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bottle of beer. Feeling it he said: "It's pretty cold." Steve laughed. "It's probably just off the
boil"...
'I poured a glass, and thought Steve wasn't far wrong. Before I'd drunk half, flies started to
drop into the glass; and as fast as I fished them out, more dropped in. One of the men said:
"You're better off drinking rum. They're not so keen on rum... It's not as if they were real bad
this time of the year"...
'The man on the bench gave an explosive cough and flies shot out of his mouth like tiny black
cannonballs...
'They talked of nothing but cattle, horses, the tremendous cattle runs. Anything less than 5,000
square miles hardly got a mention. Alexandria Station was 10,000 square miles... Victoria River
Downs was 13,000 square miles-slightly larger than Belgium!
'They talked of Western Queensland, the Northern Territory and the Kimberleys in Western
Australia as though they were their back yards... They spoke of droving trips with a thousand
bullocks, 1,500 miles from start to finish, six months on the road, bores broken down and
waterholes a caked claypan -three and four days without water, and not loosing a beast. They
talked of floods, raging bushfires, cattle stampeding at night and horsemen falling in the lead of
galloping bullocks...
'The afternoon drifted by, and then the blessed relief of night. Suddenly there were no flies.'
347
The next day Tom Cole went west, leaving Cloncurry to Lawrie Honeycombe and the flies.
It was about this time that Lawrie owned or managed a soap factory. Possibly he used his Mt
Isa earnings to buy into a business or set it up. The factory was situated on the corner of Station
Street and Ham Street. Across the road was the Cloncurry/Kajabbi railway-line. Lawrie had a
partner called Paddy Mow. It was not a fortunate entreprise. In 1925 a cyclone struck the
town. The soap factory was damaged, presumably, like other buildings: the Methodist Church,
for instance, transported eight years earlier from Townsville, was blown down and the new
parsonage wrecked; the wooden grandstand at the racecourse was also destroyed.
Before long there was a disagreement and Paddy Mow walked out. Some mishap or lack of
supervision resulted in a seething soap vat boiling over and filling the gutters in the street with
molten soap, where it solidified and provided soap free for all. The soap factory business fell
apart.
No doubt this made the customers in hotel bars fall about: here was another jokey tale to be
told at Lawrie's expense. But it meant that he was in financial difficulties once again. He had to
find another job, something that was becoming increasingly difficult. He was probably in debt.
Nonetheless, in association with Fred Anios and Frank McNally, he acquired a share in another
mining lease (No 3056), in the parish of Knapdale, in January 1926. The yearly rent was
£2.10.0, and the minerals to be mined this time in the five-acre plot were copper and cobalt.
How long this venture lasted we do not know. But before long Sugar Honeycombe was back in
the Curry. His next entreprise was the most enduring. From about 1927 to 1936 he made use
of the skills he learned as a boy while lodging with the Naughtons in Charters Towers: he
became a baker.
One of the earliest bakers in the Cloncurry had been a storekeeper, Georgie Young, who also
ran a Chinese boarding-house. Another baker later on was a character called, appropriately,
Ah Fat. Perhaps Lawrie took over a business previously run by someone else and kept it going
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