There’s a cemetery near my house. Not one of the new-school lawn cemeteries, with manicured grass and brass plaques set in concrete, but an old cemetery. The kind of cemetery where the graves have pointy metal fences around them and the markings on the tombstones wore away long ago.
It looks particularly nice at sunset, so I decided to go for a walk.
The cemetery was built on some sort of marsh, with a creek running through it. The creek had turned into a torrent during the summer floods and graves were disappearing into it as a result. Very creepy.
I did a bit of a Google search and found out that there has always been a stream running through that bit of land and the founding fathers of Rockhampton decided to put a cemetery there anyway. Clearly the Europen idea of a creek was quite different to the reality of an Aussie creek - the poor buggers probably thought it’d be a nice garden-esque touch. They weren’t very good at finding suitable cemetery sites - their first cemetery got washed away in the summer rains, bodies and all.
So, if I could give one tip to the Rockhamptonites of days gone by?
Don’t purchase a plot in the lower south end of the cemetery. Oh, and fork out extra for the marble tombstone. Sandstone just doesn’t cut it with Queensland’s weather.
