OLD GRAVES

Spinifex takes a trip to the cemetery

He'd been wanting to go out there for a while. You pass it every time you shoot off to Eldorado or Mount Samuel or Fazel Dean's original crushing plant, the first in town in 1934, or the old army staging camp from the Second World War further down near Cabbage Tree. Or you're heading off to The Springs to break the casino or let K-Mart break you.
"Let's look at the cemetery, let's look at the cemetery!" He was on about it all the time. "Here," he gushed as we headed out, "pull the cork out of this!"
"What the hell is that?" I wanted to know.
"Well, it's altar wine. I thought it was thoroughly appropriate for the occasion."
He settled back and grinned smugly across at me.
"You can't bring that out here, you dill. This is consecrated ground. No-one but a barbarian would even think of this. Haven't you any self-control? Hilda's out here, she wouldn't like it, and some other very special people, let alone taking into account the religious and sacred nature of the place. Grow a brain, mate!"
He sulked all the way in until we stopped under the trees. Stalking off along a line of graves, he suddenly stopped.
"Look, look," he shouted, "this is special. Come now."
It was special. It read:
In Loving Memory of
Our Friend Tong Chow
died Wauchope mines
15the October 1943
aged 32
It's an elaborate concrete headstone inscripted with Chinese characters, the headstone set uniquely at the western end of the grave. He was an 'asiatic', the term used in all of the early reports about people like this back then, and people didn't give asian people a fair bash at the time, but this bloke's buried and celebrated and completely at rest and at ease in here. He must have been quite a man. Who the hell was he? What was his story? Anyone know anything about him, I wondered?
Boofhead started dashing around. The place is full of history. He knew some of it and it started to give him a fairly serious full frontal.
"Over here. This is almost the oldest. Poor thing, poor thing," he said.
It is. It read:
In Loving Memory of
David Charles O'Grady (Mick)
1919-1936
Now, this is the poor young bugger, feeling totally lost, bereft and alone at a vulnerable age, seventeen years old on an isolated, desolate goldfield, nothing else for it so took his own life. Shot himself. No support systems like today, help someone out, no way out it seems. Better these days but not for him then. One of the first to be placed in here.
"It's not the earliest, you know," I told him. "There's another place, I can't find it yet, out near the race course, on a bit of a rise they say. Marked on a map in 1937 it says 'Three men buried here'. And one of them is Mick O'Brien, shot in that incident I told you about, way back in 1934. This cemetery started about 1935 or 1936."
"Look, just look at it. Unmarked mound after unmarked mound after unmarked mound. Who are they?" He spun around and looked up and down the rows. He was right.
"Someone knows I suppose. They have to."
"You wouldn't know if you're walking on top of someone." He frowned, worried, dancing from foot to foot. He didn't know where to set himself.
"They won't mind."
"You sure?"
"Yeah well, I bloody-well hope so."
"Jeez, all these gravestones, each one of them is a story in itself."
We were looking at one. An early person in town.
"Remember. we didn't start in town till about 1933," I said. "It's like quite a few of these graves. See what they say. They make mention of the early contact, the pride in being a pioneer, being here when it was tough." A bit pompous, but I wasn't sure he knew this.
He sniffed. "Well here you go," he said. "Look at this one: You missed it."
Alice Steers
Aged 85 years
She is far from her land
alone but not forgotten
at peace in a friendly town
"A pioneer?"
"Dunno."
"What date?"
"Doesn't say."
Yeah, a story in itself.
"What about this one?" he wanted to know.
Beryl Renfrey nee Gillies
27-2-1911 - 14-6-83
A true pioneer who came to Tennant Creek in 1938
Never was a needy person turned from her door
She fed those who were hungry
cheered the sad and befriended the lonely
Beryl could turn her hand to any task and was
as strong as ten men as many can attest.
Good food wine and friends were her passion
Lovingly remembered.
The wife of Snowy Renfrey. Where the hell is Snowy buried? His grave isn't here anywhere.
"I don't reckon she'd mind if I sat on the edge of her grave in the shade and took a bit of a spell then."
"Nah, mate, she wouldn't mind, she was apparently a real good stick." A million years ago.
"Someone said she used to have washbasins full of rissoles, feed a few."
"He's not a pioneer!" He wasn't listening, looking around a bit. Here it was:
Robert Watkins (Lofty)
1938 - 1985
Always a smile
Often a song
Oh Lord, it's hard
To be humble
Family and Friends in Tennant Creek
RIP
There's a baseball bat and ball embedded in a very large concrete grave. A very short man, almost a dwarf they said, the most charming friendly smiling bloke, he lived at one of the pubs. A hell of a big grave for a chap.
