2024 - Year in review
We are thinking of the 48 families who would have just experienced their first Christmas and New Year without their loved one. We extend our compassion and understanding and hope you feel that your person is resting in peace in our well cared for and tranquil cemetery.
Once again a very busy year at our cemetery with a number of projects completed all thanks to our incredible volunteer team.
Here are just some of the things we achieved this year:
We discovered a number of unmarked children’s graves all under one particular strawberry tree so decided to make this tree a feature. We marked the graves with painted stones and made a little fairy door for the tree. Then quite unexpectadly different things started appearing under and around the tree, fairy statues, garden gnomes, a bird box and wind chimes. Thank you to the local community who secretly contributed to this area. It is such a joy every time we find something new under the children’s tree.
The white wash was completed on the front of the office as part of the office restoration thanks to a grant from Living Heritage. The team from Heritage Victoria will attend the cemetery at the end of January to inspect the office restoration.
We applied and received a Department of Health cemetery grant to back fill the next section of drain along the main entrance road.
We built a pond underneath one of the taps so the wildlife had a permanent supply of water.
We celebrated International Women’s Day by unveiling a memorial to Anne Paulson an incredible artist who lay in an unmarked grave for 158 years. The memorial takes the form of an art easel which was welded by volunteer Lance Bell. It was unveiled by the Hon Maree Edwards MP who has always been very supportive of the work we do at the cemetery.
Lance also helped create another beautiful addition to our cemetery by utilising the stump of a tree that was over 140 years old. A crystal tree now emerges from the stump of that historical old tree and it’s a captivating sculpture that lights up when the sun shines. (Thanks to Reggie and Ray for the inspiration)
The grave of Fanny Finch was added to Her Place Museum and a QR code now stands beside her grave so visitors can scan the code and read more about this incredible woman
We designed and built Castlemaine’s largest insect motel which currently houses a number of guests!
We purchased signs for each different section of the cemetery to help visitors navigate their way around the cemetery. These signs were purchased with a grant from Mount Alexander Council. A sub committee of volunteers are working on researching a number of very interesting people buried in our cemetery and a self guided walk will be developed from their research and launched in 2025.
We planted another 14 trees throughout the cemetery - more tree planting planned for mid 2025
We designed and built a beautiful Wisteria Arbor and turned an ugly neglected part of the cemetery into something beautiful. The arbor will be lined with ashes urn memorials and it really is a beautiful area of our cemetery. If you are interested in reserving one of these memorials please contact us.
2024 was the year we also started to address the tragic past of our cemetery and researched different ways we could acknowledge and fix what ever damage we could.
We had an article in the Age detailing the desecration of graves that saw the destruction of around 3,000 burials from 1960’s up until 2020. We made the decision to not remain silent in order to keep past wrongs covered up. We will continue to work on finding ways to acknowledge the past so history is never repeated.
One of the ways we acknowledged this tragedy was to design and build a Pioneers Memorial Garden. It’s a beautiful space that descendants can place a memorial plaque in memory of their ancestor whose grave was desecrated and no longer exists. This garden won an award from the Cemeteries and Crematoria Association of Victoria and was voted on by our peers in the industry. It was built by volunteers Peter Milne and Lance Bell.
We also researched the headstones leaning along the wall of the main entrance and discovered we could return eight of those headstones back to their correct graves. These headstones were removed as part of the desecration of graves that occurred in the 1960’s. All the cement for this project was kindly donated by some very kind people who believed in what we were doing.
Our last project for the year is a new stone retaining wall which is an extension of the headstone wall. Over the years our volunteers have found pieces of broken graves and monuments that were discarded in the bush during the desecration of the graves in the 1960’s. We have been storing all these broken pieces for many years now. The wall was designed around using these pieces of broken graves and it starts where the headstone wall finishes. It seemed like the right place for these broken pieces. The wall has steps in it as well, where those steps lead to is our first project for 2025!
We received so many positive comments throughout the year from our lovely local community and followers on social media. The feedback really makes so much difference. We’ve also had some really useful constructive feedback which we welcome as we continually strive to improve. Our feedback forms can be downloaded via this page.
We certainly received a lot of practical and welcomed donations this year including:
Loads of beautiful bulbs of jonquils, daffs and bluebells
2 Maple trees
A brand new whipper snipper
A $100 Bunnings gift voucher
Around 10 bird boxes
Bags of cement and tubes of silicon
A huge box of succulents
A heap of agapanthus plants
Thank you for your continued support. If you would like to volunteer at our cemetery please get in touch, there are so many different ways you can assist our historical Castlemaine Cemetery.