These tombstones are in a grown-over graveyard in Parramatta, and are some of the oldest in Sydney. The park is protected by council now as native herbs and reeds have taken it back . Seeing those tombs made me sad, not because their names have faded and grass now threatens to swallow them up, just the thought that we continue to mourn them at all.
When white Australian’s grieve it is always for someone else’s history, for some false thing that exists in the space between myth and memory. Why is it so hard to mourn our own violence? Still so unspoken and unacknowledged that it threatens to dissipate. I’ve been thinking about how the land must have a memory and that memory wouldn’t fade, not like the names that have faded long ago on those graves.
That Nowhere Feeling 