“… the quiet graves
where hope and life, where songs and riches
died and dried and were deserted then,
like a convict's bones …”
from Ghost Town by W.N.Scott
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The truth is that history, as we commonly conceive of it, is not what happened, but what gets recorded and told. Most of what happens escapes the telling because it is too common, too repetitious to be worth recording.
- David Malouf: A Spirit of Play (Boyer Lectures 1998)
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My scenes with ordinary people were niggardly in number… If I would do it again … I would try to make ordinary people come alive.
- Manning Clark: Boyer Lectures Revisited
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In 1826, Belcher Dicks was convicted in England of stealing two mares and was sentenced to transportation to Australia for life. He was just twenty-one years old when he arrived in New South Wales. He was described as “ a gypsy pedlar and carter with no education … having black hair and black eyes.” After serving time in a chain gang, he became an assigned convict, working at Wallacia and then Liverpool.
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After thirteen years he was granted a ticket-of-leave and in 1843 married Jane Howlett. For the next thirty years they lived in the Nepean district, farming and raising their growing family. In 1874 they moved west of the Blue Mountains to the Cudgegong area. Belcher Dicks died in 1883 (3 May), aged 77 and was buried in Cudgegong cemetery.
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A number of years ago I was travelling the Mudgee Road, on my way to Coonabarabran, when I noticed a sign to the Cudgegong cemetery. I had driven this road many times but had never before seen this sign. The township of Cudgegong is no more, having been flooded in the middle 1970's when the Windamere Dam was built. The township had long been consigned to memory, so to learn that the cemetery was above the water line was a pleasant surprise. No prompting was needed to take the turn and follow the dusty track. It mounted a ridge before gently descending across picturesque countryside to the cemetery.
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While exploring the graveyard, which in several sections had the uncomfortable feel of having recently been submerged, I came upon Belcher Dicks' gravestone. It was his name that drew my attention. His wife Jane is buried next to him. In the midday sunshine, on this glorious November day, I thought a rather unpleasant thought regarding his name.
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A few days later I again came across the name Belcher Dicks while reading the book Over Cherry Tree Hill, edited by Margaret Piddington (The Cherry Tree Hill Community Press, 1989). It was here that I learnt more information about his life than any gravestone could have possibly recorded.
I thought of the many other ordinary people in the Cudgegong cemetery whose stories I would never know. I reflected on the possible loss of these unique stories; stories that had found closure and obliteration in death; real stories that never survived in the fragile memories of relatives and friends; stories that had no other lasting documentation than a weathered gravestone.
I hope that the song I later wrote about Belcher Dicks in some way makes amends for my indiscretion in that country cemetery. I am now definitely the wiser.
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