Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Camperdown Cemetery - A Graveforest

Cemeteries were intended to be works of purification through delineation - at precisely the moment the body perishes and would return to the earth that sustained it for the duration of its lifetime, we protect it from this return and keep it locked like Snow White in a case that we hope will preserve our minds from the encroaching  reality that we are not transcendent beings bound to live beyond the death of our bodies – beyond the very substance of our existence. And yet, people who visit cemeteries often find themselves wondering how their loved ones might possibly exist beyond the death of the body. They might speak to them as though the loved one still exists but in a different form – perhaps in the trees, the wind, the earth that surrounds them. In this way, humans are often drawn back into the natural world that they tried to cleanse from their body through the grave itself. The presence of old trees interwoven with the gravestones suggests that the bodies buried amongst the roots of the trees will be lifted up into the leaves and air by the action of the trees simply being – that the very existence of humans and parahumans are formed out of their profound intra-actions. Thus, the cemetery becomes a place of hybridization in which the lives of humans, trees and earth become enmeshed in one another and become indistinguishable in the minds of those who imagine the ongoing existence of their loved ones through this weaving of the human and parahuman worlds through one another.

In this light, just like the aboriginal flag has been painted over a building in the image 'Redfern Mural' in the Photo Essay section of Marginal Worlds; a building that symbolises the attempt of colonisers to erase Aboriginal people and their profound connection to the Australian landscape, so the existence of cemeteries may attempt to erase the fact that humans and nature are one and the same thing, even though the human mind is inexorably drawn in again by its magic to break down this imagined barrier.

By Claire Hellyer, z3393668.

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