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aborigines had rescued him and kept him alive.
Another expedition leader, John McKinlay, of Adelaide, reported to the authorities on his return
that there were 'magnificent pastures' near the Cloncurry River, and copper ore. A third
expedition, led by William Landsborough, also found good grazing land, and it was his
description of them a few years later that inspired a pastoralist named Ernest Henry - they met
at Burketown, where Landsborough was the police magistrate - to seek these pastures and
claim them as his own.
It was Ernest Henry who blazed the particular trail to Cloncurry that Sugar Honeycombe and
many more would follow a generation later, a trail that would lead eventually to Mt Isa.
Ernest Henry had served as an ensign in the Crimean War. Arriving in Melbourne in 1858, he
moved north to Moreton Bay, which had been established in 1824 as a penal settlement by the
then Governor of New South Wales, Sir Thomas Brisbane. The settlement was abandoned 15
years later and reestablished up-river, where it took the name of the river that flowed past it,
Brisbane. The first emigrant ship arrived there in 1848, and 11 years later the hinterland to the
north and west was separated from New South Wales and designated Queensland.
In this year that the state was born, 1859, Ernest Henry took part in an expedition of
exploration up the Burdekin River from Townsville; and over the next four years he bought up
three great tracts of land, the last a property far to the west of the Burdekin, which he named
Hughenden. All three stations failed for various reasons, and Henry sold up and moved on,
looking for minerals now as much as good pastures. Then he happened to meet Landsborough
in Burketown, an isolated community on the edge of the Gulf, and resolved to investigate the
alleged potential of the country by the Cloncurry River, some 400km to the south.
In July 1866, Henry and his partner, Roger Sheaffe, set out, and in October they reached an
isolated rocky hill on the river which Henry named Fort Constantine after a fort of that name in
Sebastopol in the Crimea. Venturing upstream for several miles, he found what he thought was a
copper mountain by the river - Black Mountain. But the two hundred-weight of ore that he
diligently dug out and sent on a dray to Clermont for assay, turned out to be silicated iron.
Undeterred, he returned to the area the following year, and in May 1867 he found the real stuff,
on a grassy rise across the river from Black Mountain. Pushing aside the turpentine bushes, he
saw an outcrop of gossan. On chipping the rock he disclosed some thin red veins of native
copper.
This became the Great Australia Mine, great in name only, as its output was never large; greater
were the handicaps of working there, of heat, dust,
337
37 9 Townsville and Ayr
This history now returns to Bill's widow, Esther Honeycombe, who moved from Charters
Towers to Ayr in 1913, establishing a little business, a tiny store, near the railway line, and in so
doing changed the uncertain fortunes of the Queensland Honeycombes and the lives of all her
children and their heirs.
As Mabel Kettle put it, talking of a time when she was six and Esther was newly widowed (Bill
had died of phthisis in March 1911 on a train): 'She was still living at Mt Leyshon, and when he
died she used to come into Charters Towers once a week and sell eggs and home-made bread
which she baked herself - all for a living , as she had four children to rear. She often used to
take me back with her to Mt Leyshon when she had finished delivering her eggs and bread...
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