Cortege to Beenak Creek: OBITUARY of AUNTY KIT

Katherine Winifred Knoll - nee Thompson (1915-2006)


Cortege to Beenak Creek


Leaving Monbulk, it’s early May 2006, under autumn yellow poplars, again the red dying is in the oaks, the russ brightens, the chestnuts are fallen, whole clans of colour gather for this death which we follow down Sassafras Creek under manna gums and overhanging treeferns till it becomes the Woori Yallock.

Forty, fifty cars with headlights on in the slow daytime out through Fairy Dell, rounding left at Emerald, through Avonsleigh and Cockatoo where a schoolboy salutes. Rising, to the hills, we do not stop at Gembrook, and the Telstra workers on the edge of town stand to stare at this cortege turning out onto the little-trafficked roads toward the mountains. They wonder who is this being buried? Why this cavalcade of slow respect going into the sticks? They watch gloss cars of the 21st century going back to the charcoal lands that sprung this easy prosperity, like the backs of glib beetles caught or escaping liking lemmings from the bright lights of some doom.

Now the autumn trees are erased by bark-strung bush and we enter granite country, gullies of boulder caves and underground streams, roads of muddy sand verges. Over the scrub, banksias rise up in the dim, branched in rough candelabras, full of yellow candles, the soft plumes looming. Beside these shadow-flames, near Shiprock Falls, a hearse turns east onto the narrow dirt roads, winding thinly up, following a creek towards a source, going into the townless mountain wildernesses.

Here, today, in a lonely cemetery, at a place opened for peace since Black Friday 1939 when the world burnt down, we are burying one of the WW1 and Depression-maturing children, one who was there in 39, in 41. One who spent a war building garden walls and hedges, planting trees. One who lived without fruit of her womb, but who made and gave jams, bottled fruit, made pies and clothes and treated half a thousand nieces and nephews, adopted or otherwise. One addicted to generosity, one who lived unbitterly. Also reticent, humble. It is Aunty Kit: Catherine Winifred Knoll nee Thompson, who died as she wished, at home on the farm. 1915-2006.

She did not need to fill her world with manufactured stimulus. She accepted that vast, deeper and lasting quietness. So in love with peace she knew it. She lived unhurried, a gracious lady of that modestly-veiled ancient stock, alone the last twenty four years, true queen of one valley, one hill. Here, at home, soil-blooded, stoic, a glad peasant full of the old knowing of plants, trees and wild birds, wife of pioneer stock, kind, an austral Viking, willful, tough, delightful and independent as a flame robin, and as tough on pests.

She had no children, but everybody’s were her children. She had no family, but we were all her family: to three and four generations of nieces and nephews. She never wrote a book, but a book could not contain what was written by her between unspoken lines. She loved conversation, yet words could never catch all she meant for people. She never traveled far, but her letters reached around the world.

Growing up on one South Silvan farm till eighteen, then marrying a widower neighbour, her life’s journey went like a landslip down one hill, over a single fence, she reached the next farm, but in that short step she reached for an above and to certain depths, as if real travel truly needed such travail. She worked, she did for others. Crossing fences. And here in this cortege are the many messages without borders, this world’s pilgrims are here for her, or else with an email or call from England, from America, Cambodia, from around the world. A

nd, as I spade this earth that rains down onto her well flower-arranged coffin, I can hear her words: she is commenting on the quality of the soil, appreciating this aspect, the peace in the air, the birds; and, wary of wallabies or wombats or worse, she warns of the need for this planting to be staked and firmed, to be so named with simplicity and practicality, for the gift she can still give by resting here in this geography of peace, that simple, unregarded place to be guarded well by and for us left behind.

© Wayne David Knoll 9-24 May 2006