THE pirate adage 'Dead men tell no tales' is not strictly accurate when applied to some of Western Australia's loneliest graves.
Sometimes a bush grave's exact location, a faded name scratched on a flattened kerosene tin as a marker or an elderly resident who recalls a childhood story with a name and approximate date, are just enough clues.
A diligent search of local shire, Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, mines department and any other pertinent records - backed up sometimes by old newspaper clippings - by well experienced amateur historians and a genealogist sleuth has turned up remarkable tales of the travails of life and death in an inhospitable and often downright dangerous landscape.
For the past six years a group of dedicated volunteers, now numbering about 40, have been engaged in ensuring as many as possible of the often isolated graves scattered throughout WA are identified, the stories behind the deaths uncovered, authenticated and recorded for posterity.
Outback Grave Markers was formed by two former Scotch College mates Trevor Tough and Alex Aitken after a discussion about giving back to the community at their 50-year school reunion in 2014.
This led to the purchase of two second-hand rotary engraving machines - installed now in Mr Tough's shed behind his Muchea home - and numerous four-wheel-drive trips into the back blocks of the Kimberley, Pilbara, Gascoyne, Murchison, Goldfields and Wheatbelt regions.
Those trips by group members - sometimes assisted by members of four-wheel-drive clubs and Track Care WA - are initially to locate graves and record their GPS locations.
On return trips, group members place on the graves or, as is sometimes the case, near where their research indicates a body was buried, plaques engraved with information about the people interred there.
All of the information discovered about the deceased and a photograph of their grave or burial site is also recorded on Outback Grave Markers' database and the location added to an interactive map.
Both the database and map are accessible to the public via the www.outbackgraves.org website.
Once group members discover an outback grave or are alerted to its existence by outback travellers, shire councils or simply people wanting to discover their local history, the Outback Grave Markers' research team swings into action.
The team consists of Mr Aitken's wife Julie, Glennis McDonald and Lorraine Clarke - she runs Swan Genealogy and was involved for more than four years researching and identifying Perth's pioneers buried in East Perth Cemetery from 1830.
When the research ladies are satisfied they have uncovered and confirmed the details of the person, their name, age, date of death and, if known, cause of death are engraved on a plaque guillotined from three millimetre thick aluminium sheet and painted up by volunteers, ready to be placed during the next organised trip into the outback.
"We've marked over 1000 graves now - not much in the South West of the State yet, but a couple of hundred in the Kimberley, a bunch in the Pilbara and the bulk of them in the Goldfields," said co-founder and Outback Grave Markers' operations manager Mr Tough last week when Ripe visited.
Despite COVID-19 restrictions on travel, particularly near Aboriginal communities, last year Mr Tough and his wife Sue clocked up about 14,000 kilometres in their trusty LandCruiser and purpose-built offroad caravan which replaced a camper trailer.
Their travels with other members included trips to the Goldfields (105 plaques placed and four lonely graves found), Pilbara and Kimberley (four plaques placed) and to Laverton (attended a shire council meeting, found lost grave).
Their final trip of the year was to Lawlers, a former mining town site near Agnew, west of Leinster (169 plaques placed in the cemetery), then on to Niagara in Menzies Shire (86 plaques placed) in the heat of November.
The previous year their outback travels involved something like 20,000 kilometres, Mr Tough said.
Originally self-funded, Outback Grave Markers now seeks donations from mining companies to help fund research and grave marking - mining accidents were an extremely common cause of death and injury in the Goldfields region up until the 1930s.
As well, related ailments like 'miner's lung' were frequently listed in official records as a cause of death.
"A lot of the mines were very unsafe - at Davyhurst (between Coolgardie and Menzies) they killed one or two blokes every second year - but no one seems to have been held accountable," Mr Tough said.
"Three fellows were killed in a mine close to Niagara on only their second day at the mine.
"There had been an unexploded charge at the bottom of the mine on the previous shift, but the supervisor from that shift didn't tell the supervisor on the next shift.
