There is plenty to read in a cemetery. In the first few days of their last year at school, our senior students undertake their final retreat with us. As part of this experience, we take them for a while to the Melbourne General Cemetery, in Carlton North. The place is an overview of their diverse community.
They will find, for example, the grave of James Scullin, who was prime minister of Australia from 1929 to 1932, during the worst of the Great Depression. He is buried with his wife, Sarah. On his grave are written some of his own words: ‘Justice and humanity demand interference whenever the weak are being crushed by the strong.’ His grave sits among many ordinary graves. It is nothing like the monument to Roosevelt, America’s Depression president.
Nearby is a moving plaque in recognition of ‘mothers whose children were adopted and have subsequently died before reunion’. It says: ‘but we were not separated in our hearts. Tomorrow we will sit with you and hear you laugh.’
There is also a Jewish section, which includes many survivors of Hitler’s holocaust. They often say: may his or her dear soul rest in peace. There are many Italian, Greek and Chinese graves, as well. People of countless different origins end up here.
Beyond the Jewish section is a large stone obelisk to commemorate the unfortunate Burke and Wills. They undertook a legendary expedition to cross the Australian continent from north to south, setting out from a park a few hundred metres from this point. They died in the outback, at Coopers Creek in 1861, having more or less reached their goal, but they are still considered heroic failures. Heroism is more soothing to survivors than wretched bad luck. Just north of this monument is the grave of Sir Redmond Barry, a judge and for many years the chancellor of the University of Melbourne. Barry is best remembered as the man who sentenced Ned Kelly to the gallows. His grave reveals the irony that he died less than a fortnight after Kelly, making generations wonder about Kelly’s threat to see the judge in the afterlife. Barry’s grave says ambiguously: ‘Deeply and universally regretted.’ The Kelly clan were not part of that universe. Kelly himself is not here. His remains were interred in an unmarked grave. In the last few years, a small plaque has been added to remember Louisa Barrow, Barry’s partner, who shared the same grave him for one hundred and thirty years without any acknowledgment. She was the mother of the great man’s four children.
The cemetery includes the graves of some of the brothers whose order started our school. Among them is Br John Lynch, who died in 1921 at eighty-three. He was one of the four original brothers who arrived in Melbourne with Ambrose Treacy aboard the Donald M’Kay in 1868. The foursome needed to borrow money to pay their landing tax; they had nothing. When John Lynch died, fifty-three years later, the brothers had established a large network of schools of various kinds; from that point, their history became excruciatingly painful. As a young man, Lynch had been a fine horseman. But when he was helping children at St Vincent’s Orphanage, he contracted a contagious form of ophthalmia and went blind. He shares the soil with Br Pat Daly, a Queenslander, who died of complications from appendicitis while he was on the staff of our school in 1947. Daly was only twenty-two years old. He was long remembered by his students for his youthful enthusiasm. The other brothers remembered the way he sat up late at night preparing lessons; in those days, he was sent into the classroom without much formal training.
These are just a few of the personalities in the cemetery. Our students look for the tree under which is buried Peter Lalor, the man who led the Eureka Stockade uprising in 1854. Equally important are the many hundreds of ordinary lives to which the headstones provide clues. There is the Robinson family who, in the 1870s, buried four of their children, James, Harry, Edith and Elsie, aged nineteen months, three years, six years and eleven months respectively. Venus Rennie’s grave says simply that she is ‘at rest’ after twenty years of suffering; it doesn’t say what kind of suffering. There is even a grave for a husband and wife who died fifty years apart: ‘United at last.’ Another grave contains two sisters, Jane and Helen Pigdon. One died in 1867 at the age of three. The other died in 1950 at the age of eighty-one.
We don’t come here for a joyride into history, intriguing as all these stories may be. We come because of a book, The Spiritual Exercises by Ignatius of Loyola (1548), a distillation of his own life experience. St Ignatius was keen to help people who were making important decisions in their lives and few people fit that description as well as those starting their final year at school, wondering what the years after might hold, tossing up what course or career they might embark upon. Ignatius was insightful about decisions, not least because he had made a few bad ones. He believed that the mind is the safest point of entry to the heart: a decision-maker should start with a reasoned approach, considering the rational pros and cons of a particular course of action, and then move beyond that to a heartfelt approach, knowing that emotions can be liberated by reason. This is where the imagination plays a huge part in wise decision-making. He suggests, for example, that you should imagine a complete stranger in a similar situation to your own. What advice would you give them? More dramatically, he asks people to consider this moment from the perspective of the end of time. But most powerfully, he says that you should imagine looking back on this decision from the moment of your death. What would you wish you had done?
That is why we come to the cemetery, to ponder the mystery of life and the short lease we have of it. None of us have our lives freehold; we are part of a community which shapes us and which we, in turn, shape. Life can take an almost infinite number of possible directions. But all roads seem to lead to this one place. We will all reach the end of our days. What do we want to leave behind? Who will read our story in whatever form it may be written?
Literature is the work of people who are either dead or will be dead. Often enough, it is their leavings, their attempts to come to terms with the mystery that surrounds them on every side. Great literature always implies questions about the way we live and love. Reading has, at one level, saved my life. At another level, it has helped me to surrender it, to put it in a wider context of human yearning.
The advice is often given to aspiring writers that they should write what they know. I go along with this to a limited extent. I think we should write at the very edge of what we know, pushing from the familiar into the unfamiliar, stumbling into areas where we are unsure if we can find words for what needs to be said. The main thing we need in our pencil case is honesty, the blood brother of humility. I am passionate about words that don’t come easy, the ones that build real bridges between human beings rather than burying them under clichés and slogans. I love finding a shape for things that are shapeless or misshapen. I love the writer’s faithful marriage to a reality beyond themselves. That is what has saved my life.