taken too soon

January 2nd 2011

Taken too soon

We are staying in the little mud brick guest house behind B & G’s house, where we often find ourselves at this time of year. I always sleep well here in this womb-like room with walls of earth. I dream of living in an earth house, colours of ochre and clay and rust.

Such a contrast to our rain forest and ocean place of damp greens and blues.

Yesterday G took us - D and me -  for a walk.  This property is 300 sprawling acres, mostly bush. Re-growth eucalypts with rough grey trunks grow out of yellow earth scattered with white pebbles and brown fallen leaves. Hardy little wild flowers flash blue purple and pink among the stubble and shale. Prickles and grass seeds stick to your socks. There is nobody around under the vast ringing silence of the sky . We spot the occasional kangaroo grazing in long grass. 

The topsoil here, once metres deep, was washed away by miners in the gold rush of the 1850’s. The land for miles around is pitted and lumpy  with the remains of their diggings. Every bit of dirt here, says, G, has been disturbed, turned over by humans. There are sunken mines everywhere, mounds of dirt and rubble, channels and ruts in the heavy clay soil. 

Nature is doing her best to re-clad the ravaged land, and in the hundred or so years since the end of the gold rush a forest of sorts has grown back.

It is harsh country, a hard dry place under cloudless skies, hot in summer, cold in winter. This year it’s greener than usual - It rained here last year after ten years of drought. Silver grey leaves shimmer in the cool sunlight. Tree roots grow down deep crevices in the quartz and sandstone reefs.

A cluster of our dearest old friends live here, and its where we’d live too if the climate wasn’t so awful.

Strange to think that this place, now home to a handful of reclusive artists and permaculturists, was a tent city swarming with people scrabbling in the mud, labouring and sweating and freezing and burrowing and jostling and dreaming of  gold, toiling in the hope of riches. 

Often, walking in the bush around here you see a pile of stones, the remains of some old structure - a wall, a house, a storeroom, a chimney.

Yesterday on our walk through the bush  with G, I noticed a clump of stones by the track. It was half covered with weeds and sticks.  I verbalised some vague speculation about long ago times and people who lived here, then D said ‘I think it’s a grave’ 

Yes, a protruding headstone, and a low rectangular wall of rocks around it. Perhaps the grave of a child.  

I squatted by the roughly hewn piece of  local sandstone and cleared away the debris of twigs and leaves. ‘MARY’ had been carved into it. We used  sticks to dig away more dirt, and found the words ‘TAKEN TOO SOON’,  chipped out in neat , slightly irregular letters.

Who was Mary? Probably not from the gold rush era, but from a little later when pioneering settlers ran sheep here.  Back at the house drinking tea round the table we make up stories about hard lives, children dying of typhoid, diphtheria.

Five year old H hears us saying about Mary’s grave that it probably was sad, and H wants to know why and we say well actually all the people who were sad about Mary dying back then would be dead by now so it’s not really sad any more. Or maybe it is? H keeps saying ‘But we aren’t dead’

H & her mum walk up to the grave with us and place a bunch of wildflowers on it. H in her little pink hat, sunlight catching her hair. Was Mary her age when she died? Was it her heartbroken father who chiselled  the rustic gravestone?

We are all somehow touched by the discovery of the grave. Perhaps because it is a reminder of the fleetingness of our own time upon this earth.