"So these three fellows got in the bucket and went down the mine and were blown up when the bucket landed on the unexploded charge.
"The coroner's finding was that the previous shift supervisor should have mentioned the unexploded charge but the deaths were an accident, no one's fault."
Mr Tough said one of the three men killed was employed under the name Jackson, not his real name.
Although a paid-up member of the Australian Workers' Union under his real name when he worked previously at Southern Cross, the union declined to pay out the usual £50 for a death on the job to his family, even though his brother was able to prove Jackson was in fact a union member, Mr Tough said.
In another mining death researched by Outback Grave Markers, a miner got into the cage at an intermediate shaft level but grabbed the wrong signal rope by mistake.
Instead of raising him to the surface, the winch driver lowered him into water at the flooded bottom of the mine where he drowned.
Mining aside, remote WA was a dangerous and often deadly place, particularly when medical services were few and far between, getting help usually involved a frantic horse ride hours in duration and the emergency response could take a day or more to arrive by horse and buggy.
All the while the injured or ill suffered "without even a Panadol to ease the pain", Mr Tough pointed out.
A seemingly innocuous cut or scratch in the bush, left untreated, could rapidly turn into septicaemia with dire consequences.
Chronic dysentery, chronic alcoholism, exposure, thrown from a horse, burnt to death were some of the causes of fatalities noted on Outback Grave Markers plaques.
'Speared by natives' was engraved on plaques in the Kimberley.
Fatal gun shot wounds - generally accidental - were common, but death was not necessarily instant or painless.
One of the earliest graves Outback Grave Markers researched and marked was that of Charles Farmer, 22, who died on September 27, 1854.
He was buried about 37 kilometres north-west of Mount Magnet in the Mid West by his companions, sewn up in his blanket, his head resting on his saddle.
He accidentally shot himself, shattering his arm between wrist and elbow, on September 19 while exploring the area with a party of men.
Although his arm appeared to be improving, tetanus set in and he died in agony eight days after the accident.
Mount Farmer and Mt Charles in the area are named after him.
Sometimes inexperienced visitors to the regions simply found the environment intolerable - 'died of thirst' and 'heat apoplexy' were causes of death uncovered by Outback Grave Markers' research team.
As an example, Mr Tough cites the case of Margaret Straughan, 51, the wife of a newly-appointed manager of the Bamboo Creek gold mine north-east of Marble Bar which was later recognised as Australia's hottest town.
The Straughans arrived in Albany from Melbourne on January 29, 1896, on the SS Adelaide on their way to take up the position with Pilbara Goldfields Ltd.
On February 16 they departed on the SS Australind which called at ports on its way to Wyndham.
The Straughans disembarked at the tiny port of Condon on De Grey station, north of Port Hedland, with Ms Straughan feeling unwell before they departed with one other passenger in a coach for Bamboo Creek.
By the time the coach pulled up at Kitty's Gap at sundown on March 4, Ms Straughan was seriously ill and died a few minutes later.
Her death certificate listed the cause as 'heat apoplexy'.
Similarly tragic was the death of Kate Emma Moore, 53, from malaria on Ord River station in the Kimberley on June 29, 1911.
"She had left her home in Hull, England, to sail halfway around the world to visit her son William Douglas Moore who was storekeeper, book-keeper, gardener and assistant manager on Ord River station between 1900 and 1914," Mr Tough said.
"Interestingly, our researchers lost track of her son Doug after 1914 and we suspect he enlisted in World War I."
Childbirth was a risky time for women and their babies in regional areas.
"There are lots of mothers out there who died giving birth and lots of babies who were stillborn or died from complications soon after birth," Mr Tough pointed out.
While COVID-19 continues to be a threat to community health, it's impact in WA has been relatively minor compared to the swathe of death diseases carved through regional communities in past epidemics.
"In 1895 and 1896 the typhoid epidemics killed so many people," Mr Tough pointed out.
