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future site of Townsville. Many miles further on, and after rounding the continent's northern tip,
Cape York, he landed on an insignificant desert island and, raising the Union Jack, declared the
whole length of eastern Australia to be a British possession.
That was on 22 August 1770. But nearly 70 years would pass before any naval personages
actually landed on the Burdekin coast. Meanwhile, Matthew Flinders, in 1802, had meticulously
explored and surveyed the adjacent waters and the Great Barrier Reef, as had Philip King, son
of the Governor of New South Wales, in 1821. But neither, being single-minded surveyors of
coastlines, reefs and islands, came ashore.
The first sea-captain to do so, while wintering in these waters, was John Wickham, the former
second-in-command of the Beagle (when Charles Darwin was the naturalist on board) and now
its captain. In June 1839 he and his crew landed at Cape Upstart, and a few days later found
the wide but shallow sandbank-islanded entrance of a large river, the Burdekin. The interior,
however, was not explored until 1843, when the crew of a corvette called Fly, commanded by
Captain Blackwood, spent several weeks in the area, observing the abundant animal, bird (and
insect) life and making friends with local aborigines. At one point they sailed up the river and
walked inland, exploring within a few kilometres of McDesme and Ayr.
Two years later the upper reaches of the Burdekin were sighted by Ludwig Leichhardt and his
companions on their long and arduous expedition - it took over a year - from Brisbane to Port
Essington, a military outpost on the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was Leichhardt, a German naturalist,
who gave the Burdekin River its name, so naming it after one of the expedition's sponsors, a
wealthy widow called Mrs Mary Ann Burdekin; her husband had been a London merchant and
ironmonger. On a later expedition in 1848, while attempting to cross Australia from east to
west, Leichhardt and his six companions disappeared somewhere west of Roma; their bodies
were never found.
Another man who disappeared about this time was a young English sailor, James Morrill, whose
ship was wrecked on the Barrier Reef in February 1846. He was ultimately the sole survivor of
seven persons, including the captain and his wife, who drifted for 42 days on a makeshift raft
from the Reef to Cleveland Bay, where they were eventually saved by a group of aborigines and
taken into their tribe. Within two years the six others had died. Morrill lived with the
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38 Honeycombes Ascending
According to Alma, her mother Esther Honeycombe came to Ayr with 25 shillings in her purse.
According to Esther's grandson, Lloyd, the 25 shillings were left to her by her husband when he
died. But Esther was not as poverty-stricken as legend might like. For she earned a little income
from the selling of home-made and home-grown produce; she also had a couple of horses, and
her own home.
After her husband's death, in March 1911, she had refused to accept any charity, dismissing a
proposal from gold-miners who had known Bill, that they would raise some money for her by
making a collection. One of her sisters (or half-sisters, daughters of Annie Chapman) had toiled
as a cleaner in banks and schools, to support her children after their father died. This Esther did
not need to do as she was able to eke out a living by selling eggs and bread and other produce,
coming into Charters Towers once a week from Mt Leyshon, where she and the children lived.
She probably travelled by horse and cart, and sometimes she took Bob Honeycombe senior's
six-year-old daughter, Mabel, with her on her return. She probably also sold other home-made
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