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by about 400 guests. For a year later he is mentioned in an electoral roll for 1904 as working
for the Hannans Proprietary Development Company as an engine-driver (mining engineer) on
lease No 201. Hannans PD was not in the top fifteen of gold-producing companies, which were
dominated by those mining leases at Great Boulder, Brown Hill, Ivanhoe and Lake View. The
top company in 1903 was in fact Golden Horseshoe Estates, which produced over 222,600
ounces of gold from its six leases. Nonetheless, Hannans PD had eight leases, scattered down
the east side of the Boulder Road.
How did John Honeycombe come to be there? And when did he make the exhausting journey,
by sea and by train, from Melbourne to Albany, Esperance or Fremantle, and thence to
Kalgoorlie?
He could have been in the Coolgardie - Kalgoorlie area as early as 1897, the year his name is
last noted in Charters Towers. But whether it was in 1897 or a few years later, John came to
Kalgoorlie when the town's glittering fame reached its height. He achieved neither fame nor
fortune, but still pursued them both, still drawn in his late fifties to wherever gold-fever was the
most intense, to where there was plenty of work, and where his dreams might still come true.
A young Anglican priest, the Rev Edward Collick, arrived in Kalgoorlie a few years after John.
Born in 1868 in Hoxton in the East End of London, he ran a boy's club there before being sent
as a missionary, aged 26, to Western Australia. The story is told that in order to acquire a
congregation in Coolgardie, he went to Pierce's Athletic Hall on a Sunday morning and took on
the local boxing champion, on the condition that if he won, all of Pierce's customers would
attend his church. He did - and they did. In 1905 Collick came to Kalgoorlie, where, as the
town's rector, he also cared for the aborigines, arranging most famously a 'blackfellows' feast'
every Christmas, at the church hall in Brookman Street. There they were served by some of the
white townspeople and given food, tea, ginger beer and some clothing. This was followed by an
aboriginal sporting gathering, when races were run, spears and boomerangs thrown.
Collick was appointed Archdeacon of the Goldfields in 1912. He also served as a chaplain in
the Boer War, and with the AIF in Egypt and France during the First World War.
One day he would bury John Honeycombe.
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31 Wt Golden Sunset
John Honeycombe was in Kalgoorlie from 1903 (at least) until 1907, when he became a mine
manager, for the last time, at the small Yundamindra mine in the Mt Margaret gold-field, east of
Kookynie. A year later, he was an engine-driver again, at the Jacoletti mine at Marvel Loch,
south of Southern Cross. In 1909 he was back at Yundamindra, working as a miner once again.
During these five years the sought-after ore in gold-fields around Coolgardie petered out and
the town declined. So did Menzies after 1905. Kookynie, some 70km northeast of Menzies,
was a busy mining town in 1905 (population, 1,500), with six hotels, public baths, street-lights,
a brewery, and a local newspaper. But two years later the gold ore gave out there; the town
disintergrated and died. As did Kanowna, 22km northeast of Kalgoorlie, which in 1905 had a
large population of 12,000, with 16 hotels, many churches and an hourly train service to
Kalgoorlie. Now nothing remains, except a station platform, signs indicating where streets and
buildings once existed, two cemeteries, and a cairn commemorating the discovery of gold there
in 1893.
Most of the gold-fields were in various stages of decay after 1905, although some like Marvel
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