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JViiv and Vanaia llonryrombt: wilh A ItylU26Jl9!6
David Hone>coml«r, First Qjftcei: QtinWs, J995.
Epilogue
In 1979 the Australian government launched a campaign to promote participation in sporting
and recreational activities. The slogan for the campaign was: Life. Be in it. Such could be the
motto of this book - a maxim that Chris Honeycombe, and Bill Clemenoe, would surely have
endorsed.
Other messages emerge from this story, from the passing, flickering images of other people's
lives. You see how hard work gives people a mental as well as a physical strength, and how
much in the way of poverty and tough circumstances can be endured without debasement and
despair. You see the supportive worth of family ties, the benefits of travel, a full education, and
a safe haven at home. You see how change, and chance, have the most major effect on
everyone, and that change especially, whether caused by birth, marriage or death, or by a
change of occupation or domicile, can be a positive force, an advancement for the good.
What strikes me most about this story of passing generations is that there would be no story
were it not for procreation and creation. Sons are needed to carry on the family name, and pens
are needed to tell their story. If there were neither, we would cease to exist.
If records had not been kept - and it is the triumph of bureaucracy that they were, that any
information was ever recorded and remains for us to find -and if I had not unearthed William the
stonemason, his wife and children, no one now would have known about them - it would have
been as if they had never lived. They were unknown until now to all the Honeycombes alive
today, their names, their existence, obliterated by the passage of time. And within four
generations we ourselves will be forgotten, unless we have sons to perpetuate our kind and
name, or create something special, whether a building, a bridge, a book, or become someone
special, or discover something new.
In reviving these family connections we provide ourselves with a kind of immortality, perhaps
the only immortality there is. For by resurrecting the lives of those who have gone before, by
recording them as a family tree, we acquire a continuity that reaches back through time, over
hundreds of years. And it reaches forwards too, if the process is maintained. By connecting past
lives with present ones, we provide them with an abiding history and ourselves with a heritage.
But who of all the descendants of William the stonemason, who came to Australia in 1850, will
pass on the name and the knowledge, the genetic inheritance, of those who have gone before?
As some lines have by now died out, the male descent can only continue in Australia through the
sons of Alan and John and Lloyd.
Lloyd's two sons, Andrew and Paul, have so far produced only daughters; they may have no
more offspring or any sons of their own. John's three boys,
494
David, Peter and Rob, are married (or about to be so) and Peter has had a son, Adam, born in
1995. So the line seems certain to continue through them.
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