In the Wilcannia cemetery a lot of plastic is on display. This cemetery is an important local monument not because it celebrates the working class, because it doesn’t. Unlike in Broken Hill, there are no tourist guides to the cemetery, no famous people that I know of. I camped on the river in Wilcannia, often for weeks at a time. Local people often invited me to go there, to see where their family was buried. For all that is literally houses the dead, I understood from this that the cemetery is very alive in the town’s shared consciousness. I felt I shared in their love and loss there and in this next section of my essay, I invite you to respectfully share it too.
This cemetery was established at the height of Wilcannia’s once-considerable economic power as the third-largest port in Australia, on the Barka, the Darling River, shipping ore and wool to Victoria and thence to the world. Now, like the rest of Wilcannia, the cemetery has been adapted by local Barkandji people who have built meaning and life from the debris of colonialism. There are some large traditional tombstones, but most are lovingly cobbled together by family and friends.