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The rolling slopes of the upper Lachlan catchment and the tablelands of the eastern watershed, territories of the Wiradjuri and Gundungurra nations, had been rapidly taken up by European settlers once pathways had opened south and west over the barrier ranges behind Sydney. By mid-century localities of settlement had coalesced to communities to service farms and land holdings, with an air of permanency and post-colonial confidence. People prospered, both from the produce of the land, and from stable employm
While circumstances of life on the land have changed since, the pattern of early settlement remains traced in the numerous country graveyards dotted through the municipality, expressing the shortness in time of European occupation against the many-generational shaping of the landscape under the stewardship of the nations it displaced, and its radical strangeness compared to the simple order of rural life imposed by a narrow cast broad acre economy.
Rural cemeteries, whether still in use or settling themselves into benevolent neglect, now attract interest from people researching their forebears, retrieving identification with undocumented pasts of struggle and triumph, of communities vanished in the civilising transformation, as self-contained villages gave way to larger centres of trade, education and employment. Gravestones are the markers that these lives mattered, further that settlement had displaced other lives, equally valid; further that the ma