Where are the remains? My submission to Wolston Park Hospital review

Brisbane’s Wolston Park Mental Hospital closed in 2001, but it has been the subject of many allegations of sexual abuse, beatings, and chemical restraint from the 1950s to 1980s.

A review of health services provided at the hospital is almost complete. Sixty-six people were interviewed by review leader Professor Robert Bland AM and his small team. Prof Bland is putting the final touches on his report and subsequent recommendations to the Queensland Department of Health. The scope of the report is to focus on systemic issues at the hospital amid the allegations of patient abuse.

The hospital’s former cemeteries and the unknown location of the remains of several thousand patients sit outside the scope of the review, but the review team received significant interest from family members raising this as an issue. As such, the subject will form part of the review’s recommendations.

Having first started exploring and blogging after this shameful travesty in late 2017, I was asked to share my research and was interviewed by the review panel in late April. I was also invited to make a submission that would be included as an appendix to the review.

I made a series of recommendations of my own, directed at the Qld Government and the Goodna Cemetery Trust. I also suggested additional resources to help search for the holy grail: the missing asylum burial register.

When it’s finished, the review will be presented to Qld Health and hopefully released publicly. The asylum/hospital has been surrounded by secrecy since 1865. It’s time the lid was lifted. Below is my submission to the review. I am thrilled to be able to put this story on the public record.

Where are the remains of thousands of patients?

Thousands of ‘inmates’ and patients died at the Wolston Park Mental Hospital. The asylum has had many names since 1865. As a child growing up nearby, I knew it as Wolston Park, and that’s what I will call it throughout this review submission.

Prior to 1945, most deceased patients were interred in one of the hospital’s three cemeteries. Those not buried there were likely to have had family bury them in their hometowns.

After the cemetery closures and supposed mass exhumations, the locations of the patients buried at Wolston Park are unknown. There are no available government records that disclose the number of burials, nor their names. How could the whereabouts of thousands of unnamed mental patients who died within a state government institution be undocumented?

It was a question I asked myself in 2017 when I stumbled across hundreds of old grave markers organised into a memorial and a small bronze plaque at Goodna Cemetery: “In memory of all those who died at Brisbane Mental Hospital and whose final resting place is unknown”.

Down the rabbit hole I went, hoping to unearth the stories of these forgotten people and Queensland’s overlooked history of the final disposition of those who died in institutionalised care.

Wolston Park’s three cemeteries

Cemetery 1. The first cemetery was on flood-prone land where Woogaroo Creek meets the Brisbane River. An anonymous contributor to the Queensland Times (25 Feb 1869) got it right when they wrote, “The graveyard is on the bank of the river, and the first flood will take all the dead lunatics down to Brisbane”.

Cemetery 2.  After being inundated by at least two large floods in the 1890s, a second cemetery was established on much higher ground.

An article in the Queensland Times on 22 October 1910 reports that the second cemetery was closed to make room for two new wards, but “Dr Ellerton had all the remains carefully exhumed and reinterred in the third cemetery”.

A subsequent article in The Telegraph on 30 June 1911 quoted Home Secretary J. G. Appel as saying, “the bodies removed numbered 198”.

Brisbane historian Thom Blake’s ‘Wolston Park – Police Academy Cultural Heritage Survey’ states that more than 1,500 people died at the institution between 1895 and 1912 and were presumably buried in the second cemetery, possibly the third cemetery.

In summary: 1,500 dead, most buried on site, 198 reportedly exhumed.

Cemetery 3. Patients were buried in this cemetery on the hospital’s north-eastern outskirts from the early 1910s.

Blake’s ‘Wolston Park – Police Academy Cultural Heritage Survey’ states that between 1914 and 1940, approximately 4670 patients died at the hospital, an average of 155 per year. He presumed most were buried in the third cemetery.

The cemetery grave markers were crude concrete blocks, about one-and-a-half feet high, with a number and the letter A (for asylum) or LA (lunatic asylum).

The closure of the third cemetery and mass exhumations

In 1945, the almost-full third cemetery was closed to improve the view from the new Repatriation Pavilion for “mentally unbalanced and war-affected” soldiers.

There are no available government records that indicate how many patients were exhumed from the third cemetery. A front-page article in The Queensland Times (29 Nov 1946) reported, “The mass exhumation of 2,800 bodies from the Goodna Mental Hospital Cemetery to the Goodna Public Cemetery is half completed”.

On 11 Dec 1946, the Minister for Health, Mr T Foley, told Parliament the “work of exhumation is being performed by an employee of the hospital, assisted by four borderline patients who volunteered to assist to do the work”.  

Local oral histories and an eyewitness

Goodna Cemetery has records of around 200 reinterments from the hospital cemetery. Trust secretary Ipswich Cr Paul Tully said he was told by former hospital worker and later council alderman Ted Richardson that those 200-or-so people were buried at Goodna with a proper burial. Ted said that those who had been buried for more than 30 years were not exhumed and that there had been a cleanup at the hospital in the 70s with all burial records destroyed.

Meantime, Ferg Brindley was a teenage apprentice carpenter who worked at Wolston Park in the late 1940s and early 50s. He told me that he made hundreds of small wooden boxes that were used to hold the remains of exhumed patients.

Ferg told me that “They didn’t dig the whole coffin up. They dug down, smashed the top open and took the remains out and put them in a box. As far as I know, all the coffins are still there. But I imagine there are still some whole corpses there. I doubt if they removed the whole lot.”

He said that the boxes of remains were buried end to end in trenches at Goodna Cemetery. (Ossuaries/boxes buried in trenches is not an uncommon technique for mass reinterments.)

“I had to go out there one day. I saw the trenches open … the trenches weren’t very deep – a metre, metre-and-a-half. It’s easy digging, sand,” he told me.

Using Ferg’s recollections of Goodna Cemetery, maps, and aerial photos, the possible site of the trenches was in the vicinity of the cemetery’s Sinclair Memorial Garden. In May 2021, I relayed this information and a transcript of my interview with Ferg to the Goodna Cemetery Trust.

The hospital’s cemeteries today

Over the years, the sites of cemeteries 2 and 3 have been significantly encroached upon. Now under the jurisdiction of the Qld Police Service, the sites are acknowledged on the Qld Heritage Register as having the potential to “yield information about the treatment of deceased patients and burial practices at the hospital; spatial distribution and arrangement of graves; and the extent and methods of reinterments”.

Those cemetery sites and the remains that lie within are an important part of our history, as are the grave markers standing in a faraway corner of the Goodna Cemetery. For so many, the only record of their unfortunate existence was relegated to a number, their names and identities lost.

Lisa Herbert – submitted May 29, 2025.