22nd August 2009, Cornelian Bay Hobart

Visiting cemeteries is a strange thing to do. It is something I started in Gippsland with Ella, a whippet who used to live with me. There were rabbits everywhere and she would go crazy chasing them. Sometimes Saffy, another whippet, would join us and then it was really comical. They would often collide. It was like the Keystone Cops – two over eager whippets chasing a rabbit between headstones right past a group of other rabbits that would be eating leisurely and look up after the chase had passed. Then they’d go back to eating. The whippets weren’t taken too seriously.

It is also an education – seeing who were the early settlers of the area, the prominent families, and the wars men served in, their rank and regiment.

In Sale, Gippsland, the early families were mostly Irish and some English. On the Irish head stones it would say what county in Ireland they were from. That cemetery was also segregated into the various religious nominations.

Here in Hobart, there are no rabbits and apparently no religious segregation. And the youngsters and youth of old seem to have fared better – Gippsland and Melbourne had high mortality rates for babies and children.

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