Lost Things, Yet to be Found...

The Cassilis cemetery is a special place for many. It is also in flux. Possibly visited more by people who had loved ones and acquaintances buried in that ground when Cassilis was thriving because gold was being ripped from the ground in any way possible. Processed to make money for individuals that sat in fancy restaurants and boardrooms all over Australia. The trustees have working bees to keep it reasonably maintained while they also try to go about their own lives and attempt to discover more about the people who lived in the area during those days on enterprise, which destroyed much of the landscape.

The people who buried family and friends in the cemetery were not people who lived in the Cassilis region because it was a great place to be, or marvellous for their children. It was because they were trying to make money, and as much money as they could while the gold was coming out of the earth. Once the gold ran out, so did the people, leaving much of what they had built. Also what they destroyed and buried.

So how terrible was the destruction of the cemetery once the people had left, really. It appears to be sacrilegious, and yet, it was just ground where people had left the remains of people who died in varying circumstances. There were gravestones that told a very short story, pardon the pun, the bare bones about a life. These physical markers for people to visit on occasion and remember, for a little while, the person who could no longer be touched in any other way.

Today, in this day and age, the cemetery is a point of interest to try to get a grasp on what life was like in the area known, in this instance, as Cassilis, a mining area. Much has been lost with the theft and/or destruction of the grave stones and any surrounds that have gone missing. This is to be lamented and is like burning the only copy of a book that few people have read, and even fewer alive who remember, even parts of it.

This is also the reason that the Cassilis Cemetery Trustees attempt to learn more and maintain what is left of the site. Truly it is just ground, it is the cover of the book, enticing the reader who, upon opening it, finds it mostly devoid of any material, turning enticement to a tease. There is information still around. However, it's in the wind in the main, ephemeral, or lost or soon lost if not collected, blown away and scattered widely. Spread into far reaches where it may have been caught up in corners and means nothing on it's own, just a thread separated from the tapestry in which it belongs and completes.

It becomes a challenge for any who wonders why information was lost? In the case of the burial records of Cassilis cemetery, in a fire. Henry David Thoreau asks, “how important is something that can be forgotten?” We ask ourselves, how important is something, not protected and so easily destroyed?