Rowland S. Howard Grave — Melbourne General Cemetery

Rowland S. Howard is buried at the Melbourne General Cemetery in Carlton North — the sprawling Victorian-era cemetery that holds much of Melbourne's history on its tree-lined paths. Howard died on 30 December 2009 at St Vincent's Hospital in Fitzroy after a long battle with liver cancer. He was 50 years old. His death came less than two years after he had released 'Pop Crimes,' his second solo album and widely regarded as one of the finest Australian records of the decade — a late-career statement of remarkable clarity and emotional power that seemed to draw on a lifetime of loss and survival.

Rowland S. Howard was the guitarist of the Boys Next Door and the Birthday Party, the Melbourne bands that, alongside Nick Cave, defined the most extreme and inventive edge of Australian post-punk in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Howard's guitar style — angular, melodic, and deeply strange, drawing on no obvious precedent — was as distinctive as any guitarist of his generation. His playing on Birthday Party records like 'Prayers on Fire' and 'Junkyard' remains some of the most original guitar work in post-punk history. After the Birthday Party dissolved in 1983 Howard formed Crime and the City Solution and later These Immortal Souls, and released two solo albums in the 2000s, 'Teenage Snuff Film' (1999) and 'Pop Crimes' (2009).

The Melbourne General Cemetery is open daily and is freely accessible. Howard's grave is in the section of the cemetery used for more recent burials. The cemetery itself is one of Melbourne's great Victorian public spaces — vast, shaded by mature trees, and containing the graves of figures from every era of the city's history. Nick Cave, who was Howard's closest musical collaborator and, by various accounts, a complicated presence in his life, has spoken movingly about Howard's death and legacy.