 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
investment bubble burst, finance companies, that had encouraged overborrowing and frenzied
speculation in real estate, collapsed. Factories and business houses closed... Unemployment
soared to 25 percent among skilled workers and even higher among the unskilled. As no
welfare system existed, other than soup kitchens to distribute food, the suffering and misery of
the unemployed was profound. In the search for work men left for the Western Australian
goldfields in tens of thousands... Strikes against falling wages and poor conditions ended in
defeat. The trough of the depression was reached in 1893.1
The soup kitchens in Footscray were organised by the Ladies' Benevolent Society; they fed
hundreds every week. Hundreds of others, who refused to accept their plight or charity starved.
Destitution, despair and privation increased as credit was refused in stores, and more and more
became unemployed - as many as 40 percent of all working men and boys. Suicides increased,
some drowning themselves in the foul Saltwater River. A quarryman packed gunpowder into his
mouth and lit the fuse. Others sought and fought for ill-paid relief work in vile conditions. Some
went west, abandoning their homes, which were vandalised and torn apart. Footscray's never
lovely face withered and decayed.
The vicar of St John's, Henry Forde Scott, who had married Louisa Honeycombe, to William
Allen in 1890, concluded in a sermon: 'Unwise government, feverish taste for riches, reckless
and unremunerative expenditure, unwise action of Labour leaders, cruel criminality by trusted
financiers - these resulted... in the poverty of today.'
How did Richard Honeycombe, his sons and daughters fare? As badly or perhaps better than
the rest?
They all survived. But did Richard, 40 years after he and his young family left Liverpool, curse
the day that they had come to Geelong, and then left Geelong for Melbourne? All that he had
hoped for and worked for - through no fault of his own - was being dispossessed and
destroyed. Poverty and deprivation, it must have seemed, would stay with him to his grave.
And then in 1894 his younger brother John descended on him with two of his sons, whom
Richard had probably never seen. He had probably not seen his taller brother for 20 years.
Now John was 52, more portly and well-dressed, with his one good eye and his one glass eye
and two hungry sons: one called Willie andaged15,theother11 -year-old Bob.
Why had they come? Were they in Melbourne on a family visit, or was John looking for work?
What work - in a Depression? One imagines that both brothers were relieved when John took
himself and his sons off to Geelong, to see their Aunt Jane. Did they stay at Albert Street,
waited on by Richard's wife, Elizabeth (now 72) and his spinster daughter, Jane? Or did they
lodge in some boarding-house, or even - if John had some money to burn - in some comfortable
hotel?
166
Soon they were gone, and Richard would only see his brother once again,
when John passed through Melbourne, as he may have done, on his way to the
Kalgoorlie gold-field a few years later.
, ¦
Neither of the brothers, as far as we know, nor Richard's sons, ventured to Kalgoorlie at this
time, although thousands did, seeking their fortunes or some means of supporting the wives and
children they left behind.
Western Australia had been in the news since 1885, when gold-strikes were made in the
Kimberleys, then over the next six years at Yilgairn, Ashburton and Murchison. Then in 1892
 |