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Mount Molloy Cemetery
A walk through history
There are no paths in the cemetery at Mount Molloy. You are free to wander across the grass where ants scurry into cracking soil and tiny blue butterflies flicker in the sunlight. The cemetery is cut from eucalypt woodland and enclosed in a chain-link fence. A few woodland trees remain. A palm and a frangipani have been planted in one corner. When I visited in the winter dry, the frangipani was bare.
The graves are laid out in rows, more or less. Some older headstones are half-encased in termite mounds built from grey earth hard as concrete. Lizards bask on them, reluctant to move.
The cemetery holds the remains of James Venture Mulligan, who sailed from Ireland to Australia in 1860 at the age of 23. Landing in Melbourne, he soon moved to Armidale in New South Wales, where he became interested in prospecting. From there, he worked his way north through the Queensland gold rushes, from Gympie (1867) to the Etheridge (1873). When grazier and explorer William Hann reported gold from the Palmer River region, south-west of Cooktown, Mulligan headed even further north. He and his group found more than 100 ounces and kicked off the next big gold rush. For…
