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the father of Mary Ann's bastard child at either of the weddings of Mary Ann's nephew and
niece? He couldn't have been Macpherson Robertson, who was 12 in 1872. But an older
brother - or cousin perhaps? Or perhaps that Robert Robertson who wed Mary Permewan in
Geelong in 1881.
Time and more research may unravel these relationships. But there we must leave them now,
returning to Footscray and Dirty Dick's more immediate family, and to his eldest son.
George William, the coach-painter, died in the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne of nephritis and
uraemia on 11 September 1913. Born in Leith in Scotland, he was three months old when his
parents, Richard and Elizabeth, took him and his two older sisters by ship to the other side of
the world. When he died he was 60, and none of his four children, three girls and a boy, had
married as yet, all waiting until their thirties to do so.
A happier event, though with an unhappy outcome, was the marriage of Richard and Fanny
Honeycombe's eldest daughter, Louisa May, to Harold Mudd, in May 1913, two months after
the foundation stone of the city of Canberra was laid. Louisa was a tailoress, aged 23, and
Harold was an engineer, or mechanic.
Her father, Dick, died the following year, on 28 December 1914, of cancer of the bowel. Aged
57, and blind, he died at home, at 168 Ballarat Road, where the family had lived since 1912.
Dick's son, young Dick (Richard Thomas) became at the age of 18 the breadwinner of the
family, responsible for the continued well-being of his mother and two unmarried sisters, Jessie
and Lil - as he must have been as his father slowly went blind. As such, young Dick never
became involved in the First World War, and was saved from being slaughtered with thousands
of his contemporaries at Gallipoli and in France. He was a turner by trade, a machinist doing
lathe work on precision tools. He could have volunteered to serve in the Army or Navy, as
some unemployed breadwinners did. But his mother wouldn't hear of it. She was afraid of losing
her only son.
Thousands of other mothers lost their sons in the next four years. In this period nearly 330,000
men were sent to distant battle zones overseas to assist the British in their armed struggle against
the Germans and Turks. Nearly
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60,000 of these men were killed, and 167,000 injured - a huge percentage of those who went
to war. The Anzac myth was born, and the image of the fearless, devil-may-care digger, and
redoubtable Aussie, reinforced.
Initially, when the was began in August 1914, the Australian government volunteered to send
20,000 men to help a foreign king and country ("good old Britain1) fight a series of wars in
foreign lands. The leader of the Opposition, Andrew Fisher, said: 'Australia will stand by the
mother country to help and defend her to our last man and last shilling.' Fisher became Prime
Minister in September 1914 when Labour was returned to power and immediately put into
practise what he preached. He had wide support, for Australia, as a very new nation, was eager
to prove her international worth and be one of the boys, and one with them.
The Royal Australian Navy, but three years old, was put at the disposal of the British
government and fought its first and last ship-to-ship action in the First World War in November
1914, when a light cruiser, HMAS Sydney pounded a German warship, the Emden, to pieces
off the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The Sydney was part of a large fleet of warships and
transports that had assembled off Albany in Western Australia and had sailed for Egypt on 1
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