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hotel in the town; he had also collected photographs of every establishment and was in the
process of sorting them out. I saw where the soap factory had once stood, and took a photo of
the Flying Doctors' memorial; their base had long ago been transferred to Mt Isa and Flynn's
monument to the Shire Hall.
Colin Dawes, timber merchant, coffin-maker and undertaker, produced and old Funeral
register; he had buried Sugar.
It said that F Doyle S Co had arranged the funeral, that Lawrence Sydney Honeycombe had
died on 6 June 1962 and was buried the following day. He was described as single, aged 75
years (this was wrong - he was 74), and his late residence was given as Scarr Street. There was
a blank opposite Next of Kin.
However, one of his relatives happened to be in Cloncurry and could have filled in the blank.
Lawrie's nephew, Bob, was assistant stationmaster in Cloncurry at the time. A week before his
55th birthday Bob attended the funeral of his uncle, whom he had only met about four or five
times. The time of the funeral was 4.0 pm, and the grave's number was documented as 2076.
The total cost of the funeral, including the coffin, was £61.7.0. The account was sent to Mrs
Rees.
She and her daughter, Gwen Black, had put an announcement in the Mt Isa Mail; it appeared
on 15 June and read: 'Thanks: We wish to thank doctors, nursing and domestic staff at the
Cloncurry Base Hospital and all those who sent messages of sympathy, in respect of our dear
departed friend, Lawrence Sydney Honeycombe.'
'He was a cranky old bastard', said Colin Dawes, adding that Sugar 'wore glasses at the finish,
half glasses, and had lost his hair.' He also, said Col, used a Maurel and McKenzie cigarette-
holder, made of plastic and briar.
355
Col took me out to the back yard and showed me the ancient hearse, a Fiat 110, that had been
in use since 1919 and is which Lawrie had lain. 'He was 5 feet 7,' said Col, as if it were
yesterday. 'And weighed 11 stone'. Funerals he said, were generally held between 3 and 4 in
the afternoon, and as the hearse was driven through the town, shops would shut and men would
doff their hats. That's how it had been with Lawrie.
Col drove me out to the cemetery in a blue Rolls Royce, a 1969 Silver Shadow, a superb but
incongruous object in the Curry, with a kangaroo fender marring its noble prow. The cemetery
was devoid of trees, flat and tidy, the gravestones few and lowly. Bare patches of red-brown
earth showed here and there, swept clean by recent heavy rain, which had elsewhere caused
sudden effusions of green grass and young spinifex. On one such brown bare patch lay a broken
trefoil spike, numbered 2076.
There was nothing to say and nothing to do, except to stick the marker upright in the ground.
We returned to the Rolls Royce.
It was almost 100 years since Lawrie's birth in April, 1888. As I sat in the Rolls I thought of the
old man in the granny flat, the wooing of Amy Rees, of the haphazard search for uranium and
gold, of the cards, the horses, the soap factory and the Royal, of Gwen and Lily, and of the
Naughtons and Charters Towers, of the cane-fields of McDesme, and of Lawrie's childhood in
Crocodile Creek. But I saw him most strongly in his youth, playing football: winning, not losing,
with the sun on his neat and smiling face, and joy in his heart.
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