Morgan Avenue, Matraville on Thursday, 15 October 2020

I cannot find Morgan Avenue. I am already at the roundabout at La Perouse where I eat my sandwich, sitting on a bench. It is very windy. I turn the navigator on to find a petrol station and make another attempt to locate this street. It leads me through an area where trucks come thundering out of yards without stopping to look left or right. Finally, the navigator takes me into the Botany Cemetery. From here I can see the bay where Captain Cook first landed in Kamay (Botany Bay) on the fateful day of 29 April 1770.

I find it unsettling to be guided to a street in a graveyard. I used to like cemeteries, reading the inscriptions on the stones and guessing about the lives of the people buried. Today it makes me sad. The inscriptions on the headstones speak of tragedies. Here lies a two-year-old boy and his mother who died only one month later. Somewhere else a young man is dearly missed. I think I am too old to enjoy cemeteries.

A car arrives, and a middle-aged man gets out with a watering can. Most graves here don’t have living plants. I am curious about who he is visiting. When he has gone, I find the grave easily. It has a rosebush, the water droplets are still on the petals. The woman remembered on the stone died old in 1986. I am touched by this dedication.

Many of the graves have no one who cares for them anymore. They are caved in, the stone plates broken into pieces, covered with lichen.

School children walk by on a path outside.