Recently, while photographing in Wollongong Cemetery, I met a woman who used to be in the ‘industry’ and we started talking. As an ex-funeral director, she pointed out those she’d put in here: one over there, a couple further back. Even family members, a cousin, an uncle by the fence. Not her husband though, he’s buried elsewhere.

Since he’d passed, she’s been touring the country with her friend looking at cemeteries. I asked what she was searching for but all she said was, ‘I just like them, they’re peaceful.’ They’ve even visited Western Australian graveyards, tooling across the Nullarbor in their Daihatsu hatchback with purple wire wheels. 

          Graves, grandiose black
          marble and a patch of lawn 
          for the stillborn babes.

Originally established on the outskirts, over the last hundred years the city has grown to surround the cemetery. Light industry on one side, housing and a high school on the other; it takes effort to block out road noise and the clanking of a backhoe being unloaded.

          Flowers and tended plots 
          then Ryan’s pine cross—ten years
          and still no headstone.

We talk about masonry styles, urns and torches, the broken column of a life cut short. She points to the earliest part of the cemetery dating back to the 1850s, now an enclave behind the courier depot and the indoor sports centre. Aside from the trees, we’re the only ones breathing in all this crowd. 

          I have no graves 
          Dad’s ashes off Fremantle
          a bloom in deep water.

Image: the old section of Wollongong Cemetery. I hope you like the reading of this piece.

And for music this morning here’s Irish folk/country singer Brigid Mae Power with her song I’ll wait outside for you (Youtube) from her new album Dream from the Deep Well.