And this one, a tragic one:
Dr Walter Ferguson Straede
aged 23
and his wife
Vivian Straede
aged 20 years
who perished of exhaustion
on an errand of mercy
on 9 March 1942
"You used to travel, before the bitumen road across to Queensland, on the old stock route through Rockie, Alroy, Ranken, Soudan and Avon to get to there. An old Aboriginal bloke says that on Rockie they turned the wrong way at a bore. He and some other fellows found the car and followed the tracks of the two and then they saw a police car and knew that there was trouble. Found them a bit late, hot time of year, too."
Where the hell did he find that out from?
"Look at these old graves. They were taken care of once, weren't they?" He was looking for reassurance. Scared about his own mortality. "These graves were as elaborate as you could make them here in the Creek back then. Look at that one over there, just a great lump of ironstone with
'Luke Jones 1965'
on it. Just that. And hard to read now. Almost as though someone used whiteout to mark the name."
"Yeah mate. Can't read it almost. Just that. Someone cared thirty years ago, didn't they."
"Does anyone know now, you reckon. Is he forgotten?" He was concerned.
"Dunno."
He paused and walked slowly down to a little pocket of plots at the northern end.
"It's the little ones get me." He looked down at the tiny little patches, funny concrete creations to hold lost dreams.
"Yeah." What more can you say.
He paused in the chat for a few minutes and then started in again. Notions of it getting to him just a bit.
"Tragically killed, tragically killed, tragically killed. Aged 14 years, aged 5 years 3 months, aged 18 years, aged 17 years, aged 4 months 4 days. What the hell happened to them all?"
"It's just culling the herd, mate, just culling the herd. It happens in every community, in every part of the world. Most young 'uns make it, some young 'uns don't. Accidents, sickness, rotten bad luck. It just happens."
"Well, what about this one then," he'd skipped away, gone somewhere else, it's a place where there's a lot happening;
Lest We Forget
1756, Pte SK Vance,
1914-1918 and 1942.
At the going down of the sun
and in the evening,
we shall remember them.
RIP.
May.
"What's so special about that?"
"Well, that number is a really early enlistment number for the first AIF in the First World War. And then of course 1942, well I don't know but Singapore fell in 1942....and if not there, then there was a lot happening over the seas in Europe and Africa about then."
"Well how come he got here? Did he die in Malaya and if he did how come he got here?"
"I don't know, I just don't know."
"Who came to the funeral?"
"Who knows."
"Are they still here?"
"Who knows."
"Do they still care, do they still remember?"
"Who knows."
"They grow them up sometimes you know, even after they've lost them."
"Who does what?"
"My Auntie Glad lost a son, about the same age as me. He was about nine. I hated going over there, she was always comparing me to Trev and talking about what he'd have been doing and how tall he'd have been and all that sort of thing. She never got over it and she lived a sort of fiction. I suppose it helped her cope."
"Forget that. Here's some heroes":
Malachi (Jack) Noble
Born 5-4-1886 - died 2-4-1966
Bushman, Prospector and Gouger
Discoverer of Nobles Nob mine
RIP
Erected by Australian Development No Liability
and this one too:
William Weaber
5-10-1942
Aged 63
Both of them discovered Nobles Nob. One died well before the other, one of them got a big gravestone and all the plaudits. I guessed it paid to die late.
We started back as the sun started to drop behind the hills. A friendly little cemetery, even at night, but time to go.
"Cemetery's looking a bit scrappy."
"Yeah it is, but remember you can't expect to have a lawn cemetery out in the middle of a desert"
"True, mate, but they could at least have a position marker on all the graves and sites. A great idea was brewing. "Do you reckon there's tourist potential in the place?"
"Might be but you'd need an explanatory note or two around the place. There are some real characters and real pioneers in here. You'd want to do them justice. And it would be interesting to know who some of these unmarked mounds are as well."
"Maybe there's a Heritage Grant or something like that around you could use. If it was worth doing. I've always reckoned I'd like to be buried in a nice cemetery that was interesting and pretty."
"You're an idiot, you know. Cemeteries are for the living, not for the dead. But yeah, maybe. Tourism could do well out of this if some of the local history was spelled out."
He looked around, just as he paused at the wall where ashes of past members of our society are preserved. Something was coming.
"What do you reckon, a shrine or something. Something for all the nationalities and that? For all the poor young ones?"
Sun's still too hot for him, even now in the cooler dry season. Gushy and sentimental twerp.
"Catholics, Anglicans, Prots, Orthodox religions, Aboriginal people, Chinese - they're all the same now, mate. Names from all over the world - Imre Rovacsek, Jozsef Finta, Zanga, Ruger. They're all here, properly planted."
He paused reflectively, gazing back through the fading light over the scattered mounds and headstones. These people, done their jobs, lived their lives rich and full.
"And look," he said, "servicemen, miners, mums, dads, young people, babies. Place is full of Aboriginal people too, you know. Like we will be one day. There with them, I mean."
Poor silly bugger. I looked into the Magna. No worries, it was still there.
"Yeah, but not just yet," I said, clambering into the vehicle. "Not for a good while yet anyway. Now get a bloody move on. Open that bottle of altar wine.".