THROUGH a painstaking process of detective work and research, Wonthaggi historian and passionate cemetery archivist, Noelene Lyons, has been able to identify the resting place of all but 683 of the 6908 people buried at the Wonthaggi Cemetery.
Hundreds of entries in the Bass Coast Shire Council’s official register of burial sites and grave ownership still need to be corrected.
But according to Noelene, her five and a half years’ work, together with the support of another former member of the Wonthaggi Cemetery Friends group, Renee Loeckenhoff, who had responsibility for the all-important veterans’ graves’ records, is substantially complete.
“The reality is that we are never going to know the exact resting place of those 683, which is disappointing, but at least we know who they are and that they are buried at the Wonthaggi Cemetery,” Ms Lyons said.
Among them, for example, are the 43 people who were buried in the original mine cemetery, from 1909 to 1911, before the Wonthaggi Cemetery was gazetted.
“There are two gravestones in that area (lawn at the front right of the cemetery), including a coal miner’s daughter’s grave which is still visited by family members, but no records have come to light of where people were buried there,” Ms Lyons said.
As for the others, some 640, their final resting place will likely never be known, a result of poor recordkeeping, something that has dogged the history of the Wonthaggi Cemetery, right up to the present.
“One of my neighbours bought a double plot at the cemetery some years ago and went up to visit the site sometime later only to find that it had been recently dug up and a new burial had taken place there.
“They ultimately got their money back, and legal fees covered, and they were allocated a new site by the shire but it was a difficult process.”
Ms Lyons said incorrect records had resulted in family members being wrongly advised about the location of a parents’ or grandparents’ grave, only to erect a headstone on someone else’s resting place.
“Sometimes it’s a simple administrative error. We had one recently with the two Binns brothers, William Binns (1899-1920) and Matthew Binns (1869-1917), where signs were erected on sites that proved not to be their graves.
“They had the section right and the grave number right, but not the row. The Binns brothers were actually buried 100 metres away. There have been a lot of incidents like that.”
More distressing, however, have been cases where plots have been sold to families but subsequently found to be occupied by others, without the records to show for it.
In fact, after researching the records of 18 cemeteries, most of them in Gippsland, including Kilcunda, San Remo, Outtrim, Meeniyan, Foster, Woodside and Greenmount near Yarram; Ms Lyons is of the opinion that the Wonthaggi Cemetery records are among the worst she has seen.
“Most of the cemeteries have kept meticulous records and are an absolute credit to their trustees and managers but there have been a number of periods of time when the records at Wonthaggi have been poorly kept.
“At one stage, the names of the people being buried at Wonthaggi were kept, but incredibly, not the location of their graves.
“It makes it very difficult when you are contacted by family members wanting to know where their relatives have been buried. We do know now all the names of the people who have been buried at Wonthaggi, some 6908, but we don’t know where 683 of them are buried and we will probably never know.”
Ms Lyons said this was a particular problem when trying to identify the graves of ex-service people with which the Commonwealth War Graves Commission took a serious and on-going interest.
“Together with Renee, we have been able to identify the resting place of most of our ex-service personnel and working with the RSL, Renee has been able to pass those records on to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and we have been able to have a number of those war graves rededicated.
“They’re no longer able to source those white headstones and crosses but they have been suitably rededicated where necessary.”
However, while Ms Lyons was given the voluntary responsibility, by the cemetery trust, of trying to put the records in order, there has been a falling out between the former Friends group and the Bass Coast Shire Council, to the point now that they won’t deal with Ms Lyons or accept her corrections to the official record.
This impasse, and a general inability to work with cemetery volunteers had its ultimate expression recently when the shire council, the official trustees of the Wonthaggi Cemetery, threw up their hands and declared they couldn’t manage either the Wonthaggi or the San Remo cemetery to the satisfaction of the community.
They voted that the only solution was to hand over management to a Melbourne-based cemetery group.
Ms Lyons says that’s nonsense.
“There are dozens of community cemeteries with similar burial numbers to Wonthaggi that are well looked after and operate successfully in the black locally including Inverloch, Korumburra and Leongatha.
“All you need is a couple of local people with careful attention to detail, an interest in the preservation of history and respect for the community to oversee the work and a local committee. You don’t need Melbourne management for a cemetery the size of Wonthaggi with fewer than 50 burials a year.
“I’d be more than happy to work with a group like that and we’d find other volunteers,” she said.
There are still hundreds of Wonthaggi records that need correcting, including dozens of cases where the people supposedly buried in certain locations are buried elsewhere and where people have been allocated what they believe to be vacant plots, which are already occupied.
“After the poor treatment we’ve received from the shire, I’m not going to hand over the errors we have identified. I’ll get in touch with Handley and Anderson and hand over the records to them.
“It’s a public place, so we can still work with the RSL and Commonwealth War Graves Commission,” said Ms Lyons.
She said the condition of the cemetery was close to what the community expected several years ago, and while drainage was an on-going issue during the winter, there was no reason why it couldn’t continue to be managed locally, if not by the shire, then by handing it back to a newly appointed trust.
In fact, the recently appointed maintenance group has the cemetery looking the best it has for years, and the small but adequate public toilet is open and regularly cleaned.
With the records now substantially in order, Ms Lyons believes the Wonthaggi Cemetery could easily be managed by a committed council or handed back to a community-based trust.
If not, she says extensive community consultation is mandated by the Victorian Health Department (see Manual for Victorian Class B cemetery trusts Revised April 2022 page 33) before a Class B Cemetery Trust can be either abolished or amalgamated.
Ms Lyons expects the process of handing over the two local cemeteries, at Wonthaggi and San Remo, to the Melbourne-based Southern Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust (SMCT) to take well beyond 12 months to achieve, to cost a significant amount of money and is ultimately not in the local community’s best interests.
