HEADSTONES AND CHATTELS  -

 

‘Twas pure chance that I discovered

Just the other day,

A place passed

Countless times,

Never had the thought of calling in,

Inner thoughts and misplaced fears

Oh there must have been countless other reasons

For one to just go there inside,

But however on this particular day,

I stopped,

I looked,

Then summoned up some kind of an internal fortitude

And through a pair of rusty creaking gates

I entered and embraced

Another forgotten time,

Inside the local cemetery

In a forgotten part of town

Where on first appearances

Overgrown,

Untidy,

Forgotten,

Ignored,

By many who live in luxury?

In this pioneer town

Where homes of bricks and mortar

Have become the order of the day.

 

This township

When first settled,

After pushing the aboriginals out,

By European immigrants

Who fled the persecution?

And slaughter

Of their ancient homelands,

Being wrapped

And raped in revolution,

And then there was no other choice,

Escape by rolling wooden ships

Canvas sails in providential winds

Then landing in,

An unknown foreign land

On high tide in Hobson’s bay

A new home land called Australia

Way back in eighteen fifty four.

 

 

Through overgrown unmowed grass

That crinkled neath my feet,

My aimless wanderings took me past

The history of my district,

With headstones marking

Anointed spots in the ground

The words of each

Meant much more

Telling tales from the past

Of persons now lying

In final resting places below,

An immigrant,

A seeker escaping personal grief,

A mother,

A father,

A child born out of wedlock,

Now in here a pioneer true blue.

 

Reading inscriptions imprinted

Sometimes,

Not quite having an understanding,

But for sure,

One thing more than anything else

Telling briefly of tales that said

Of what life was all about?

In bygone days

Where women were seemingly treated

Harshly,

Like slaves,

For dominant overbearing masters,

Second class citizens,

Chattels to be owned and conquered

Who sole purpose in life?

For me it seemed,

They to be the bearer,

Of many children

And then some more,

Then packed it in

To die at an early age.

 

Then without a sound I stopped,

Pausing

Before a dirt burial ground mound,

An ancient looking headstone marking

The recipient of being mouldy grey,

For at an awkward angle 

It leant backwards,

For it was up close

I realized that I needed to be

To read,

To take in the inscription chiseled there,

“Our dearly departed Mother

Theresa Henrietta Alice

Who died when bearing another?

Already a mother of fifteen kids

This beloved chattel

Of husband Alfred George

Now gone home to glory

Into the arms of an Almighty God.”

 

So thus I say to you

It wasn’t that long ago

When a woman had kids

She had one on her apron strings,

A second with a snotty nose on her hip

Another with dirty diapers

Another bun in the oven

This body of hers taken for granted

To be a chattel

Often not of her choosing,

Abused and taken for pleasure

By he who goes by the title

“Her Old man or the master of the house.”

 

Then quite often,

At a relatively young age

When sometimes tears were shed,

For this woman buried there

Frequently for this child of God

RELIEF!

From the pain of childbirth,

That only a woman,

A wife,

A mother,

An indentured servant girl,

A chattel,

Could ever experience

A joy of motherhood.

 

In this afternoon embrace,

As time slowly passed

Reading inscriptions there

For me it seemed to be

That one after another,

From decade to decade,

These stone memorials

Were the remembrance

Of a forgotten what went before,

That recorded

Our sometimes chequered history,

For indeed there were the Chattels

The brides to be

Of prominent pioneer males

Who suffered indeed of pain?

Mostly now for these pioneering mums

Where is her headstone

Proclaiming her to be a Chattel?

Probably housed in forgotten patch

Known locally as the Cemetery

Where you enter through creaky gates.