"They say, if you wander long enough, you'll find the one. It will be of cracked stone and straggling grass, if there's a statue, it will be headless, and it'll be colder than any other place in the cemetery. That's when they say you've found the one, the one that belongs to the ghosts."
The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
It's the oldest official public burial site in the Canberra region and while the Queanbeyan Riverside Cemetery is the final resting place for some of the area's most prominent citizens, it's more than just where they sleep the eternal sleep.
As with any town, the cemetery is a physical chronicle of its journey as well as a monument to its people and progress.
Opened in 1846, while not as extensive as Sydney's Rookwood, the largest Victorian-era necropolis (literally, "city of the dead") in the Southern Hemisphere - and said to be Australia's 13th most haunted location - there's definitely more to Riverside than meets the eye.
Often thought to contain a mere few hundred gravesites, there's actually almost 4,000, including many unmarked.
Each of the headstones has their own tale to tell. Stories of injustice, murder, madness and suicide are plentiful. This includes the first victim of a capital crime in the ACT, 11 month old Charles Porter, poisoned by his father, Bertram Porter in 1932.
Similarly drownings, epidemics and disasters. Women dying in childbirth and tragedies involving young people and children are heartbreakingly common, revealing much about the harshness of life in the district in those early times - and the swiftness of death.
And then there's the plentiful mysteries, involving both the seen and the unseen.
Regularly do visitors report significant temperature differences in the one spot; produce any number of photos with unusual lights and orbs; tell tales of gates swinging open, apparently of their own volition; and even encounter shadowy figures along the fenceline, that disappear on approach.
In the mid-1970s, it was reported that council workers were very reluctant to dig graves there, apparently having to be “urged” to do so.
Another of its anomalies include a number of markers that, for reasons unclear, are "out of alignment".
In the Christian tradition, bodies are buried with their feet pointing eastwards in order to allow them to rise more easily come Judgement Day. Outside this is relatively rare and usually reserved for the likes of those deemed "irretrievable sinners".
Most unusually, in Riverside there's a single one that's "backwards". It belongs to Flora Blundell Snr and her 16-year-old daughter, also Flora - said to be the ghostly resident of Blundell's Cottage on the edge of Lake Burley Griffin. Why their small monument is so positioned remains unclear.
When Queanbeyan first came into being, burials were a rather haphazard affair with many dictated by the conditions of the period.
Private graveyards appeared as early as 1837 and include the likes of that at Lambrigg, Tharwa, where William Farrer, saviour of the Australian wheat industry, lies.
Churches such as the Anglican St John's in Canberra, built by the man responsible for the impressive stone dwelling that became Duntroon College, Robert Campbell, catered for their own denominations.
More often though, hurried bush burials were the order of the day and the first Europeans to die in the town were interred along the banks of the river and in the area that's now the Showground.
When an intoxicated William Clarker was killed in 1842 after being hurled from his out-of-control dray along the road to Jerrabomberra, he was literally popped into a hole in a local paddock. The discovery of what may have been his remains in 1991 revealed something more startling than just the undignified details of his death: it brought to light the previously forgotten first public burial place on the Limestone Plains.
The unconsecrated, non-denominational Oaks Burial Ground, was located next door to the oldest surviving building in then Queanbeyan, now Oaks Estate ACT, and the town's first pub, the Elmsall Inn. The site is believed to have been in use since 1838, with more than 40 souls interred within, none of which were afforded a burial marker.
The last of these occurred in 1863, an Indian visiting Queanbeyan as part of a travelling troupe, apparently murdered by his compatriots for his share of the takings (it's in fact, quite the unsolved mystery itself - see link).
Becoming a more formal affair from the turn of the 19th century, the dead were required by law to be buried in publicly designated cemeteries. There was also an intention for these to be locations for "contemplative recreation" with “an emphasis on moral improvement through meditation upon graves and memorials.”
In such a spirit, this locality's newest cemetery was laid out by the man responsible for the original town plan, surveyor James Larmer.
The reserve of Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians and Methodists, each were afforded separate sections, approximately one acre apiece to lay their dead (there's at least one Jewish grave and one Maronite - an Eastern Catholic religion - both within the RC section).
Its trustees were important men, among them the first Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, John Polding, Sir Terence Aubrey Murray, owner of the property that today is Government House and first parliamentarian for Queanbeyan, and his brother, Dr James Fitzgerald Murray of Woden.
