In April 1891, Donald McDonald visited the cemetery at the Point Nepean Quarantine Station for the first time since having been there with his family nearly 40 years earlier. Although still sited just back from the pretty foreshore of the cove, now named Ticonderoga Bay, he noted that the graves were in disrepair, many with indecipherable names, others just little mounds with no identifying marks at all. He sat for a long time, until the sun began to set, reflecting on those times and all that had happened in his life subsequently.
In 1917, he wrote of the experience in the venerable Melbourne newspaper The Argus. He recounted that, walking among the few headstones, he noted the sandstone blocks were even back then covered in moss and beginning to crumble back to sand. ‘Half obliterated as the inscriptions were, the words “from the ship Ticonderoga” were readable on many’, he wrote. Lingering until the autumn darkness fell, McDonald says that he became disoriented on his way back, and at one point had to strike a match to find the path leading him away. In the light of the match, amid the thick tea-tree scrub, a single headstone was briefly illuminated and the name became clearly visible. ‘Margaret McDonald,’ it read—it was the grave of his own mother, who he had buried at this very spot all those decades ago.
When, a few years later, McDonald again visited the little graveyard, his mother’s headstone was gone. Looking back at the incident and on the Ticonderoga herself, McDonald reflected:
In such a swelter of humanity, typhus was king, and his sceptre a busy scythe … but with all its suffering and death, there was some soul of goodness in the things evil of those good old ghastly times.