‘Blessed are those who mourn’
It was understandable that the main street had a bit of stench about it. At the tail end of a festival weekend the sullage systems in the old seaport town were stretched to capacity.
But the sadness was palpable. It hung in the low lying part of the street, alongside the stink, near the old hotel.
The weekend crowd cleared and I soaked up the seaside atmosphere during a few days of fishing, lazing and sightseeing.
Curious, I followed the sadness past the old Sisters of Mercy church, which had later been used as a convent. Past the memorial near the boat harbour with names of fishermen and mariners lost at sea. Past the ambulance station and the golf course at the base of the dunes, to the old cemetery.
The old cemetery was enclosed with an old stone wall, a sign said it was built by a bachelor Irish stone mason who had also built many of the old stone houses. Built for penance perhaps, or to reassure the restless spirits?
The sadness was concentrated in one corner with little markers for four Brennan children. The oldest was eleven, they were all struck down within a few days of each other in 1875.
In other parts of the cemetery two children from another family had also died close together later in 1875, and another child’s grave for the same year.
Poor parents, probably survivors or progeny from the Irish potato famine of 1846, their children wiped out by a plague in this remote place. Four buried together in an awful week. The lingering sorrow of the prayer and fear of all the town’s parents, enduring somehow in spirit.
I learned that 1500 children died from a Scarlet Fever epidemic in New South Wales during 1875 and 1876. Hundreds of deaths from outbreaks of Typhoid fever, diptheria, tuberculosis or smallpox were recorded methodically every year, even an epidemic of the plague in Sydney in 1900.
Throughout the country, the indigenous people were dying from the same and other diseases, their death and misery largely unmarked, unrecorded and unpreventable.
Some scientists estimate that of all the people who ever lived, half have died from malaria. Children are particularly susceptible.
Sorrow is our inevitable companion in life. Blessed are those who mourn.
May peace be with you.
