How a century-old headstone reveals the power of belonging

April 16, 2026 — 11:30am

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A cold wind swept the old graveyard, grey headstones standing like rows of uneven teeth.

We were alone. Few, we figured, bothered to visit this place.

The cemetery sat way off the main road; a lonely paddock fenced off from farms around, the grass around the older tombstones spindly and unkempt.

We had come in search of just one of those headstones.

Relatives passed the hat around a year or so back to get the old stone cleaned up and the inscription, worn and faded by a century of wind, rain and sun-blast, restored in gilt.

And so, having been to this place only once, years before, I felt impelled to revisit and cast an eye upon the new work, and, as the saying goes, pay my respects to those who had lain beneath the ground for so long.

After a bit of wandering about, we found the cleaned-up stone among a gathering of venerable upright memorials that – for a reason lost on me – faced into a far corner of the graveyard, hunkered together with their backs to all the other expired inhabitants. If this were a social gathering, the group was decidedly antisocial. But of course, no one here had reason left to avoid their fellows.

Here were buried together the bones of my maternal great-grandparents, named Thomas and Isabella.

Having never known them, for they died in 1921 and 1923, I was taken quite by surprise to discover a feeling of something approaching warmth creeping through my being as I stood before their shared grave.

In a world maddened by blood, has death lost its meaning?

She raised six children, used her management skills to help Thomas build up a fine farm and enviable homestead and lived only to the age of 57. At least she survived a couple of years after welcoming home her youngest son, my grandfather, from World War I, where, to her anguish, he was wounded twice.

And yet, no one had thought to inscribe an epitaph to her that had a hint of poetry or even loss or longing to it.

“She hath done what she could,” the headstone reads.

Thomas lived another two years after Isabella died. He was crushed when the family jalopy, driven by his son, my grandfather, rolled upside down a few hundred metres from the homestead.

I suppose I should not have been too surprised to feel a sense of connection out there in that empty graveyard, despite never having heard even the voices of these long-departed people.

Those who study such things, psychologists and the like, tell us humans share a fundamental need to know where we come from – an almost unconscious map of our origins – to make sense of who we are now, and to help cement our identity.

And so it seems to be.

Among the more popular documentary series on SBS is Who Do You Think You Are, in which well-known Australians are assisted to trace their ancestors.

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Tears often spring as participants discover the triumphs and travails secreted away in the stories of their families.

Constructing family trees is said to be among the most popular of hobbies across the world. Who hasn’t got a relative capable of boring a dinner table rigid with their latest discovery? (“Great-uncle Sam married his first cousin – can you imagine?”)

The internet is saturated with sites such as Ancestry offering direction to dedicated family detectives, and the granddaddy of them, Family Search, boasts of storing billions of names contributed by millions of members.

But what of those who are denied, for one reason or another, the ability to map their identity in a way that connects them with their ancestors?

Years ago, I was granted the unusual opportunity of interviewing at length several teenage girls who had got themselves in trouble with the law and ended up in a closed shelter in a regional city designed to give them the chance of starting over.

I was struck that each of those with whom I spent time, once their defences came down a bit, spoke of becoming disconnected from their families early in their lives. In particular, each spoke of being abused by fathers or stepfathers and feeling doubly let down by mothers who did not stand by them.

My impression was that these unfortunate young women were like saplings that had not had the opportunity to sink roots into the soil, leaving them buffeted and flattened by any storm that came along.

They were isolated from their immediate families by trauma and denied the resilience that might have come with the understanding that they were part of a much larger and longer story.

Perhaps the most catastrophic and lasting of all agonies visited upon Indigenous peoples in numerous countries, including ours, was the deliberate effort by colonisers to ban ancient languages and to remove Indigenous children to institutions where their connections to country, culture and family stories were severed.

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In an age of immigration often driven by war and conflict, vast numbers today suddenly find themselves dislocated from access to the familiar places and the stories of their ancestors.

There is no denying all sorts of problems accompany large waves of immigration, stretching back further than the restless Germanic and Slavic tides that contributed to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and all the way forward to postwar alterations to Australia’s population.

But those who for political, racist or other unworthy reasons criticise migrants today for clustering together misunderstand – deliberately or through ignorance – the human need of the displaced to continue to share, as they did in the places they left behind, the abiding comforts of community and memory, staving off isolation.

Perhaps I will return some day to the graveyard where my great-grandparents lie, though I don’t need to do so.

I have the privilege of knowing an invisible connection to the forever is there, just as it is with others of my family in other graveyards, lending strength to the rootstock of my existence.

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© The Sydney Morning Herald