A warning to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people; this article contains references to people who have died.
I love walking through cemeteries. I love to read the gravestones. They are like the first and last page of a novel whose contents I will never know. Here lies many from my community; they were born, lived, and then lost. They were loved. This evening I am walking with my 11-year-old daughter and my husband through Mullumbimby’s cemetery. It is a quiet and beautiful place. I feel the stories rumbling under our feet. I never understand why people see these places as creepy. They are places of reverence and remembering. They remind us of our transience. It’s the small graves that hurt the most. We see the grave of a baby girl who lived and died 100 years ago. One year and nine months. Another, only seven months. For an instant, when I read their names, I feel the pang of the loss travel across the decades. Then I see his grave; my friend Bob Morgan has told me abo