Feb 3, 2016
The Lost Children Of Pennyweight Flat
Hundreds of anonymous dead innocents and a moments pause
The graveyard is little more than a bee-stung patch of ground, small swellings rising up here and there where the earth’s surface was long ago prickled by rough shovels. Some of the mounds have their perimeters acknowledged by rows of stones, no more sophisticated than those you might set up around a campfire; others are marked only by a single jutting rock, or nothing at all.
Some 200 children were buried at Pennyweight Flat Children’s Cemetery between 1852 and 1857, during the height of the Australian gold rush, and not much has happened here since. There have been no more burials. There’s no garden to tend to. No fresh flowers. You’re left wondering how many of the graves are still visited by living descendants, if any — and how many are simply shallow beds for long forgotten ghosts.
Only a few of the fortunate dead were bestowed names and dates. One headstone — held together by rusted iron bolts that form two eyes above a sad crack of a mouth — has foreign characters engraved on it. It offers more of a story than most: at least we can assume that the child sleeping here was born into one of the area’s many families of luck-hunting Chinese settlers.
Aside from those few with markings, the babies and children buried here are voiceless, nameless; nothing but soft bones and dust crushed beneath anonymity and piles of arid earth. The tiny mounds are even sadder because they are mute: the dead are always silent, but the unmarked dead are the quietest of all.
A pennyweight is an itty-bitty measure of gold. It’d be pleasant to think that the cemetery’s name was a thematically-appropriate homage to the children as shining little nuggets, but alas its origin is far more industrial. “No wealth was sacrificed by establishing the cemetery here,” informs a sign outside the grounds. Less than a pennyweight of gold was found on the flat, so the name actually refers to the fact that the land was worthless. “The site was so barren it would not be disturbed by fossickers or miners,” the sign concludes.
“The dead are always silent, but the unmarked dead are the quietest of all.”
I stopped by the cemetery on my most recent visit home to Australia, road tripping through the Goldfields area in Victoria with my little sister. On this particular summer’s day a small group of people were shuffling slowly up the path to the cemetery carrying fold-up chairs and blankets. We trailed behind whispering to each other that this was a strange place to hold a sunday afternoon barbecue.
The real purpose of the gathering was revealed when we entered the cemetery and a man handing out bibles extended one in my direction.
“Oh no,” I said politely. Then, motioning toward my sister and I, “we’re just looking,” as if a cemetery were a bookstore to be casually browsed.
As the only ones not there for the mass, we felt like we were intruding on something. I even felt compelled to genuflect when crossing in front of the priest, though out here in the sun-burned Pennyweight Flat the only church aisle was an aisle of dry leaves, the only altar a fold-out wooden table, and the only steeples the arching branches of the shade-giving gum trees.
We left the congregation to finish their service in peace, to cast their prayers to the open air and let them scatter and settle amongst the rough graves of the sleeping children. I’m not sure that the prayers were a comfort to them, but in a way, they’re a comfort to me.
The fact that masses are held here signals something small but significant about the Pennyweight children.
While their stories may have been lost, their souls are not yet forgotten.
