This was the post I wasn't able to put up on Saturday evening. Hopefully it'll work now!
Stephen
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Hi everyone,
I'm starting this entry before Joni and the girls come online. It's Saturday evening, and this will be the skype we would have done yesterday but for Joni needing to work yesterday.
It's been a day of observing the guides to life recommended by this guy -
Specifically, that scene in "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" where he goes through the library on a motorcycle, taking time to remind a student that to be an archaeologist, one really needs to get out of the library. Anyway, I was out of ideas for my next historical article and so I decided to go look at the Melbourne General Cemetery and see if that handed me any inspiration. The plan I had was as vague as this: I'd heard that a veteran of the American Civil War is buried there, so without knowing so much as what name to look for, I decided to wander round looking for it until I found it, or gave up, or found something of comparable potential interest.
I should say that, despite the subjects of most of historical writing I've been doing lately, I'm not particularly fixated on military history. My focus at University was actually on cultural and religious history and that remains my core interest. But as I'm trying to write things that newspapers hither and yon (chiefly yon) might want to print, it makes sense to write things the punters might read. And the fact of the matter is a lot of folks do seem to be interested in the history of conflicts past.
I should also add that there was a fairly deliberate decision about going to the Cemetery. When I was going through a rough time earlier this year, I decided to get my head as far away from matters macabre as I could. So, I boxed up and put away the books I have on the death penalty and the like, and made a point of not passing through or by the cemetery on my various walks. Going there today was a fairly strong decision.
Melbourne General Cemetery is one of the oldest still-functioning bits of the city. It's been accepting burials since the 1850s, which in terms of operational life would put it up there with the Queen Victoria Market and the Duke of Wellington Hotel. As cemeteries go it's a bit of a shambles. Most of the pathways among the graves are broken up and uneven, and many of the trees are overgrown. And a lot of the graves have fallen into serious disrepair. On the other hand, the shambles has it's upside. Because it's so crowded, the denominational boundaries seem to be pretty porous: you see Jews rubbing headstones with Presbyterians, Catholics jostling for space with Anglicans, and Adventists quietly sleeping alonside Greek Orthodox.
The headstones were, as always, an interesting look into the mentalities of the past. Sometimes they were quietly heartbreaking (a 14 y.o. boy who died of injuries in an accident in the government printing office before World War One, or a husband who drowned when the barque Ann was involved in a collision off the coast of New South Wales, or a young nurse, Charlotte Smith, who had come out from England and died at the Melbourne Hospital, with not family here to bury her.).
Some were historically surprising, like the grave of a veteran of some of the worst fighting of the Napoleonic Wars
Sometimes they hinted at things that clearly meant something at the time, but that have long since faded from memory (for example, so-and-so dying in "the Sunshine disaster").
There were also a few things I wasn't expecting, like the monument to Jewish servicemen giving the dates by both Christian and Jewish reckoning.
And now and again, one that was inappropriately comical (a fellow said to have drowned when his boat sprang a leak in Hobson's Bay - sorry, no photo).
I stopped trekking around the cemetery and had my sandwiches and kept walking. I was pretty close to giving in when I came upon this marker -
Yep, the grave I'd been looking for! I was pretty pleased, and took pictures and transcribed the marker. It then occurred to me that I could value-add any writing I might do about it by finding out something about this fellow's life here. I got a tram down to the State Library and began to explore their genealogical centre. I'd never used it before, but they had an astonishing amount of material on microfilm. Within a few hours, I'd found out where this fellow lived and what his job was, I'd established that at some stage he was naturalised as a British subject, and found out the names of his parents. He appears to have had a son. The son doesn't show up in the First World War nominal rolls, which was a shame as any service records would have told us much about his parents. I couldn't find his naturalization certificate, although it's difficult to find them without knowing when he was natutralised (it'd involve going through a couple of thousand certificates one by one). One thing I was surprised by when I was looking at naturalization certificates was that, for what's supposed to be a legendarily racist period in Australia's history, there were dozens of certificates of naturalization granted to people with Chinese names who signed their names with Chinese characters. I genuinely didn't expect to see that. There'd be a good MA thesis in that for someone!
6:00pm rolled around and the Library closed. I came back here and went and got some groceries, then came back and cooked dinner. I came up here then, read a little, and then skyped with Joni and the girls. It was a difficult skype. The connection was awful and the pictures at both ends kept dropping out. Still, it's a long way better than nothing. Grace was her usual extroverted self. Her favourite toy is a little pony, and she's learned to sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". And she loves calling me Dad, which of course I can't hear her say enough, even when she's saying "silly Dad" and "bye bye Dad". That's pretty awesome. And Rachel is still very much the quiet achiever. She glanced at the screen now and again, but mostly she was playing with what looked like two forks in a way that suggested she saw a way of nutting out string theory with them. I'm certain that when she gets her first cell phone, she'll be the only girl in her class to have NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on speed dial ("Yeah, this neutron emission drive I read about in the paper? I think you're doing it wrong").
Seeing my little family this evening really was what the doctor ordered. Walking through the cemetery today had kind of made me feel a long way from my family, and the miles were hanging heavy on my mind, so seeing them was just what I needed.
Not sure what tomorrow will be. The office I guess. We'll see. Anyway, it's 12:45am now, so it's bedtime. Hope all your days are going well too.
Be happy.
See you tomorrow.
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