Rookwood Cemetery preservation efforts uncover personal family history amid expansion concerns

Robyn Hawes was trying to save the memory of thousands of graves at Sydney's Rookwood Cemetery when she stumbled unknowingly on the names of her own relatives.

In 1981, Ms Hawes, with the Society of Australian Genealogists, moved to transcribe 750,000 graves at Rookwood after a road project had removed a swathe of headstones, resulting in four sections being effectively lost to history.

She said the society was worried that more of the cemetery, which had no heritage listing, might meet a similar fate.

"We expected that maybe that would all be demolished and built over with units or whatever," Ms Hawes said.

Ms Hawes looked up one day while transcribing to see names she recognised — Edward and Sarah McCamley, her great-grandparents who had come to Australia from Ireland in the 1850s.

"I knew they were my great-grandparents, but I didn't know very much about them," Ms Hawes said.

Ms Hawes is the president of the Friends of Rookwood group, which runs tours at the cemetery and raises money for restorations for the older parts of the cemetery.

It took eight years to transcribe all the graves at Rookwood. At the same time, in 1989, the Heritage Council of NSW placed a permanent conservation order on the cemetery, and 10 years later it was upgraded to the State Heritage Register.

Biggest necropolis in the Southern Hemisphere

Founded in 1867 on 80 hectares in an area formerly known as Haslams Creek, the cemetery popped up as Sydney was growing and the original cemetery at Devonshire Street, where Central Station is now, was getting full.

It was once serviced by a train link from Central twice a day on the so-called mortuary line, which had three stops inside the cemetery.

From the beginning, the cemetery was divided up into six denominations: Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, Wesleyan, Independent and Jewish.

Since then, the cemetery has grown to facilitate graves for 140 religions and 250 different languages.

Metropolitan Memorial Parks (MMP) manages 190 hectares of Rookwood, which is about two-thirds of the cemetery, while Catholic Cemeteries and Crematoria manages the other third.

The cemetery will celebrate its 159-year history on Sunday this weekend with a heritage day festival that includes a grave-digging demonstration and tours of the graves of famous Australians including suffrage pioneer Louisa Lawson, retailer David Jones and biscuit maker William Arnott.

"There are more than 150 years of Sydney's stories here, told through the people, monuments, architecture and landscape," MMP CEO Denise Ora said.

MMP says cemetery needs to expand

Despite its immense size, which rivals that of many Sydney suburbs, the cemetery is running out of room, and MMP is looking for ways to expand the cemetery.

In August last year, a proposal by MMP to convert the nearby Carnarvon Golf Course into a cemetery drew backlash from the local Labor MP and members of the community.

The final decision on the proposal is with the NSW state government.

Ms Ora said the cemetery would run out of "at-need" space for some faith groups in two or three years.

"At-need" space is a burial plot purchased after a death occurs, rather than planned ahead of time.

She said this was particularly a worry for faith communities that require burial, such as Muslim and Orthodox.

Ms Ora said Sydney needed to look at sustainable burial practices, so similar issues with burial ground shortages were not revisited in 100 years' time.

Metropolitan Sydney has a burial rate of 31 per cent, above the average burial rate for NSW at 27 per cent, according to MMP.

Meanwhile, Sydney's cremation rate is at 69 per cent, below the state average of 73 per cent.

One sustainable burial practice is limited tenure, or a renewable interment right, which came into being in NSW in 2018.

Under limited tenure, remains may be kept at a site for between 25 and 99 years before the site becomes available for reuse.

Ms Ora stresses that this system is not compulsory in NSW and would not be compatible with all faiths and traditions.