I had the honor of being a guest on Blueprint for Living on Australia’s ABC network last Friday. We talked about what draws people to cemeteries, what they might find there, and why it’s worth going out of your way to visit graves of people you don’t know. Here is the link to the podcast:
Every graveyard needs a book like this: a little history, a little architecture, a bit of gossip, and a self-guided walking tour or two.
For the most part, I am woefully uneducated about Australian history. Because of that, I found the information about the Victoria Gold Rush, the return of the “diggers” to settle in Melbourne, and the early exploration of the continent to be quite fascinating. The labor struggles and political battles were also new to me. Best of all were the opinionated biographies of the people buried here.
The Melbourne General Cemetery itself had an unusual history, with this management overseen by religious leaders — and its monuments approved by religious censors — that stands in contrast to the rural and garden cemeteries that I’m more familiar with.
The only reason I’m withholding one star from this book is that there are too few photographs and those included rarely rise above overexposed snapshots. They don’t do justice to this atmospheric old place.
This was a great addition to my cemetery collection. I got my copy from Amazon and you can, too: The Melbourne General Cemetery by Don Chambers.
This view of the cemetery and the photos that follow were taken from the book The Melbourne General Cemetery by Don Chambers. I’ll review it tomorrow.
Melbourne General Cemetery
College Crescent, Parkville, Victoria 3052, Australia Founded: 1852 Size: 106 acres (43 hectares) Number of interments: 300,000
Melbourne General Cemetery is the final resting place of Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister, authors, billiards players, and the Princess Theatre ghost, along with 300,000 others.
Established by trustees in 1852, Melbourne General Cemetery opened in June the following year. It stands two kilometers north of the city of Melbourne, in the suburb of Carlton North. The cemetery’s first burial was merchant John Burnett in May 1853.
As the first modern cemetery in Victoria, Melbourne General is crossed by wide paths that loop between its rotundas and chapels. Each denomination — Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Wesleyan, as well as Jewish and Quaker — was separated from the others. The cemetery’s oldest buildings are the Jewish chapel, completed in 1854, and the Catholic mortuary chapel, which dates to the 1870s. Several of the heritage buildings are built of bluestone.
Originally, the Chinese, Afghan, and Aboriginal communities were restricted to a small “Other Denominations” section of the the cemetery, but there they could pursue their own traditional burial rites.
A sandstone monument remembers native chief Derrimut, who died in 1864. Because Derrimut didn’t fit into the recognized Western religions, he was buried amongst the Chinese. The Koori, his people, don’t traditionally mark their graves. After his death, Derrimut’s monument was erected to honor him for warning early colonists that some up-country tribes planned a massacre in October 1835.
The grave of Sir Redmond Barry, the Acting Chief Justice, who sentenced Ned Kelly
Also buried here are Irish-born Robert O’Hara Burke and Englishman William John Wills, chosen despite their lack of exploration experience to walk across the Australian continent from south to north. On the return trip, Burke and Wills starved to death. Their bodies were recovered in January 1863 and given state funerals.
Four Prime Ministers are buried at Melbourne General Cemetery. Two lay in the Prime Ministers Garden—Sir Robert Menzies and Sir John Gorton—alongside a cenotaph for Harold Holt, whose body was lost at sea while he was swimming. James Scullin is buried elsewhere in the cemetery, as is Sir Isaac Isaacs, the first Australian-born Governor General.
The grave monument of billiard champion Walter Lindrum comes with a pool cue and ball. It’s the cemetery’s most-visited monument.
Preachers, con men, musicians, actors, scientists, and other permanent residents include:
Patrick Hannan, who discovered gold at Kalgoorlie in Western Australia
Sir Redmond Barry, the judge who sentenced outlaw Ned Kelly to hang
Mendel Balberyszski, who survived the destruction of the Vilnius Ghetto in Lithuania
British opera singer Frederick Federici, who originated the title role of The Mikado in New York and who is said to haunt the Princess Theater, where he died singing Mephistofeles in Faust.
Walter Lindrum, buried beneath a tombstone in the shape of a billiard table
Boxing champion “Gentlemen Jack” John Reid McGowan
The cemetery offers tours both during the day and at night. The next day tour is coming up on July 12, 2017.
It’s not easy to find books about Australian cemeteries in the US. This one is currently going for over $200 on Amazon, although I paid much less on ebay. I don’t know if this indicates a lack of Australian cemetery books in general or if they just aren’t being marketed to the American cemetery aficionado scene.
As cemetery books go, this one is fairly comprehensive, if a little dry. It offers color images of the landscape and grave markers (although it could certainly have more). It has images from historical ephemera. It has page after page of black and white photographs of the cemetery in its prime.
It’s scattered with the kind of historical tidbits I like, like the first burials in each division of the necropolis. The book has whole section on the artistic and architectural styles on display in Rookwood. There are also chapters on the Rookwood Cemetery railroad line, the family of stonemasons who worked in the cemetery for four generations, and the landscape design, with a focus on the original plants that survive.
The Sleeping City could use much more information on the characters buried in Rookwood. There’s barely a mention of Ruby Elizabeth Sterio Adams, who died in 1982, and whose gravestone honors her as Queen of the Gypsies. The chapter profiling people buried here isn’t even 30 pages long. The listings skew Anglo and male.
Since this year is the sesquicentennial of Rookwood Necropolis, I hope a new guide is on its way.
