Death and Capitalism (Part 3 of 4)

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.

Small sculptures of angels are painted black. Touching arrangements of solar powered lights and artificial flowers are offset by the merchandise of the deceased’s favourite football team. Hand-made artworks are everywhere. I visited local artist Karin Donaldson while she opened her studio for people, especially children, to come and work there. She showed me some of the clay artworks that children were making to take to the cemetery.

Graves are colourful, even joyful. People are very creative about where they get their colour. I was especially taken by a grave covered with green plastic lids from softdrink bottles. It was striking against the red desert dust. Truly beautiful.

Such creative reuse of the debris of colonialism – building shacks and cooking equipment, for example, from discarded petrol tins – has been key to Barkandji survival since colonisation. I find this inversion of the logic of elimination inspiring, turning the junk of global petrochemicals into homes, painting white angels black, converting that which kills into survival. It is like recycling, but without the vast mass of plastic floating in the ocean, some of it spilled by carbon-emitting recycling export ships.

Such survival offers hope and a pathway by which we all might seek to outlast capitalism, but that is not what cemeteries are about. The cemetery demands we recognise the centrality of death, here. One reason the cemetery is so important in Wilcannia is that everyday death hits hard.

The Wilcannia cemetery, unlike the one in Broken Hill, does not and cannot commemorate working class struggles against capitalism. Colonialism, not capitalism, is at least on the surface largely responsible for everyday death in Wilcannia where male life expectancy when I visited was still 37, female around 42. Death is real, frequent, heartbreaking and an undoubted consequence of the racist tyranny that came with taking land, suppressing sovereignty and oppressing nearly everything else. The purpose of this colonization was economic. Mining, agriculture and the transport of commodities extracted profit from First Nations land, culture and people, just as it did from the bodies of mine workers.

The cemetery is a beautiful and moving expression of love, family and culture, but it also embodies the logic of elimination. Colonial capitalism literally demanded the land and resources of First Nations people, pushing them to the fringes of their own culture, economy and sacred places. Near-elimination of Barkandji language and connection to land was the foundation of the first blossoming of profit on mines and sheep stations. Their continued survival under near-impossible conditions is a result of herculean efforts by Barkandji leaders and community.

These efforts are heroic indeed. Into the present, colonial capitalism continues to kill. The sugary drinks once topped by the green lids I admired in the cemetery, are a key cause of diabetes and a major vector of premature death among First Nations Australians, including those living in Wilcannia. In towns like Wilcannia, largely abandoned by the capitalist enterprises that extracted everything and left, Aboriginal people purchase what they must from tiny stores with transport costs that make for crazy prices. The median family income in Wilcannia is about half what it is for the rest of Australia. Consumption – of sugary drinks, as much as football merchandise – means something important to people here, expressing their agency. But often enough, commodities that are available for pleasure and diversion from troubles, might also prove fatal.

Colonial capitalism kills. The cemetery in Wilcannia shows that this is perhaps not so different to the logic that killed miners in Broken Hill.