yet more shadows over shadows

Here in the cemetery of Wybalenna there are now few marked graves and even fewer with legible or known histories. On this head stone is the touching story of Margaret Monohan and here two tiny young children. As if taken from the pages of some pulpy Victorian melodrama, she and her 2 children drowned while disembarking the Colony of Van Diemans Land (Tasmania) on HM Brig the Tamar in 1840. Her petticoat was caught while boarding a dinghy to go ashore, capsizing the boat plunging her into the sea with here two young children, with none surviving.

Life in those days was extremely hard in a way we have little understanding of today, in the West at least. However what is truly sad is the thought of all the hundred of Aboriginals that died of disease and heart break at that very same graveyard in that same period, almost all their lives go unremember and marked. What was even worse was the way many of the bodies were desecrated after they were buried for the purposes of "science" and ghoulish curiosity. This antagonism to the aboriginal race has carried on into even very recent times. Its amazing to think then how selective we are about the value of life. Daily we hear of yet another bomb blast in Palestine or Iraq and tens of people killed and maimed, but should one Australian go missing the whole world will stop. Even very topically this last week with the terrorist bomb blasts of trains in Mumbai India, with a total of some nearly 200 deaths goes almost unnoticed by the media. While the blast some year ago in London with a fraction of the deaths the world seemed to stop. How is it we seemingly value human lives so differently depending on the race, creed or religious belief, aren't we all just one and the same?