The town cemetery is sited in bushland close to the banks of Honeymoon Creek. Wattles and eucalypts hem it in on three sides. Mourners who plant bulbs on the graves of their loved ones (daffodils, jonquils, irises) have learned over the years that the tender winter shoots attract rabbits. Wallabies have been known to leap the wire fence. One was witnessed eating flowers left in a vase by a visitor.

Between the cemetery, the creek and the river lies a patch of land on which plum trees, a ragged lemon tree and a pair of hornbeams struggle along in the shade of the yellow box and ironbark. Half-hidden in the tawny phalaris and barley grass beneath the trees you will find, after an earnest search, the red-gum stumps of all old dwelling, together with other fragments—some smothered in blackberry—of the type of house that once stood here, above the Goulburn. A few lengths of weatherboard as fragile as paper lie flattened to the clay. A curved scrap of corrugated iron, all that is left of a water tank, is so brittle that it is possible to poke a stick through it.

These weather-beaten remains were once part of a grocery shop that my grandfather kept for a time in the ’twenties. The town barely existed in those days, and keeping the shop cannot have afforded my grandfather much profit. Conscientious pursuit of what cannot provide reward seems to have been a hallmark of the male members of my family.

The cemetery has always been a pleasant place to me. I like to walk amongst the graves and stop whenever a familiar name invites me to recall that woman, that man, that boy, that girl. ‘Pleasant’ is not quite the right word. But I enjoy the brief suspension of anxiety and fret that settles on me when I walk amongst the graves and see so many inalterable conclusions to so many stories. Here, editing is done with. The ending is perfect.

Vernon died at fifty-two, mourned by his wife and brother, so the headstone says. I happen to know that no children were left behind to grieve. What more can be said? Vern lived and died, and once taught me how to gut a trout. Terry was overtaken by cancer and was only eighteen. He was a boy who loved to brag, but I liked him. Mrs Cooper lived next door to my family, and suffered a great deal from having a husband who made a career of a bad back, so rarely was he employed and so wearingly did she strive to compensate. Her husband misses her, the headstone says, and so do her sons and daughters.

My father’s grave lies between an anonymous weathered monument and a concrete marker with a small, numbered brass plate attached. The number refers you to a name, should you wish to study the shire records. The inhabitant of the grave died poor and alone, one of many reinterred here by the Americans when the rising waters of the lake drowned an even older cemetery down on the river.

The wording on my father’s headstone is mine. It was thought proper that I should find the words, since I wrote stories and poems and was attending university at the time of Dad’s death. Recalling that I had once ornamented the restaurant menus of the Parki Saadi with quotations from Chekhov, I opted for brevity. ‘Francis Edward Hillman’ I wrote, on translucent blue air-letter paper, the only blank paper in the house at the time; ‘Dearly loved and sadly missed by his family.’ The sheet of blue paper was handed to the undertaker. The undertaker relayed it to the mason. The mason inscribed the words on the headstone. I had written the conclusion of my father’s life story.

I often drive up here to the cemetery from the city with a friend—maybe a friend from the town who, like me, hasn’t lived there for many years now, or maybe someone who is simply happy to get out of the city for a day. Some are touched by the visit, feeling, I think, that I am sharing something that I would surely reserve for the people in my life I cared for most. Some think it weird, or boring, or disturbingly sentimental. One of the visitors says, with a laugh, ‘Do me a favour!’

When I visit the cemetery alone—I am alone now—I attempt a chat with my father. I always glance about warily, terrified of being caught mumbling over a grave. The chats are never successful, because while talking I split in two, and one of me watches the other. The one watching is embarrassed by the one speaking, and eventually starts speaking, too. He says, ‘For God’s sake shut up, the man’s dead.’ And then I become one person again, a person who has shut up, as he should.

I don’t have anything to say today. I wander through the Catholic section, stopping to stare down at a fresh mound of clay. Bunches of flowers are wilting on the hill of pebbly clay. Looking more closely, I see that a small, gold ring is tied to one of the bunches with a purple ribbon. Is it a wedding ring? It’s too small for a man’s finger. Why, if such a gesture was called for, was the ring not placed in the coffin? Left here, it could be stolen. The ring, exposed to theft, worries me. I place another bunch of flowers over it, to conceal it. I walk away from the grave reluctantly, still troubled.

It’s a balmy day, a late autumn day, the blue sheet of the sky barely touched by cloud. Wattle birds, ransacking the shore pines outside the fence in search of buds, shout their harsh, tribal, two-note caw.

I put my hand on my father’s headstone, as I usually do before starting back to the city. But I can’t empty my mind. I stand beside my father’s grave for some time, fretting about the new grave. Finally, I accept that the wedding ring has been left for much the same reason that I would leave a ring on a grave, or book a ticket on an ocean liner. The ring has been left to place its owner in the story of a life—perhaps to be included in some imagined future. I booked a ticket on a ship to install myself in a story that my father had begun in his imagination, and that I had rounded out.

I leave this place of conclusions just as a car pulls in and parks close to mine, under the pines. I know who this is. It is Madge. I haven’t seen her for maybe twenty years. I know whose grave she will be visiting. It’s in the Catholic section. I stopped at it almost an hour ago, thinking of the boy, Madge’s son, who is buried there. I put him in a novel once, with a cavalier disregard for the feelings of his family. Madge won’t have read that book, I hope. She probably won’t recognise me. She’s carrying a huge bunch of pink chrysanthemums.

‘Tracy,’ Madge calls to a stout little girl with yellow hair under a red baseball cap on which the words ‘Kylie’ and ‘Fever’ are lettered in sequins.

‘Get that vase, love!’

Madge is carrying a trowel and a small mat, for some weeding. She has just about reached me. I am standing at the gate, prepared to take my medicine if I have to. Madge, about the age of the ancient pines above us, glances at me and seems ready to trudge past. Tracy has found the vase, and is running towards us.

‘Bobby!’ says Madge, and her face fills with wonder as she stands staring up at me, chryssies heaped under her chin. ‘You’re Frank Hillman’s boy, aren’t you?’