The remains of 1,331 bodies have now been found on the site of some school construction at Sandy Bay in southern Hobart. Hundreds more are expected to be discovered. The land was the former Queenborough Cemetery which was used until 1935.
Speaking to the ABC, school principal Dr Rob McEwan said he was “surprised, shocked with the scale of what we were dealing with”.
“We certainly didn’t anticipate that the exhumation process that we’re now involved with, so it’s probably a six-month delay and a significant cost blowout that we didn’t anticipate….”
“It has now become clear very few of the previous exhumations had occurred on the site of the current building works.”
Principal, Dr McEwan speaking with the ABC.
The cemetery’s story
The original Queenbrough Cemetery opened in 1873 and more than 3,000 people were laid to rest there. By 1913, the Cemetery Trust had run out of money and the cemetery was sold to Hobart City Council a couple of years later.
The cemetery was used until 1935 and, about 25 years later, in 1961, the Hutchins School and its sporting grounds were built on the site.
Shortly before the school was built, any cemetery-type stuff was removed. That is headstones, memorials etc. According to the Sandy Bay Historical Society, “Apparently, if no one claimed a grave when they finally closed the cemetery in 1961, the remaining stones were turned over and reused as pavers etc at the Cornelian Bay Cemetery.”
(Reusing old headstones as pavers and roadbase is pretty standard across Australia. And building on top of cemeteries is common too – here’s an earlier blog of mine.)
Chatting to me via Facebook, the historical society said, “As far as we know families were contacted in early 1960 re interment at the Cornelian Bay Cemetery.”
Attempts to contact families also happened a decade prior. You see, in 1953 there was an idea to make the cemetery into a park, but it ended up being too expensive, and tracing the families of the deceased was too complicated.
This 1953 article in The Mercury makes it clear that any exhumations would be carried out with the permission of relatives. With more than 3,000 people buried there decades prior, it’s no surprise that many families or relatives could not be contacted. Without family permission, the bodies stayed where they were, both in the 50s and, one would assume, again in the 60s when families/relatives could again not be traced.
According to the ABC, Ann Ricketts of the Sandy Bay Historical Society was not surprised to hear that more remains had been found.
“If you talk to old boys who were going to Hutchins in the 1960s when they were building the senior school, they mention they can remember coffins being brought up,” she said.
What now?
Archaeologists are using standard methods to deal with the remains. That is, each set of remains is being put in a box, an ossuary. What’s really cool is that each box will have an identification plate. Yes, the burial records and maps are intact and being used to identify the dead!
Australian cemeteries have poor form when it comes to maintaining and securing old burial records, so this is brilliant news.
The reinterment is going to be interesting
The remains will be buried/reinterred in the Cornelian Bay Cemetery. But what will they do with up to 1,800 ossuaries? Will a large grave be dug, and boxes laid on top of each other? Or perhaps laid in a trench?
I say trench because it’s not uncommon that, in these circumstances, the boxes are laid side-by-side in a trench. It was done with dozens of indigenous remains in the Kimberley at Fitzroy Crossing in 2018. There’s a good photo in this ABC article.
And it’s alleged that the same thing was done to the missing remains of Wolston Park Mental Hospital patients 80 years ago. I wrote about that too (see below).
I have sought comment from Millingtons, the cemetery operator, about how they plan to deal with such a huge number of reinterments.
Memorialising the deceased
I’m stoked to read that, once the exhumations have been finalised, a permanent memorial will be erected at Cornelian Bay Cemetery. And records of the excavation and reinterment, the location of the original remains, and the identification of the deceased will be on the public record.
Check out this ABC article for more.
4 Responses
My grandfather, Frederick Humphries, died in Hobart on 3January, 1900 and was buried at Queensborough cemetery. His name is not among the names released to date but I will follow this story with interest.
My comments are about the Balmain Cemetery in Sydney which opened in 1868 & accepted 10,608 interrments before being closed in 1912. On Trish Mack’s website there is a thumbnail of council workers with draught horses & chains in the 1950’s knocking down all the headstones & chiselling them into the correct shape to form a retaining wall (flat on their faces so the inscriptions cannot be read) in what is now a memorial park. Given that descendants paid good money for these headstones & the epitaphs on them, could these headstones not at least have been photographed before destruction, or stood around the perimeter to form the retaining wall as I have seen done at English Churches where they needed the land for car parking. At least an army of family historians are now addressing this to some extent & people should be aware that there are 3 current groups involved in this : Auscemindex, Find-a-Grave & Billion Graves to which they can volunteer to assist in this effort.
Goodness, Rowena. We really do have a terrible history when it comes to our cemeteries, don’t we? Thank you for those insights. It’s wonderful that so many people are researching family histories. Our history is too important to let disappear. Lisa
it’s really interesting… and will be watching. cornelian Bay isn’t private though. it’s on a long lease to milling, 50 years I think… Southern cemetery regional trust leased five cemeteries, two millingtons, and over the years they’ve purchased four of them, but they haven’t purchased cornelian bay. That’s still technically owned by the state government. also interested in what happens to that lease. The records from the meeting of the trust that leased the cemeteries to millingtons, are public record on trove. very good article though. it’s not much talked about here, they are too worried about their bloody stadium.