On The Bell

I'm really hanging out for the bell in the last of twelve rounds in 2012. With three days to go I reckon I'll have a narrow loss on points if I can stay on my feet for this last bit. It has been a rugged contest, I didn't flinch, but I'm quite spent and demoralised.

I met a lady today in the Beenak cemetery. I was returning from Yarra Junction, where I visited Graeme. Graeme rang me on Thursday, he had some some seedlings and seeds for me still, I could come and get them if I wanted. He'd told me a month ago he'd bring them to Gembrook when he next delivered to the IGA and he'd ring me when, but he didn't ring. He told me he had complications with the stomach ulcer that had stopped him coming some weeks earlier, and had to go to hospital again. They found cancer and took most of his stomach out. He showed me the big three week old scar right down his gut. He and his son Dave loaded me up with tomato, onion and capsicum seedlings they would otherwise throw out.

On the way home I took the turn down the dirt road, following the finger board that said 'Beenak Cemetery'. It was a few k's in, I was surprised at the volume of traffic coming out, causing much dust and detracting from the remoteness of it all, as I slowly drove past a winery, a kiwi orchard, then stringbark bush. There was once a town at Beenak, a mill town which followed the gold prospecting of yet earlier time. I expected the remnants only of the cemetery and perhaps a few very old headstones, and solitude, which I want badly. Need badly.

There were a lot of cars outside the cemetery, a funeral service had just finished. I found a car park in one of the gaps created by the cars I had passed and strolled in to have a look around. The grass was freshly mowed, there were perhaps four or five dozen graves scattered about, none of them looking old. I stayed away from the gathering of people and the hearse at the burial site and wandered amongst the other graves. A blonde lady sat alone in the shade inside the fence on a bench seat. The graves I inspected were all recent burials, say from 1980 to the present, migrant people, still born baby, two year old from the same family, young men with photos, probably car accidents.

I remember Meredith telling me she and her boyfriend Ray Hudson were walking in the bush near Beenak cemetery in the 1970's when they saw a Thylacine, quite close, crossing the track in front of them, unmistakably a Tasmanian tiger. Meredith is the sort of person you believe.

I was surprised the cemetery had recent graves only. I walked back towards the van, passing close to the lady wearing sunglasses. I said hello, and voiced my surprise at the lack of old graves seeing that Beenak was once a town. She could not shed any light on it, she said she was here with the funeral group, but did not know the deceased personally, who was a lifelong friend of her mother. She was down from Queensland, visiting her mother who was in her eighties.

I told her I was on my way back from Yarra Junction and followed the sign to the cemetery out of curiosity. The weather was balmy as we looked down the slope at the gathering chatting quite happily with tall stringybarks behind them. I commented that death is not really a sad thing if a person is in their eighties, in fact it's a beautiful thing, the completion of a life and quite natural, and perhaps renewal in some way none of knows about with certainty.

She agreed, but said when death comes to someone in their forties as it did to her husband, by means of cancer, it's a proper bastard. She and her three children were devastated. She said she now lives at Maleny, in from the Sunshine Coast, and she loves it. Her new partner and her have a hundred acres or so and he works with timber and makes furniture etc and she loves it up there where she does a lot of fishing, in the sea as well as rivers and dams. She manages a farmers' co op. Her children are grown up, one in the thirties, and she's now a grandmother.

Another lady came over and began talking to her so I said, "Goodbye, I'll have a look around Maleny one day." She smiled and said I really should.

It has been a tough year. I haven't got the grass cut at the farm yet and I haven't got to extracting honey. I told the florists I was not picking foliage for them between Xmas and New Year. I've had a house full of people for Xmas. As good as it all was, today was the first bit of quiet I had.

That's why I lost on points. I want most of all peace and quiet, I do not have it, not in 2012 anyway.