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passing. Any flowers were dust long since.
Only an entry in the cemetery's register for burials notes where, in the bitter brown earth, Mary
Honeycombe lies.
251
300 Kalnoorlie
What now of John? There is a gap in his recorded story between 1897, when he was still
manager of the Stockholm mine, and 1904, when he turns up in Western Australia. By then he
was 62. By then both Willie and Bob were married and had already provided him with four
grandchildren.
Where did he go in the missing years? Did he seek out Mary, for the last time? More than likely
he passed once more through Melbourne and Geelong, revisiting his older brother and sister,
Richard and Jane, before turning his face to the golden west, to the last gold-fields found in
Australia, from which he and many others never returned.
The first gold rush in Western Australia centred in 1885 on the Kimberleys, a mountainous
region over 2,000 miles north of Perth. The next major strikes were in 1892 and 1893, at
Coolgardie, 330 miles east of Perth, and at Kalgoorlie, another 25 miles further east. There had
been several other finds. Prospectors had been nosing about the vast trackless interior of
Western Australia since the 1860's, poking about 'for colour'. Not a few had come from other
gold-fields, restless seekers, wanderers, who moved away from diggings when machines moved
in and businessmen took control.
In the wastes of Western Australia they followed in the tracks of surveyors and explorers who
sank wells and charted the tenuous life-line of water-holes, without which no seeker after gold
could exist. Some prospectors never returned, speared by aborigines, or dying of thirst and
fever, their nameless bones marking a luckless claim.
Tales were told of gold found and lost. In pursuit of such stories, several prospectors struck
gold in 1887-88 in the Yilgairn gold field, at Golden Valley, Parker's Range and Southern
Cross, where gold was found on New Year's Day, 1888. But it was a tale told of gold to be
found even further east that lured Arthur Bayley and William Ford from the new mining town of
Southern Cross at the end of 1891.
They had met at the Croydon diggings in northern Queensland back in 1887, Bayley was 22
then, and came from Charters Towers. Did John Honeycombe know of him or his family? If so,
did Bayley's letters home inspire John to seek his fortune, for the last time, in the golden west?
Bayley was 13 years younger than Ford. They had intended waiting at Southern Cross for rains
to replenish the waterholes before setting off. But news of a find at Ullarring drew them thither: it
yielded nothing. They and their horses then moved, slowly, some 120 miles to the south-east, to
the oases of the Gnarlbine Soak, a regular and natural water supply discovered by one of HM
Lefroy's expeditions in 1863. On the way they found a little gold at a place later
called Black Flag, but lack of water prevented any further investigation. However, after two
days of rain at the soak - it was now August - they decided to return to Black Flag.
Some 30 miles south of their destination, as they crossed an area known as Fly Flat, Ford, who
was walking, spotted a gleam of gold and picked up a half ounce nugget. Bayley got off his
horse and they scouted around. Within a few days they had collected about 250 ounces of
alluvial gold, a small fortune. They returned to Southern Cross for food supplies and left almost
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