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forehead high, moustache and whiskers no doubt neatly trimmed. And what did Richard see?
Aias, no photos of William Honeycombe have survived.
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12. Family Gathering in Geeiong.
The presence of the Honeycombes in Geeiong and Melbourne - and they have lived in
Melbourne now for more than 150 years - was determined by many things and many people,
long before the family made any decisions of their own.
Although both towns were very new in 1852 and the land around them newly settled, Port
Phillip Bay had been known about for 50 years. Its development as a settlement and then as a
separate colony was due in no small measure to events and persons in Tasmania.
This wooded island, the size of Scotland and with a similar climate, entered European
awareness and maritime history in December 1642, when a Dutch sea-captain, Abel Tasman,
searching for a new route to South America, found an unexpected piece of land. He named it
Van Diemen's Land, in honour of the Governor-General of the Dutch East indies, Anthony Van
Diemen, and before pressing on he claimed the land for Holland.
He thought it was part of the vast unknown continent (Australia) that the Dutch had encountered
sporadically and generally accidentalty from March 1606, mainly in the north and west. They
didn't like what they saw - 'Wild, cruel savages... dark barbarous men' - The most arid and
barren region that would be found anywhere on earth.'
Cape Leeuwin, on the south-west tip of Australia, was sighted and named by the Dutch in
March 1622, a few months before the first English ship sighted the coast. Called the Tryai, she
became the first English shipwreck, striking a reef near the Monte Bello Islands, off Western
Australia. Five years later another Dutch ship ventured along the southern coast of Australia,
between Cape Leeuwin and what is now Streaky Bay, skirting the Nullarbor Plain. But the
south-east corner (Victoria and New South Wales), as well as the long eastern reach of
Queensland, would remain hidden for more than a hundred years.
Australia was very slow to reveal itself. Van Diemen's Land was stil! thought to be part of the
mainland in 1788, and the First Fleet sailed cautiously sour/7 of Tasmania. It was left to George
Bass and Matthew Flinders to prove Bass's theory that Van Diemen's Land was an island (by
sailing around it) and to explore the coast of Victoria in 1798-99. Flinders then went on to
verify that Australia was an island continent, by circumnavigating it in 1801-03.
The discovery of the Bass Strait provided ships bound for Sydney with a short-cut, albeit a
dangerously stormy one. It was traversed by Lt Grant of the Lady Nelson in 1800 - he named
Cape Otway. But the narrow entrance, the Rip, that led to the 30-mile wide inland harbour iater
called Port Phillip Bay, was missed.
It was found and entered by Grant's successor, Lt John Murray RN, early in 1802. He wrote:'A
most noble sheet of water... with many fine coves and entrances in it, and the appearance and
probabilities of rivers.' Lt Murray nosed
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about in the Lady Nelson's launch, exploring the shoreline, eastwards and westwards, as far up
as the future site of Frankston on the eastern shore of the bay and that of Geeiong to the west.
He and his men were the first Europeans to see the western shores of Port Phillip Bay, and to
be seen by the aborigines who dweit around a smaller bay, later called Corio.
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