The first burial took place in 1847. Mrs Anne Powell died at the age of 31, causes unknown, and her impressive headstone boasts different kinds of anomalies. Along with two other spelling errors, forever etched in stone is her hometown of “QUEENbeyan”.
Some of the notable family plots include that of Queanbeyan's first Mayor (1885) John James Wright – again, in an unsolved mystery, for some inexplicable reason, his name doesn't appear on the monument above his grave. It does commemorate two of his sons who lie with him, but not his wife or four daughters for they'd tired of J.J.'s rather eccentric ways - he'd apparently started to go off the rails on the death of his first son and by the end of his life was known for sitting on his balcony and waving a shotgun at anyone who wandered by. Rather scandalously given the times, Mrs Wright divorced him and moved back to Sydney.
Nearby is the Gale family. Leading lights of the community in everything from establishing the local newspaper to seeing Canberra sited next door, they appear to have been afflicted by something similar to the infamous "Kennedy Curse" said to plague the extended family of the former US President.
The Gale's 12-year-old son, Ben, drowned in the Queanbeyan River in 1877. Only a year later, their two-year-old daughter Ettie drowned in a well. The seventh of John's children, Charles, shot his wife Susan in 1903 and served 20 years in prison, while the eldest, Annie, died mysteriously only two years later at the age of 48.
While John's wife predeceased him, the family's "broken column" monument which expresses the idea of death cutting off life in its prime, didn't apply to the patriarch - he lived until just shy of his 100th birthday, dying in 1929.
"Grave furniture" also indicated social status. At another juncture in the Cemetery, there's an avenue of veritable who's-who of early Queanbeyan.
It includes another Mayor, Edwin Land, the town's youngest at just 32 (and also the first to die while in office just seven years later - his son would become the second).
There's also the town's first Police Magistrate, Captain Alured Tasker Faunce, appointed in 1836, and the town's first innkeeper and owner of the previously mentioned Elmsall Inn, William Hunt.
A few of the monuments are unique in the Cemetery.
One with a small trumpeting angel atop belongs to the town's first Matron of the District Hospital of 1861, Mrs Mary Rusten.
Another much larger and quite beautiful angel is that belonging to the Collett family, involved in everything from Council to the Hospital.
Only a single mausoleum has ever existed within its bounds, that of the Blewitt family. A beehive structure with a door into it, it's incorrectly recorded as a vault. Containing some 23 members, in 1980 it collapsed, only the concrete kerbing and a plaque to mark its place remaining. (The local record goes to the McInnes family with some 64 of them laid to rest there).
Numerous graves were also placed outside the fenceline of the cemetery, indicating unconsecrated bounds. As was the norm in earlier times, this generally included those of Aboriginal and Chinese heritage, unbaptised babies, murderers and as they were then known, "lunatics", thought as they were to potentially be "possessed by the devil".
The picturesque river setting for the Queanbeyan Cemetery has long proved something of a heaven and a hell, and the floods that have affected it over the years are some of its more commonly known peculiarities.
While many know of the infamous flood of 1974 in which numerous graves were washed away (though regularly confused with the next which occurred just two years later), the great flood of 1925 was worse.
The most devastating in the town's history, it reached almost 11 metres, destroying the graceful Suspension Bridge of 1901, and even sweeping along with it a seven-roomed house. It also took as many as 100 graves.
With all of these extraordinary stories then, is it so surprising when people suggest strange sounds and sights, unexplained whispers in the dark and events for which they can't rationally account?
Following the second "one in 10,000 year flood" in 1976, there were calls to see Riverside Cemetery closed. This occurred in 1985. However, there's a caveat that allows those with family plots to still be buried there.
One of the very last reserved burial areas belongs to a man by the name of Rheuben Colverwell, the last surviving descendant of one of the first pioneering European families to ever make their home on the Limestone Plains. When Rheuben claims it, he'll take with him a name almost as old as this region itself. But that's a story for another time.
Whether as part of our Mysterious Moonlight Tours, or for an individual sojourn, I encourage people to visit this marvellous heritage site that offers up so much about our past - as well as keeping other things buried as deep as those who lie within.
I do though, also ask that you take care, perhaps even of your own soul, but most importantly, to demonstrate the appropriate mindfulness and respect to those for whom it is their final place of rest.
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