It’s a fascinating place to delve into the city’s past. “As with graveyards the world over, a few minutes reading headstones at random can create pictures of lives lived and squandered, of traumas suffered and of perils to our ancestors undreamt of today,” writes the Melbourne Insight Guide. “With the music of ordinary life providing a faint, reassuring soundtrack,” says Melbourne Circle, you can hear shouts and whistles from a game of women’s football on the adjacent Princes Park oval, the rattle and squeak of trams, and faint bird song … the words darling wife, loving daughter, cherished father, fell asleep, called home, departed this life, regretted, sadly missed are fading to illegibility on weathered, sometime toppled headstones.”