Two rare wooden gravestones and two footstones have been returned to their rightful homes thanks to three local residents.
Parks Victoria ranger Lachlan Cullum, who discovered the artefacts in a storage shed in Wattle Gully, contacted Castlemaine Cemetery Trust chair Debra Tranter who went straight out to have a look.
“If a family couldn’t afford a stone mason they would usually carve the wooden headstone, so they are handmade with a lot of love. They are so rare,” Debra said.
“As soon as I got them I thought, ‘The only person who’s going to know about these is Jeannie (Lister from the Vaughan Cemetery),” Debra said.
“I took a photo and sent it to her that night.”
Jeannie instantly recognised the unique and rare wooden headstones. She even had a photo of them at the Vaughan Cemetery from 30 years earlier.
“I remember seeing the wooden headstones at Vaughan when I was a little girl,” Jeannie said.
“Parks Victoria looks after the old burial ground at Vaughan, people know it as the old Chinese cemetery, and they took them about 30 years ago to put them into storage, because they were concerned they might be taken or burned, and we have voracious white ants at Vaughan.”
The local historian did a little digging and was able to locate the death certificates of the two little girls from the initials on the footstones (it was an old English custom to have a footstone with the initials of the deceased as well as a headstone).
Among some of the earliest burials, the two girls had been buried in the Castlemaine Cemetery. One footstone belonged to a two-year-old girl, Emma Anne Barber, who died in 1854 and the other belonged to Mary Roach, who died in 1852 at three weeks of age.
Amazingly, Debra was able to find Emma’s headstone among others that had been salvaged and are on display at the Castlemaine Cemetery. With a little work, some water and good lighting, she was able to make out the words on the historic stone:
Go home my friends and shed no tears, I must lay here ’til Christ appears. Short was my time, long is my rest. Christ took me when he thought it best.
Locating Emma’s burial site on a historic map of the cemetery, Debra said she was likely removed when a series of graves and bodies were dug up in the 1960s.
“To destroy a little girl’s grave is very sad,” Debra said.
“To have that back is amazing, but it’s a sad part of a tragic history and the only way to stop it happening again is to talk about it.”
