The rolling slopes of the upper Lachlan catchment and the tablelands of the eastern watershed, territories of the Wiradjuri and Gundungurra nations, had been rapidly taken up by European settlers once pathways had opened south and west over the barrier ranges behind Sydney. By mid-century localities of settlement had coalesced to communities to service farms and land holdings, with an air of permanency and post-colonial confidence. People prospered, both from the produce of the land, and from stable employment associated. With community came places of Christian worship to mark succession of generations, and progress and decline in these small populations.
While circumstances of life on the land have changed since, the pattern of early settlement remains traced in the numerous country graveyards dotted through the municipality, expressing the shortness in time of European occupation against the many-generational shaping of the landscape under the stewardship of the nations it displaced, and its radical strangeness compared to the simple order of rural life imposed by a narrow cast broad acre economy.
Rural cemeteries, whether still in use or settling themselves into benevolent neglect, now attract interest from people researching their forebears, retrieving identification with undocumented pasts of struggle and triumph, of communities vanished in the civilising transformation, as self-contained villages gave way to larger centres of trade, education and employment. Gravestones are the markers that these lives mattered, further that settlement had displaced other lives, equally valid; further that the march of progress was one more myth to be assimilated in understanding a contingent occupation of the country.
Rural cemeteries guard other secrets too. Each by virtue of its function reserves a curtilage from agricultural or urban disturbance, representing a plot of countryside that remains largely undisturbed since dedication, implying for the majority a window to pre-settlement times. This fortuitously makes cemeteries sanctuary to a diversity of plant and animal communities that had been sustaining feeding and hunting grounds husbanded over many generations prior to European occupation. The roadside verges along thousand kilometres of secondary country roads hint at the complexity of these interwoven natural communities; so too do the cemeteries.
New interest has been kindled in these invisible banks of biodiversity, along with efforts to see them revalued within a larger recognition of the importance of cross-tenure landscape conservation. Australia, endowed with a rich endemic species assemblage, has an appalling extinction record. Widespread clearing and dominant monocultural practice, once the mark of advanced agriculture, now have been recognised as leaving a legacy of systemic destruction on landscape scale, requiring industrial-scale defense against invasive pests and soil and water degradation; and heavy reliance on energetic, chemical, engineering, and physical inputs. How did productive systems work, unaided, in the past? What does a healthy grassy ecosystem look like? How relevant might this be to farming which aspires to sustainability? These are not fringe questions. They have brought serious crop and livestock scientists, extension experts, agricultural economists, and natural resource managers together. Looking over generations, what makes a farm productive or even viable?
Atttention has converged on landscape scale biodiversity conservation; coupled with fine level attention to microsystems; to the presence or absence of key species; to soil microbial composition; to porousness and weather cycles; to dispersion of genes; to disturbance and repair; to refuges and recolonisation; to rewilding and edge weeding; to biological control and intelligent grazing regimes; to management of ephemeral wetlands; to slowing down runoff; to maintaining hollows and snags; to controlling feral populations; to cooperative cross-tenural strategies; to reskilling, recognising and rewarding a skilled rural workforce around these new parameters of managing land, over and above commodified production.
But we started with cemeteries – in each case no more than a handful of acres, not valued beyond the headstones, and managed against risk of fire, or to allow for sporadic interments.
Nevertheless, underneath this neglect the animals and plants native to the area can flourish. At Bigga cemetery – maintained by the Picker family on a voluntary basis – a recent survey includes 300 native plant species, outnumbering pioneer burials. Plant lists as impressive may emerge from other of the dozen or so rural cemeteries in the Shire, despite their situation surrounded by cleared and grazed paddocks, visited by macropods, and open to the public.and still in use for burials.
Stonequarry Cemetery Reserve
One cemetery where animal and plant lists have been put together is Taralga’s Stonequarry Cemetery, situated in the countryside 4kms from the village, just beneath the brow of the Dividing Range, and one of the oldest still operating. The Cemetery reserve of 6 acres comprises an active graveyard, with a fenced off annex, intended as overflow, but also for unconsecrated burials. The Stonequarry reserve had been excised from farmland in the 1850s, although likely not fully cleared at the time. Responsibility for the reserve had reverted to the shire in the 1980s with its direction entrusted to a local citizen committee, a successor to the voluntary board that had looked after the cemetery on behalf of the major denominations. Since the graveyard has been maintained by Council – spraying around and mowing between plots, while the annex was unattended, accumulating a quantity of debris, and by 2013 completely overgrown by hawthorn making passage through hazardous or impossible.
