 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
Arthur Bayley returned to Southern Cross with over 15 kilograms of gold in his saddlebags,
scoured from a site at Coolgardie. And the following year Paddy Hannan wandered into an area
called 'Kalgurii' by aborigines, and picked up some nuggets of gold that lay at his feet.
Other news, apart from talk of Federation, and the flying experiments Lawrence Hargrave was
making near Sydney with box-kites, included the amazing fact that South Australia, preceded by
New Zealand, had given women the right to vote - something that would not happen fully in
Britain until 1928.
This must have been amazing to Dirty Dick, who no doubt deplored such liberality and chose
never to discuss the matter with his daughter or wife. How browbeaten they were by him we do
not know. But Richard's wife, Elizabeth, who was some inches taller than him, clearly had some
fight in her. Family legend has it that she used to fetch a billy-can of beer from a hotel and leave
it cooling on a window ledge, so that on his return from work he could immediately quench his
thirst. One day she was so displeased with him that she filled the billy with cough mixture and he
drank the lot.
Women put up with a lot from their men in those days - they had no choice - and hard times
must have made things even harder at home.
Ironically, it was at this time of extreme hardship in cities and towns that the romantic ballads of
Andrew Barton (Banjo) Paterson were published by Angus & Robertson as The Man from
Snowy River and Other Verses and became a huge and popular success. In that same year,
1895, Paterson, while in Queensland, wrote new words for an old song which was first heard in
Winton as 'Waltzing Matilda'. The following year Angus & Robertson published the antidote,
Henry Lawson's unromantic and uncompromising view of rural Australia contained in a
collection of 52 short stories entitled While the Billy Boils.
Did Dirty Dick ever read Paterson's poems and Lawson's stories? We would like to think so.
We know, because he wrote to The Age, that he was probably in the habit of perusing the
papers in Albert Street. And what must have interested him then was any mention of South
Africa.
For in 1895, when the Australian anthem of 'Waltzing Matilda' was being penned, two of
Richard's sons decided to join a third in South Africa and (temporarily) stopped calling Australia
home.
167
i South Africa and the Boer War
Although three Honeycombes, brothers, were in South Africa in the 1890's and became
embroiled in the Boer War, we know very little to nothing about exactly when they were there,
where they lived and worked, and what happened to them during that war. Were it not for oral
evidence, we would know next to nothing about this most interesting episode. For just one
document has been unearthed to prove that one of the brothers, Dick, was in South Africa then.
We have nothing to show that Tom and Jack were there - not until (in Jack's case) 1905.
Tom Honeycombe is said (by Aunt Lil) to have gone to South Africa in the depression to work
and to have sent for his brothers Jack and Dick. She said: 'Thomas went over first. Then he sent
for his brother, Jack. Dick went over later, I think... Thomas went over for work. There was no
work here. There was a Depression. And they found out that there was work in Africa, and
that's why they went over. There was plenty of work for stonemasons, and Dick stopped there
for about five years. His son (my younger brother) was a baby when Richard left. I would have
 |