After moaning about needing more time on yesterday’s photo post I found myself with a couple of spare hours between work and a guitar lesson today. Of course I decided to use those hours to go on a photography excursion since I have kind of rushed my Project 365 photos in the past week. The location I chose was the Brisbane General Cemetery (aka Toowong Cemetery) which is Queensland’s largest cemetery and it is so old and iconic that it is heritage listed.

I have a pretty strong interest in Australian history and it turns out that this particular cemetery is the burial site of some fairly famous people from the late 1800’s. That kind of stuff piqued my interest but of course there are more recent graves there which kept me quite sober and reflecting upon my own life. Some of the graves were really large and fancy, while some were old and had fallen into disrepair but there were also a few from within the past ten years which were specially designed to really represent the people buried beneath them. I drive past the cemetery every day on my way to and from work and although a lot of the time I just drive on by, there are quite a few times when I drive past and look in and find myself thinking about the lives of those who are no longer with us. What did they achieve in their lives? What legacies did they leave? By comparison I measure my own life and question what path I’m on. Actually walking amongst these very personal monuments to the lives of people who were lost was really powerful and a couple of them elicited some strong emotion from me which surprised me given that I never knew these people.

I took quite a few photos but this photo of a huge tree in the middle of a road through the cemetery was definitely my favourite of the bunch. I’m not sure how I feel about taking photos in cemeteries because I don’t want to disrespect or offend anyone, but I’m glad I made the decision to go today.