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Crocodile Creek for the next eight years, for most of the time at Three Mile Creek.
Crocodile Creek was notorious, as other diggings in other colonies had become, for an anti-
Chinese riot.
The first race riot of this sort had happened many years earlier, in 1857, when a group of
diggers at the Ovens gold-field in New South Wales destroyed a Chinese settlement and drove
out its occupants. Similar disturbances periodically erupted in the gold-fields of New South
Wales and Victoria until their bloody culmination in the Lambing Flat riots in 1861, when several
Chinese were killed. When the New South Wales government, sympathising with the demands
of the European diggers, passed a law in November 1861 that restricted Chinese entry to the
colony, the problems went elsewhere. They were based on the simple facts that the Chinese
looked and were different: they ate, behaved, dressed, and worked in ways alien to the
sunburnt and hairy diggers, who were also jealous of the other race's diligence, industry and high
ratio of success.
When payable gold was found at Crocodile Creek in June 1866, within six months some 3,000
people were living and working in the area, a third of whom were Chinese. Once again, their
self-imposed seclusion, graft, odd appearance and customs (like opium smoking) antagonised
the whites, especially the 'new chums' from Brisbane. In the heat of January 1867, two Chinese
claims were 'jumped' by a mob of chums, who urged others to 'roll up and drive the buggers off.
The Chinamen were assaulted and beaten off with stones and sticks and their vegetable gardens
wantonly wrecked. Their tents were set on fire, and everything they owned, bedding, clothing,
tools and provisions, was broken up or torn apart - or stolen by diggers' families, eager to help
themselves to what was left. During this affray, several Chinamen were injured, though none
seriously. One European, a man named Hughes, had his skull fractured by a Chinese
tomahawk. The enterprising wife of Ah Sing, who had a pub, saved the establishment from
being wrecked by a thrusting 'a stiff glass of grog' into the hands of the mob's leader 'and when
the crowd flocked in the place, she treated them all freely to the contents of the bar; they then
became peacefully disposed'.
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Nine whites were arrested and locked up in Rookhampton; the local press referred to them as
'European blackguards'. Six were eventually sent for trial in March at the Supreme Court in
Brisbane. Two were found not guilty of riotous behaviour, but four were sentenced to nine
months in jail.
The Chinese had some difficulty in identifying their white assailants, but it was established that
the riot arose from an initial (and not unprovoked) assault by two Chinamen on Hughes. A
petition was organised by 24 Crocodile diggers protesting at the severity of the nine-month
sentences. It was ignored by the Queensland government, who also refused to consider a claim
for compensation by the Chinese whose properties had been destroyed. However, the local
authorities were concerned about 'the strong Irish Mob determined on annoying the Chinese'
and in due course a sergeant and two constables, equipped with an iron watch-house, were
despatched to Crocodile Creek.
By 1884, when John Honeycombe's family took up residence at Three Mile Creek, many of the
fossickers had dispersed, although the hardier diggers still toiled away, encouraged by the
recent finds, in 1882, at Mt Morgan, 38km south-west of Rockhampton. First a gold and then a
copper mine, Mt Morgan would become the most significant and richest of the many mines in
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