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tried to get out in mid-air. Trying to restrain her and control the plane, he made a shaky landing,
smashing the plane into the race course rails. No one was injured, and the aircraft was freighted
to Perth, where it gave further demonstrations until the novelty wore off. Before long its makers
were caught up in something else new to Australia-war.
On 28 June 1914, six days after John's 72nd birthday, the Archduke Ferdinand was
assassinanted in Sarajevo: Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia; Germany declared war on
Russia, then against France, and invaded Belgium. Britian declared war on Germany on 4
August.
AB Facey was 20 that August. He was then in Newcastle, boxing as a heavy weight with
Mickey Flynn's Boxing Troupe - 'I had 29 fights and was lucky to win them all'. The boxers
asked Mr Flynn whether they should enlist. He told them: 'Some of you could be ruined for life
by going to war. It is not a picnic. I went through the South African war so I know. Don't any of
you go taking any notice of the government's promises. They will tell your anything to get you
in'. The troupe volunteered to a man. Facey wrote: 'We all felt we should go - we were fit, and
another thing that appealed to us was that we would be travelling overseas and would be able to
see what the other part of the world was like'. Mr Flynn paid their fares back to Western
Australia. 'You boys can have this one all to yourselves', he said. 'I've had all I want of war. I
didn't see much of it, but... it's not pretty. Don't go off thinking you're in for a bit of fun - it's not
like that.'
By the end of September Bert Facey was back in Perth and in training at the military camp at
Blackboy Hill. In February 1915 he sailed for Suez.
The Great War, as most called it then, involved distant nations in cold, strange lands, including
those northern islands that most Australians, like John, still thought of as their mother country.
They rallied to the Union Jack in their thousands: eager to defend the Empire. In doing so the
youth of their own unbloodied nation was unwittingly sacrificed on the muddy altars of foreign
and futile causes. Of the 330,000 like Bert Facey who sailed off to the war so blithely and so
ignorantly, 200,000 became casualties. More than 76,000 died. Australian casualties were the
highest of any country fighting with the British allies in the war - 65 per cent.
Arthur Bennett recalls what happened at the outbreak of war in the small outback gold-mining
town where John Honeycombe lived.
'There was an immediate outburst of patriotic fervour by Kalgoorlie's citizens, keen to see the
Kaiser's armies checked in their march across Europe and forced to make reparation for the
damage they had done. A newspaper report of the time tells of the reaction of a Tivoli Theatre
audience at Kalgoorlie when a comedian broke off his fun-making to announce that a message
had been received that "the Federal Government had offered the Motherland to
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supply 20,000 troops in the present crisis". A tremendous demonstration followed, wiht the
singing of patriotic songs and the National Anthem.'
Bennett describes how life continued normally for a few weeks 'with newspaper advertisements
announcing the forthcoming annual racing carnival, the Benevolent Society's yearly ball, an Irish
National concert, the Athletic Club's Electric Light carnival', and an oration ('Ireland a Nation')
by Hugh Mahon. At the cinema, there was Mary Pickford in Tess of the Storm Country, the
English Pierrots were touring, and the Mines Rovers defeated Railways in the football
premiership, which was played in a blinding dust-storm.'
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