlikely.
Families clung together then out of mutual need and dependency. And if he was ever at work in
Melbourne, his wife and children would normally have accompanied him. It was her duty to
keep house for him, to serve and feed him and to be bedded by him. He would expect no less.
Richard Honeycombe's presence in Melbourne is not in fact recorded in street directories until
1877-although he was probably there in 1876, if not before. It may not be until then that he
became active in trade union affairs in Melbourne and began attending every procession and
march honouring the masons' march.
30 years later he may well have felt as if he were almost a pioneer - and who could or would
refute him if he said he was?
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Richard and the Masons' March
What now of Richard Honeycombe, William the stonemason's eldest surviving son, from whom
the main line of Australian Honeycombes are decended? What of him? He was known, by
some, as Dirty Dick.
A stonemason, like his father, he was a short, gaunt, irascible man who drank too much and
abused and beat his wife. Yet she and he became one of the oldest married couples in Australia,
and their progeny eventually produced a Town Clerk of Fitzroy and the first Honeycombe in the
world to become a knight, dubbed as such in London by the queen.
Richard, the fifth of his parent's children, was born in South Devon, in Newton Abbott, and
baptised on 26 September 1829, eight months before the accession of William IV to the throne
on the death of his brother, George IV. The next nine years of Richard's childhood were spent
in Devon while his father plied his trade of stonemason in and around the village of Newton
Abbott and llsington, where William was employed by the Haytor Granite Company and
eventually sacked by them in 1834. He remained in Devon, however, for five more years, living
in Exeter for a time, until the family moved to Bristol, in 1839 or early the following year.
There, William set up in business with George Wilkins as masons and builders, residing at 1
Hillsbridge Parade. The last of William and Elizabeth's children, John, was born there in June
1842, when Richard was 12 years old.
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