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dimly lit by gas, weatherboard workers' homes, and shops, sprouted along major roads, and
spread. A fertile population rose rapidly to over 19,000 in 1890 - 50 percent of whom were
under the age of 21. By no means all of the workforce, however, were on a 48-hour week. In
the factories of some of the noxious trades, women and boys might toil for 56-hours, earning as
little as 5/6 a day.
In 1888, Richard Honeycombe, his wife and two unmarried daughters, and his scattered and
married offspring - Mary Ann Regelsen in Benalla, George in South Yarra, newly-wed Richard
junior in Footscray, Thomas and Jack in North Carlton, and Harriet in Geelong - variously
celebrated the Centennial of the white settlement of Australia.
Festivities began on 26 January, then known not as Australia Day, but Anniversary Day. The
Argus said: 'Australia confronts the world today with a record of 100 years, with a marvellous
past, a prosperous present, and a future of boundless possibilities.'
What, one wonders, did Dirty Dick, now approaching 60, know or think of that marvellous
past? What did he know of prosperity? What possibilities of
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self-improvement were left to him? Although he had been in Victoria for 35 years, did he still
think of England as home?
Which, if any, of the morally improving centennial events in Footscray and Melbourne did he
attend? Were he and his reduced family among the thousands who flocked into Melbourne's
Centennial Exhibition that opened in August that year? Did he wonder, as some did in 1988,
what the fuss was all about? What was being celebrated? The arrival of a bunch of convicts?
The subjugation of the aborigines and the seizure of their land?
There was little sense of national identity then: the various colonies competed and quarrelled and
Western Australia was still run by New South Wales. Most people, in the towns or in the bush,
were more concerned with survival - with feeding and clothing their families and staying in work.
Of more present and future significance to Australians in 1888 was the first appearance of
electric street lighting in a town (Tamworth in New South Wales), and the linking of Brisbane to
Newcastle by rail. The link to Sydney was effected the following year.
In 1890, the white Australian population, added to infinitesimally by Richard's grandchildren
(they numbered 12 that year), passed the 3 million mark; Western Australian acquired its own
Constitution and its first premier, John Forrest; and a maritime strike, involving stevedores and
ships' officers, provoked strikes by shearers and miners that almost resulted in a general strike -
union leaders were arrested and troops used to bread picket lines - and foreshadowed worse
economic troubles ahead.
At the end of that year, on 29 December, Richard's youngest daughter, Louisa, escaped from
Albert Street by marrying a 27-year-old coach-painter (the same trade as her eldest brother
George), called William Allen. She was a dressmaker and 25. Again, as with all their other
children, neither of her parents witnessed the signing of the register. The bridegroom came from
Maryborough, a railway town between Bendigo and Ballarat, and his father was a miner. As his
mother's maiden name was Hannan, can we suppose, if not prove, that she was related to that
most famous of Irish Hannans called Paddy, who would discover gold at Kalgoorlie in two
years' time?
It was perhaps about this time, so the story goes, that Dirty Dick, in sawing a branch off a tree
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