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Governor, a tracker and farm labourer, had a 17-year-old wife and child. She was white, and
subject to more contempt and derision than her husband. This reached fever pitch in Governor's
mind after several months of working for a settler, John Mawbey, at Breelong. He protested
bitterly to Mawbey about various insults and injustices - as his young wife did to him. Much
provoked by her scorn and his humiliation by the whites, he visited the homestead on the night
of 20 July with a simple-minded aboriginal friend, Jacky Underwood. The three men in the
family were spending the night elsewhere. A brief altercation at the front door between Jimmy
Governor, Mrs Mawbey and a young schoolteacher, Helen Kerz, ended with the latter saying:
'You black rubbish! You ought to be shot for marrying a white women.' Governor exploded.
He exhorted Underwood to 'bash their brain out!'. Four of the women of the household were
attacked and killed by club and tomahawk, as well as Percy Mawbey, aged 14. Mrs Mawbey's
18-year-old sister was seriously injured, but four younger children in the house, all boys, were
left alone.
The manhunt that ensued became the biggest in Australian history. During it Jimmy Governor
and his brother settled other old scores by killing two 70-year-old farmers, a pregnant mother
and her year-old son and by raping a 15-year-old girl. Jacky Underwood was soon caught and
hanged. But it was not until 31 October that Joe Governor was surprised and shot by a grazier
near Singleton, four days after Jimmy Governor was captured. He was hanged in January 1901,
eighteen days after the foundation of the Commonwealth of Australia, and four days before the
death of Queen Victoria. But neither of these historic events, nor the Boer War, nor the Boxer
Rebellion in China, could have had such an impact on the McLennans of Honeycombe, and on
every family immured in their lonely outback homes, as the Governor murders.
The actual and dire impact of several seasons of drought hit the Mackenzie River properties
hardest in 1902, when Honeycombe was held by Alexander, William, James and Mary
McLennan. At least half of their cattle, as
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elsewhere, perished. Then James McLennan died in an accident in 1905, and Ingle Downs was
broken up and in due course Honeycombe was sold.
By then the property extended north and south between the adjacent properties, or 'runs', of
Jellinbah to the west, and Leura. To the north lay Junes, and to the south Tryphinia, which in
1900 was owned by a German, Heinrich Bauman.
Arriving in Australia in 1854 - the same year that the explorer, Ludwig Leichhardt, named the
Dawson and Mackenzie rivers - Bauman had married an Irish girl, and after working for the
Dutton brothers of Bauhinia Downs, he had set up in business as a carrier, operating between
Rockhampton and the west. The Baumans had a block on the Dawson River, but after being
flooded out moved with their five sons and one daughter to Tryphinia on Dingo Creek. It was a
sheep and cattle property, but by 1903 the sheep and been phased out. The previous year, half
of the 7,000 cattle on the property had perished in a drought; other droughts had depleted
livestock in 1884 and 1897.
One of the Bauman sons, Henry, whose early life was spent among his father's cattle and
horses, once took over a thousand head of cattle from Tryphinia to Musselbrook in New South
Wales. In 1890 he married a Miss Tierney of Rockhampton (they had six children, including five
sons) and built what became the family home, Tryphinia View.
In 1908, Henry Bauman and his brother William bought Honeycombe, thus increasing the
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