As I mentioned, a paperback copy of The Sleeping City: The Story of Rookwood Necropolis edited by David A. Weston is available on Amazon for a whole lot of money. I got a hard cover copy via ebay for much less.
This photo and the two that follow are taken from The Sleeping City: The Story of Rookwood Necropolis, which I’ll review tomorrow.
Rookwood Necropolis
Hawthorne Avenue, Rookwood, New South Wales 2141, Australia Founded: 1867 Size: 777 acres Number of interments: more than 1 million
In 1862, the government of New South Wales purchased 200 acres of the Hyde Park Estate, owned by Mr. Edward Cohen, near the village of Haslam’s Creek for the site of a new cemetery. Once the necropolis was dedicated, burials began in January 1867. This year, Rookwood Necropolis is celebrating its sesquicentennial.
Nearly 10 miles outside of Sydney’s business district, the original cemetery was designed with divisions for Roman Catholic, Anglican, Wesleyan, Presbyterian, Jewish, and Independent congregations. Each section was sized based on the denomination’s number of adherents in the 1861 census. That original 200-acre cemetery is now only the northwestern corner of this enormous cemetery. The Wesleyan, Presbyterian, Independent, General, and Catholic Cemeteries all have curvilinear layouts, while the Anglican Cemetery is based on a grid.
The original 200-acre cemetery lay along the rail line from Sydney to Parramatta. A spur was built to carry funeral trains into the cemetery to stations serving Anglicans, Catholics, and nonbelievers. The first funeral train ran in April 1864. Train service ended in 1848.
In 1878-9, 577 acres were added to the cemetery. At 777 acres, the Rookwood Necropolis is the largest graveyard in the Southern Hemisphere. More than a million people have been buried or cremated there. A whopping one million epitaphs have been recorded on 600,000 graves and 200,000 crematorium niches. In fact, although it wasn’t the first crematorium in Australia, Rookwood’s Spanish Mission-style crematorium is the oldest that continues to operate. It opened in 1925.
The necropolis is so large that “vistas came be found within it that are completely contained within the cemetery landscape, providing an aesthetic retreat for the senses of the viewer,” according to its National Trust listing. When it was added to the National Trust of Australia (NSW) in 1988, Rookwood was commended for being a “comprehensive and tangible manifestation of the social history of Sydney, documenting the cultural and religious diversity of the Australian community since 1867.” Rookwood serves over 90 culturally diverse communities, also displaying Australia’s diversity of religious beliefs and burial practices in its monuments and memorials.
The National Trust listing goes on to note that “the progressive layering, development, and diversity of styles of memorialization document the conceptual move away from the 19th century perception of death and dying to the more rationalist view prevailing at the present time.” The Friends of Rookwood offer several tours that point out historical points of interest, including some twilight tours. I’ll link to the 2017 tour schedule below.
More recently, Rookwood acknowledged that the Dharug people—part of the oldest continuous culture in the world—are the traditional custodians of their land.
The largest public open space within urban Sydney, Rookwood serves as a haven for birds and native fauna, including 19 species of frogs and reptiles. In addition to native brushtail possums and grey-headed flying foxes, the cemetery hosts colonies of imported rabbits, hares, and foxes. Several species of cuckoos and honeyeaters breed in the cemetery trees. A large spectrum of birds migrate through. The cemetery also provides habitat for two endangered plant species: the downy wattle and the small-leaved Dillwynia.
Buried here are Peter Dawson, a singer and composer who became famous as a gramophone recording artist; Louisa Lawson, a suffragette who owned a newspaper and wrote poetry and short stories; John Fairfax, who emigrated from England with five pounds and later purchased the Sydney Herald; and Roy Rene, who performed as Australia’s most popular vaudeville star Mo McCackie.
Rookwood has a large War Graves area, some of which commemorates the Australian landing at Gallipoli during World War I. Many of the graves are cenotaphs in memory of soldiers buried in Europe or whose bodies were never recovered. The cemetery has a thoughtful video on their website.
A paperback copy of The Sleeping City: The Story of Rookwood Necropolis edited by David A. Weston is available on Amazon for a whole lot of money. I got a hard cover copy via ebay for much less.
Click here to sign up for my monthly mailing list, which will keep you up to date on my speaking schedule and upcoming projects. As a thank you, you'll receive "4Elements," a short ebook that showcases one of my favorite cemetery essays, a travel essay, and two short stories, spanning from urban fantasy to science fiction.
I had the honor of being a guest on Blueprint for Living on Australia’s ABC network last Friday. We talked about what draws people to cemeteries, what they might find there, and why it’s worth going out of your way to visit graves of people you don’t know. Here is the link to the podcast:
The necropolis is so large that “vistas came be found within it that are completely contained within the cemetery landscape, providing an aesthetic retreat for the senses of the viewer,” according to its National Trust listing. When it was added to the National Trust of Australia (NSW) in 1988, Rookwood was commended for being a “comprehensive and tangible manifestation of the social history of Sydney, documenting the cultural and religious diversity of the Australian community since 1867.” Rookwood serves over 90 culturally diverse communities, also displaying Australia’s diversity of religious beliefs and burial practices in its monuments and memorials.
Buried here are Peter Dawson, a singer and composer who became famous as a gramophone recording artist; Louisa Lawson, a suffragette who owned a newspaper and wrote poetry and short stories; John Fairfax, who emigrated from England with five pounds and later purchased the Sydney Herald; and Roy Rene, who performed as Australia’s most popular vaudeville star Mo McCackie.