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children, the youngest of whom was 29, and by their wives and husbands and the 14
Honeycombe grandchildren, the latest being Lilian, third child of Richard the younger. When
Willie and young Bob left Melbourne they were not to know that they would never return, and
never see their cousins again.
So John and his sons returned to Queensland, and Willie to the mines. Bob would follow him
thither a year or so later.
John, we know, was back working in Charters Towers in 1895, as a record exists of him being
the manager of the Stockholm Mining Company in that year, a post he held for about twelve
months. He then spent some months in 1896 as the manager of the Livingston Mining Company,
an adjacent mine, until he returned to the Stockholm, working there until 1897.
The Stockholm mine was seven kilometres southwest of town, not far from the Black Jack
mine. The temperature there, as in Charters Towers, would veer between 30 and 40 degrees in
the arid Queensland summer. At other times the skies would be rent by colossal thunderstorms;
flood-waters would surge down dried-up creeks; occasionally bush fires scoured the land. Flies
and mosquitos were a plague, although they would find little nourishment in the tanned,
thickened skin of the faces and hands protruding from the coarse clothes worn by the
overdressed miners' families. How inured these people must have been to discomfort of all
sorts, magnified for the men below ground by the choking dust and sweating, lamp-lit darkness
of the holes they dug in the ground. No ice-cold drinks awaited their twilight return to their
airless, dusty, fly-blown huts -just tea and beer and a smoke, and a plate of stew.
John's second son, Bob, would eventually find work in the Stockholm, and Willie probably
went to work in the Black Jack mine on returning to Charters
Towers from Geelong. Both mines had been opened up by Black Jack Thomas, one of whose
daughters Bob would one day wed.
Over 100 mines were then in operation around Charters Towers, with about 25 batteries
crushing the ore. The output from these mines reached a peak of production in 1899, when over
300,000 ounces were produced, worth well over 3 million Australian dollars. The mine with the
biggest output was the combined Day Dawn Block and Wyndham, worked without a break
from 1883 to 1912. Fortunes were made, but not those of the Honeycombes.
During this period, John Honeycombs, although he worked out of town, lived in some comfort
on his own, not like his two teenage eldest sons, who probably boarded, if not with their
mother, with families or in bachelor quarters near the mines where they were employed. John,
after all, was a mining manager, and in 1895 he is recorded as living in Hackett Terrace in the
Towers. In 1896 he was in Maloney Street, in what seems to have been a boarding-house
occupied by single men. But he seems to have left Charters Towers early in 1897, as by 20
March 1897 his name disappears form the electoral roll.
His daughter, Annie, who was born in February 1891, would say many years later that she
could never remember seeing her father. If this is true, the family crisis in 1893-94 must have
been severe and the division of the family complete.
Where was Mary Honeycombe during these years? Where were their children? One imagines
that the four youngest - Jenny (who was ten in 1895), Lawrie, Annie and Ellen (who was two) -
were living with their mother. Bob may have been with her as well. If so, despite what payments
John may have made for their upkeep, Mary must have had a fairly difficult time. She probably
took a job as a cleaner or as a domestic in some rowdy hotel, reverting to the kind of
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