#52 Ancestors Week 22 – In the cemetery
Many of our early ancestors are buried in cemeteries no
longer in use. In Lismore and Ballina
the pioneer cemeteries have become “Parks” with salvageable headstones
straightened and set into walls to protect them from further erosion. In both these cases, the cemeteries have been
affected by rising water levels, and many headstones have been lost. While this process “saves” the headstones,
they unfortunately lose context, so family or kinship relationships can’t be
read by looking at the graves.
In the Pioneer Cemetery of North Lismore are many surviving
headstones of my early Lismore family.
All four of my paternal 2x great grandparents are here – Charles and
Eliza White and Charles and Susan Stanford, as well as two of the Stanford
children, Violet and Dyscha.
Some of Paul’s ancestors are here too. Three McCann brothers who all died accidentally
over a period of nine years from 1889 - 1898 – Charles (drowned), Nicholas and
James (hit by falling trees) are buried here; their headstones gradually
becoming less legible as time passes.
Nearby are the graves of Paul’s 3x great grandfather James Exton. Born far away in Lincolnshire, England, he
died in Lismore in 1876, aged 59. His
inscription is also illegible, but it has been recorded. It says,
“Whilst on earth I did remain
My latter days were grief and pain
But God whose mercy ever free
Has from my pains released me."
His wife Susannah does not seem to be in this
cemetery, but his daughter Hannah’s grave is there, with her husband, John
Jones.
Listed on the plaque at the entrance to the
cemetery are two more of Paul’s 2x great grandparents, James and Sarah
Barrow. James was born in Shropshire in
1817 and came to the colony in about 1841.
Sarah was born here, the daughter of convicts John Hooper and Rebecca Bloxham. James was a sawyer and had a successful
business as a builder in the fledgling town of Lismore – there is a lane named
after him in South Lismore.
The location of the first cemetery in Ballina
was chosen because it was convenient to the settlement by land and by water,
but the town soon outgrew the site. It
was declared a rest park in 1957, and the few headstones that had survived were
placed in a wall. While beautiful, the
area has no sense of the past and is rarely visited. Paul’s 3 x great grandfather, the
soldier/blacksmith William Johnson is apparently buried here.
My maternal great grandparents are buried in the small bush
cemetery at Wallabadah, with one of their sons, a bachelor, and one of their
grandsons, my uncle Jackie who died long before I was born., before even my
mother, his sister, was born. It has
seemed, on the occasions I have visited, as if the country is permanently in
drought – it’s a bleak and cheerless place.
On the day they buried Jackie, however, it was probably sodden with
recent rains – when he died on the family property in the hills behind
Wallabadah they were cut off from help by the flooded Jacob and Joseph Creek.
We have heard the story many times. My grandmother, Josie, alone on the property
with four small children and a “girl” hired to help her. We don’t know who the girl was or how old she
was – probably a young teenager. She had
taken the older three children (aged 8,6 and 5) outside to play. Jackie was
listless at dinner time, then unconscious, then dead. The girl had demonstrated to the others – on
Jackie – how to do a “rabbit killer”, an edge-of-the-hand chop to the back of
the neck. My grandmother laid him out on the kitchen table and sat with him for
two days. Neither my grandfather nor a
doctor or even an undertaker could cross the flooded creek to come to them. In my mother’s many tellings of this tale,
Josie is pregnant again which is an added note of poignancy but not true, I
think, unless that child too was lost.
There was no inquest or official enquiry. My mother told me that she thought that my
grandparents would have wanted to spare the ignorant girl from blame or
censure.
