Smarty pants...

Many moons ago, when I was in high school, I had two thoughts –

1. What am I doing here?

2. Fuck, I don’t know the answer.  

I never saw the point of high school. I never knew anything and most of my time there was trying to bunk off sport and go work at McDonalds so I could get  money to travel to the UK - or keeping a low profile so no one could ask me things like math or science questions. Religious education?  Ah no, Mum agreed I could be removed from that because I considered it a load of bollocks and there was that incidence where I may have expressed an opinion to a religious type who took it badly. Phys Ed? How is running around a school sports oval going to do anything but piss me off? Actually, I was only thinking on my morning run, this morning, that when I was 12, and playing netball at school, we had this Nazi as a coach. She was an uncaring jockette who made us run and run and frigging run. I enjoyed being last on each of her runs because I’d already worked out a shortcut and never, ever, did that bitch work out I never ran the full way. But I digress…the main point of this ramble is today someone asked me a general knowledge question about the kings and queens of the UK and I rattled them off one after the other in succession. They were amazed. How did I know this stuff? By reading books – and not history books – Jean Plaidy. Really? Yes. Remember her? By reading her stories based on the lives of the Tudors and Plantagenets etc, I learned to love history and accept textbooks.   

My point? Wanna be a smarty pants? Sometimes the road less travelled when it comes to education is the best.  

        

Sunday morning…

…and the rooster is crowing. Yes, this is my rooster, Neil. I like obscure things like this where people have gone - “I’m gonna make me a rooster out of that bit of iron.” It’s supposed to be a weathervane – the base extends. Mum bought it thirty years ago and I inherited it. Correct, there was no fight over it. I reckon, by the look of it, it's from the 1930’s when people made things with their hands and made do with what they had. Society doesn’t do that much any more. We want sparkly and new and stuff with history gets pitched. Shame. We lose out on a lot of quirkiness. Want obscure? Come to XH. It’s a time warp….

Reflections…

I went to the Cairns Pioneer Cemetery today. The graves there are from 1850 to 1914, when the huge casualties from WW1 would have required another cemetery. I like graveyards. They’re a slice of history and a look into the lives of ordinary people who did the best they could with what they were given. This particular cemetery is located ten minutes from the heart of Cairns City. It’s in an area that is prime real estate. Of course in 1850-something when they decided to plonk the cemetery there, it would have been just a field and the inhabitants of the town of Cairns wouldn’t have envisaged the tourist mecca and international city it would become. I’m glad they never tired to relocate it. It’s a peaceful place to walk around and read up on the trials and tribulations of people passed.

There are so many stories in that cemetery from the young man who drowned trying to cross the Mulgrave River, to another who fell from a horse, to the tiny plain grave from the 1800’s – ‘couldn’t see that date clearly – that announced a child had been born one day and died the next. But there were two graves that particularly stood out to me. One, I couldn’t get a good picture of but it made such a strong impression on me as it was such a basic memorial to a loved one. It was a simple stone slab, weathered by time and someone in the 1880’s had painstakingly hammered in what appeared to be tin studs to spell out a child’s name and the age of 3. The other is shown in the second photo. It tells of the death of young children in the one family year after year after year.

Cemeteries – they’re about human endurance and simple love.

http://s4space.com.au/Cairns_Pioneer_Cemetery.html

Amarinda Jones
Penn Halligan
www.amarindajones.com
www.amarindajones.blogspot.com
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