On the longer time scale that we feel in nature, the violence of colonial capitalism seems almost fleeting. ‘Mother Nature will outlast all of this’, Barkandji man Woddy Harris told me, gesturing across his hometown of Wilcannia, two hours’ drive from Broken Hill, and which has a majority Barkandji population.

I wondered about this when, on a later visit, I attended a funeral at the Broken Hill cemetery. There, the Aboriginal wife of the white working-class man we mourned handed me a plastic rose. As instructed, I threw the rose into the grave, materially connecting me and the other mourners who did likewise, to his body.

That connection might almost last forever. The plastic rose will certainly take many hundreds of years longer than his body to decompose. It will probably outlast Creedon Street and all the gravestones in the cemetery. It will likely still be there under the ground when BHP is a lost memory. It may outlast even the stock exchanges that BHP and other mining enterprise have helped to succeed. Success seems an understatement, in fact: finance’s influence has sometimes exceeded the power wielded by governments and politicians, including American Presidents and UK Prime Ministers.

Some things are eternal, or near-enough, but that doesn’t necessarily make them nourish. In the moment, at the funeral, the plastic rose nourished something. Global petrochemicals, turned into plastic, were articulated in a moment of everyday life that Michel de Certeau would certainly have called ‘agency’. In this way of thinking, we would take heart from the ways the product of capitalist environmental contamination was translated into new meaning at the graveside, a logic that mirrored the world-class restaurant that produced touristic beauty on the old slag heap. The problem with this perspective is that it does nothing to end the production of plastic, nor the infection of soils, oceans and food with microplastics that poison us all. We might have to admit that the plastic rose, so simple and beautiful a gesture, also performs something akin to pollution.

These intersections of agency and structure, of meaning and matter are particularly noticeable at funerals, and in cemeteries, where small things accrue abundant significance and where each life, mourned, celebrated and remembered, also somehow represents us all. In the cemetery, the structures of big capital articulate not only with the everyday life that was the focus of de Certeau’s politics, but in everyday death. In everyday death, individual agency might pollute in the same moment that it nourishes. And the sheer inclusivity of death, universal as it is, embraces and celebrates working class activism on the same street as the Aboriginal families that the very same town pushed to the margins if not to die, at least to live materially close to the dead.