‘Modern innovations?’ Ideal vs. reality in colonial cemeteries of nineteenth-century New South Wales

Abstract

The public general cemetery was an invention of the Victorians. The philosophy that informed the creation of cemeteries—the cemetery ideal—tried to overcome the perceived negative affect of decomposing corpses on the morals and health of the living. It rejected small, overcrowded burial grounds in favour of large extramural cemeteries containing fine monuments and landscaping that consoled and educated. The history of cemeteries in the Victorian era is often portrayed as a ‘celebration of death’, the triumph of the landscaped garden cemetery. This article, drawing upon the evidence of several parliamentary inquiries, contrasts the cemetery ideal with the reality of cemetery management and burial practices in colonial New South Wales. Aspects of the cemetery ideal were adopted in New South Wales. However, the transformation of the cemetery landscape was superficial and in later years many cemeteries experienced the same problems of overcrowding and neglect as the condemned churchyards. The overgrown, neglected condition of many cemetery landscapes by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries challenges the strength of remembrance and commemoration celebrated in the cemetery ideal, and suggests that cemeteries were not always the respected and sacred places as portrayed in cemetery historiography and popular memory.