By Roselyn Fauth
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about monuments. Maybe it’s the free online course I’ve been doing through Harvard called Tangible Things, which invites us to look closely at everyday objects and ask deeper questions. What do they tell us? What do they leave out? Whose stories are preserved, and whose are forgotten?
This thinking has made me look differently at some of our most visible public objects here in Timaru. Our statues, plaques, headstones, memorials. Especially the Captain Cain statue outside the Landing Services Building, which has been the focus of my latest historical rabbit hole. But now, something else has captured my focus. Not a monument that already exists, but one that doesn’t yet. One I want to help bring to life.
At the Timaru Cemetery lie unmarked and pauper graves. Dozens of them. People whose names may never have made the paper. People who built our town, raised families, died far from home, or slipped through the cracks. People who mattered, but whose final resting place is now just grass and silence. These are the lives that are so often missing from monuments. And that’s exactly why I believe they deserve one.
The Tangible Things course reminds us that history is not just what happened... it’s what we choose to remember. Objects can spark memory, but they can also reflect absence. The lack of a headstone, a plaque, a name, that too is a story. These unmarked graves invite us to ask, what does our community value? Who do we honour?
Creating a new monument in the cemetery is not just about righting a historical wrong. It’s about expanding our circle of care. I think it helps us telling a broader truth that every life holds value, whether it came with wealth and status or not. It’s about naming the unnamed, honouring the invisible, and restoring dignity to those long overlooked.
I know there may be questions. Who will be listed? What will it look like? Will it be welcomed by the wider community? These are important things to consider. But more than that, I believe this is a chance to reshape how we do public memory, from something top-down and polished to something collective, inclusive, and real.
Because this isn’t just a monument. It is a tangible object that holds stories. Some remembered. Some forgotten. Some yet to be uncovered. And by choosing to build it, we are choosing to listen, to care, and to remember.
If Tangible Things has taught me anything, it is that looking again, truly looking, can change everything. It has changed how I see the statue of Captain Cain, the grave of Ann's husband Samuel Williams. And it has deepened my commitment to this project: to mark the graves of those who lie forgotten, and to ensure their stories, however small or quiet, are not lost.
This is the monument we choose to build. One of compassion, of community, of shared memory. One that invites others to join the hunt for our history and and to recognise and honour it.