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him in March 1864 and took him south, manacled and chained. He was sentenced to 32 years
hard labour, but was deported ten years later to Hong Kong and reportedly died in San
Francisco in a saloon brawl. The fate of Kitty Brown is not known.
Meanwhile, Peter McDonald had begun to dispossess himself of his hugely unmanageable and
unproductive domains. In the latter half of the 1860's, he sold off various leases, block by
block, retaining only Fernlees and Columbra. However, he continued to renew the
Honeycombe lease annually until 1869, when he was granted a lease on the property for 21
years (from 1 July 1869) at an annual rent of £27.10.0. But for some reason the following year
he forfeited the lease, and its unexpired term was eventually sold at auction in September 1876,
when it was bought at a rent of £15 per year, by a member of another Scottish family, Lawrie
McLennan.
The McLennans held the lease until 1885, when it was put in the names of Messrs Charleson
and McLennan as executors of the late Duncan McLennan. A brother of Lawrie, he had
occupied Ingle Downs in 1875, and after his death, in 1889, Honeycombe was incorporated in
one vast estate called Ingle Downs, which covered 91 square miles and included the adjacent
properties of Gordon, Goombleburra, Rockvale, Lorraine and the original Ingle Downs. In this
consolidation 53 square miles were also taken back by the government.
The isolation of those of the McLennan family who occupied Honeycombe in the 1890's was
virtually complete. They were hemmed in by the river to the north and west and in any
emergency there was no medical or other help at hand. But although they might fear accidents of
any sort, they had no reason to fear their fellow men: the last of the professional bushrangers,
Captain Thunderbolt (prison-escaper Frederick Ward) was shot and killed in New South
Wales in 1870; and the robber and murderer, Ned Kelly, was hanged ten years later at the age
of 26. Nor had any atrocity as terrible as the Hornet Bank Massacre been committed by
aborigines since 1857 - although the murder and rape of aborigines by whites still occurred in
the more remote regions of the bush.
Hornet Bank was an outback station and sheep-farming property near the Dawson River in
Queensland, west or Taroom. One night, a band of about 100 aborigines surrounded the station
bent on revenging the rape of their women by farm-workers and the shooting of their men. Mrs
Martha Fraser, aged 43, her eight children, their tutor and four shepherds were all asleep: the
other menfolk were out in the bush. At dawn the tribesmen attacked: Martha Fraser and her
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two eldest daughters were raped and then murdered; three of her sons were clubbed to death.
All the others were killed except for 14-year-old Sylvester Fraser, who escaped and raised the
alarm. Every aborigine in the Dawson River area was hunted down after that. The Frasers'
eldest son, Billy, who, being absent, survived the massacre, spent the next year in unremitting
revenge, roaming the bush, shooting every aborigine he found. It is believed he killed over 100.
Many years later, it was vengeance aroused by racial hatred that led to the massacre of the
Mawbey family in July 1900, and sent Shockwaves of fear across outback Australia. In New
South Wales, where the murders occurred, women and children from isolated homesteads were
brought into towns for protection; men went about armed; outback stations were guarded; and
for 99 days over 2,000 mounted police and civilians hunted the killers, Jimmy and Joe
Governor.
Both were in their early twenties; their father was white, their mother black, as they were. Jimmy
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