07/01/2022 Walking in Newtown 1: Camperdown Cemetery

One of my favourite morning walk destinations is the walled remnant of the Camperdown Cemetery which includes St Stephens church and is surrounded by the wide open spaces of the Camperdown Memorial Rest park.

The cemetery has a long and interesting history, which you can read about in detail here.  It's the final resting place of  lots of important people from Australia's early history, but there's lots of unimportant people also buried within the cemetery.  No body knows their names.  They include mass graves from the measles epidemics in the 1800s and early 1900s, paupers who were buried by the state, and indigenous Australians. I like that someone has thought of them, and included this acknowledgement of their existence.

The cemetery opened in 1849 and 18 years later it was full and causing quite some grief to its neighbours on account of the not-so-rigorous burial procedures of the day.  It ceased selling plots in 1868 and three years later St Stephen's was built in the grounds, which explains why some of the headstones are so close to the church walls.

For the next 70-odd years the cemetery trustees and the public argued about what to do with the cemetery whose increasing wild and unmaintained grounds attracted all kinds of vagabonds and anti-social activities. It all came to a head with a particularly nasty murder in 1946 after which the government of the day resumed most of the cemetery, built a wall around the remaining 4 acres, collected all the remaining headstones outside and lined them up against the wall, and turned the rest of the space into a park.

I like to wander about inside the walls, taking photos and finding out about the residents.  Let me introduce you to a few of them:

The victims of the wreck of the Dunbar have their own alcove in the cemetery. On 20 August 1857 one Captain Green made the ill-considered decision to try to sail in through the heads of Sydney Harbour rather than waiting for both calmer weather and morning so that he could see what he was doing. Suffice to say that this was not a good decision: the Dunbar sank, only one crew member survived and this was not the unfortunate Captain Green who gets his own grave with an anchor on top to make sure he stays there.  Five others from the Dunbar are in the mass grave beside him, an arrangement determined in part by the difficulty that was had in both retrieving and identifying the bodies from the wreck.

Scattered between the graves are random endangered historical monuments and markers, collected by one Mr Gledhill (a trustee of the cemetery from 1924 until his death in 1962) and brought to the cemetery for preservation.  These include the pediment from the Maritime Service Board building circa 1850s;

and the Erskineville water fountain, now a focal point for wedding photographs.

and an anchor from Morts Dock, attached to a chain from the shipwrecked SS Collaroy.

At the entry to the cemetery is a Moreton Bay Fig planted in 1848 which is, along with the other trees planted in the cemetery at the same time, one of the oldest trees in the Newtown area.  

And beside the fig tree is the restored Cemetery Lodge.

The cemetery and the park are now one of the largest green spaces in Newtown. By day the walled section is full of people wandering around the graves, walking dogs, taking photos, watching birds, having picnics and (gasp!) canoodling on the green spaces between the graves.  Lots of children (and some adults) channel their inner monkey on the Moreton Bay Fig. The wide green spaces of the park outside the walls are full of more of the same with the addition of joggers, kite flyers, bicycles, strategically placed coffee vans, and the occasional equally strategically placed police van.

At night, so rumour has it, the dark side of the cemetery emerges.  There's tales of a ghost, of course the murder, a multitude of nefarious activities involving both legal and illegal drugs, music, parties, and general wild and anti-social behaviour once the lights are out.  This is all hearsay, mind you.  I haven't been there at night and don't plan to do so.

Thank you for coming with me to the cemetery. I'll see you on our next exploratory walk, discovering all the things that can be seen around the streets of Newtown, or further afield on a bicycle.