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must have been his most frequent visitor. No doubt he behaved himself when she called. But a
young nurse, Rose Williams, remembers how anxious he was to place a bet on a horse, perhaps
in the Melbourne Cup. The matron was totally opposed to any betting being done in her
hospital. But Rose Williams did as Sugar wanted, though she couldn't recall whether or not he
won anything.
When the war ended the Americans went home, and the town lapsed into an outback torpor,
induced by the lack of business and visitors and the long hot days, and nights. The greatest
annual activity was in April, on Anzac Day, when two world wars were now commemorated. In
1947 Gwen Rees married Chick Black, an engine-driver, and a young colleague of Lawrie. He
and Amy attended the wedding. Theirs would never take place.
In 1950, Australia went to war again, in South Korea, committed by the newly elected and pro-
imperial Liberal Party under Robert Menzies. National Service followed. By the time the war
ended, in July 1953, some 250 Australian soldiers had been killed.
In April that year Lawrie Honeycombe retired; he was 65. Everest was conquered in May and
in June, in Britain, a Queen was crowned. But no one saw the ceremonies on television in
Australia, where regular TV transmissions would not begin for another three years, and then
only around Sydney and Melbourne. Radio put the outback in contact with the rest of the
nation, but brought it no nearer. To the two thousand people who now lived in the Curry,
Sydney was as unimaginable as London, and as far away; most had never seen the sea.
Then something happened that enlivened the whole community and the last years of Lawrie
Honeycombe's life. Uranium was found at Mt Isa.
It happened in March 1954 at the Royal George copper mine. Mt Isa Mines, which was now
having a bonanza, producing manganese, bismuth, cobalt and limestone in addition to copper,
gold, silver, lead and zinc, made every effort to cash in on this latest discovery, as did hundreds
of amateurs armed with geiger-counters. Once again, prospectors roamed the spinifex, and
before long over 700 claims were registered at the Mining Warden's office in Cloncurry. In July,
extensive uranium deposits were found by Clem Walton and Norm McConnachy near
Rosebud, an abandoned copper mine some 40 miles west of Cloncurry. The find was named
Mary Kathleen, after McConnachy's wife, who had recently died, and was sold for £250,000
to a major Australian company. A British company, Rio Tinto, moved in, a model town was
built, and the new open-cut uranium mine began production, with an official opening by the
Liberal prime minister, Robert Menzies, in October 1957.
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It didn't last. By then, the British had completed their five-year testing of atomic bombs and
weapons on Australian soil and had exploded their first hydrogen bomb (on Christmas Island in
May). Within seven years Rio Tinto's contract with the British Atomic Energy Authority for
uranium oxide worth £40 million had been fulfilled, and by 1974 the thousand strong population
of Mary Kathleen had fallen to 80. It revived, however, when the mine re-opened later that
year.
Back in 1954 Lawrie was among the many who bought geiger-counters and went out looking
for another Mary K. He didn't find one, and the fortune he sought, the lucky strike, continued to
elude him. Sometimes he took with him a younger man, Harry Charles, then in his thirties and a
railway guard. In earlier years, they had gone out together at weekends, looking for gold.
Later that year, in November, a memorial to the Rev John Flynn was erected at Cloncurry
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