"For example, in Niagara cemetery there are 86 graves, 28 of the deaths were from typhoid and another seven were typhoid related.
"There were 11 from mining accidents and five suicides."
Outback Grave Markers is working with the Leonora, Laverton, Menzies, Sandstone and Wiluna shires to identify and mark graves in cemeteries dating back to gold rushes.
The funding it receives from the shires and other sources is being directed towards purchase of the $95,000 laser engraver which will enable Outback Grave Markers and its plaque-making contractor Westcare (a Perth not-for-profit organisation that employs people with a disability in a number of business ventures) to create much larger and more complex plaques and burial list signs for outback cemeteries.
"When we started with two engraving machines in the shed here, we were doing about 300 (plaques) a year and that was about as much as we could do with volunteers - it takes about an hour and a half to do a plaque," Mr Tough said.
"A couple of years ago we decided to seek some help with making the plaques and we settled on Westcare.
"What it has done is lifted our capacity to make plaques from about 300 a year to probably 1000 a year.
"But for us it's now shifted the problem from physically making plaques to one of doing all the research - it takes two or three hours each person to make sure we've got the right person and the right dates.
"It can be quite complicated - in those (gold rush) days a lot of people used aliases because they were running away from the law, bankruptcy, a wife and family and things like that.
"(Also), human error has been around forever - we must have corrected easy 50 records in Births, Deaths and Marriages where we can prove their records are wrong, either dates or spelling.
"As a bunch of amateurs and volunteers, we're correcting the history of our State.
"Westcare has done the first lot of 169 plaques for the Lawlers cemetery.
"We've just given them the second job for all the plaques for the Sandstone cemetery.
"It is a really nice, well looked after cemetery, but out of the 144 graves in there, there's less than 10 that have headstones or grave markers.
"It's taken us months and months to do the research and even then, there's about half a dozen that we don't have occupations for."
Outback Grave Markers sees a degree of urgency is required to mark all of the graves it can while the people who might know some of the story involved are still around.
"We reckon we've probably got 10 years before a lot of the information is gone," Mr Tough said.
"With the pastoral industry and agriculture in general gradually becoming more corporatised, with companies taking over from generations of family, local history is in danger of becoming lost.
"On some of the stations up north they no longer know where the original homestead was located."
Mr Tough knows this from his experiences in the north of the State.
Born in Perth and graduating from Muresk with a diploma of agriculture in 1965, he joined the then agriculture department and was sent to Ord River station on beef cattle research, mustering on horseback and at one stage droving a mob of 600 head to Wyndham.
At 22 he opened his own retail business in Kununurra - he met Sue, an English tourist at the time, in Kununurra in 1971 - then moved into tourism with building a motel in Broome and marketing the Kimberley to the world.
One - in his own words - "spectacularly awful venture" was to buy the Whim Creek Hotel between Roebourne and Port Hedland.
In 1981 he joined the Army Reserve with the formation of a new Australian Army unit called North West Mobile Force - better known as NORFORCE - and rose to the rank of major.
He has hiked through most of the Kimberley.
As if to reinforce the urgency aspect of locating and recording outback graves, some of the remote graves that Outback Grave Markers has located and marked are of people who have died within its members' lifetime.
Lucy Benning, a contract cook working from stock camp to stock camp in the West Kimberley, was one.
"She had her own plant of horses and equipment and moved with the stockmen, she must have been a strong and capable woman to live in the bush and make her income that way," Mr Tough said.
"We have little information about Lucy, but she died at Mt Hart station, we believe about 1950.
"In 2017 we marked her grave - a pile of rocks about 30 metres from the ruins of Old Mt Hart homestead.
"It took quite an effort and about a four-hour return walk through very long grass and across a line of hills to get to her grave.
"(Aboriginal bushman and Derby identity) Sam Lovell had found another grave near there in 2016 and had guided us to the place.
"Later he found Lucy's grave and described to us where to go."