International Volunteers for Peace, which had been clearing out the creek behind the Taralga show ground, put a proposal to the committee to clean up the annex, with a view to testing the presence of original plant associations. After consulting with the committee, the Taralga Historical Society and Shire officers, and with guidance from bushland restoration experts, IVP commenced four seasons of work to remove the hawthorn, blackberry, vinca and broom, to open the site to close weeding of reshooting stems, and replanting heavily weeded patches with appropriate native shrubs.
The volunteers – from overseas but also local – brought classes from the Taralga primary school onto the site to learn about what was living and growing there, and also visited the classrooms to explain where they were from (France, Germany, Korea, Japan, Malaysia) and what they were doing. They mixed socially with people from town, and were introduced to district history. Interactions with Shire staff occurred at different levels; with cooperation needed to remove hazardous fencing, and woody waste. An IVP delegation attended the monthly Council meeting to report on progress, and explain methods employed.
After the conclusion of the project a guide to the species encountered on site was produced. The front cover shows the project’s emblem – a female swamp wallaby, which had made a home within the site, and reappeared at intervals over the four years. The site was home too to wombats, echidnas, a variety of birds, small and large, insects and ants. Three rarer species were observed – a grey currawong, small eagle and brown tree creeper. The forty native plant species emerged in the half of the site that had been unaffected by broom, blackberry and vinca.
The clear boundary between disturbed, weed-infected ground and intact native grassland/ woodland showed signs that the native associations were recovering. The site is now accessible and allows for quiet contemplation of a fragment of open woodland/ grassland where there most likely exist unmarked graves, and which complement the more traditional layout of the cemetery proper with conventional plantings next door. The list in the guide covers many of the common species to be seen in any patch of bushland in the district.
The surprising thing is to find such diversity in this open woodland island surrounded by grazed paddocks, For children growing up in Taralga, the cemetery reserve provides a surprisingly rare opportunity to observe undisturbed public bushland, to learn about the intricate webs of dependency among native creatures. The project was greatly aided by bushland ecologists/ naturalists who lent their knowledge in identifying species and advising the volunteers on bush recovery practices.
It is hoped that care for the bushland annex can be continued, in the form of fine-level weeding as native species advance into previously infested areas, and in interest in observing what lives or visits. Further it is hoped that the annex can be adopted as a tranquil place to call in on while visiting graves in the cemetery proper, out of interest in the history it evokes, or from association with relatives or forebears buried there.
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Field Guide to the Bush Cemeteries of Upper Lachlan
The rolling slopes of the upper Lachlan catchment and the tablelands of the eastern watershed, territories of the Wiradjuri and Gundungurra nations, had been rapidly taken up by European settlers once pathways had opened south and west over the barrier ranges behind Sydney. By mid-century localities of settlement had coalesced to communities to service farms and land holdings, with an air of permanency and post-colonial confidence. People prospered, both from the produce of the land, and from stable employment associated. With community came places of Christian worship to mark succession of generations, and progress and decline in these small populations.
While circumstances of life on the land have changed since, the pattern of early settlement remains traced in the numerous country graveyards dotted through the municipality, expressing the shortness in time of European occupation against the many-generational shaping of the landscape under the stewardship of the nations it displaced, and its radical strangeness compared to the simple order of rural life imposed by a narrow cast broad acre economy.
Rural cemeteries, whether still in use or settling themselves into benevolent neglect, now attract interest from people researching their forebears, retrieving identification with undocumented pasts of struggle and triumph, of communities vanished in the civilising transformation, as self-contained villages gave way to larger centres of trade, education, and employment. Gravestones are the markers that these lives mattered, further that settlement had displaced other lives, equally valid; further that the march of progress was one more myth to be assimilated in understanding a contingent occupation of the country.
Rural cemeteries guard other secrets too. Each by virtue of its function reserves a curtilage from agricultural or urban disturbance, representing a plot of countryside that remains largely undisturbed since dedication, implying for the majority a window to pre-settlement times. This fortuitously makes cemeteries sanctuary to a diversity of plant and animal communities that had been sustaining feeding and hunting grounds husbanded over many generations prior to European occupation. The roadside verges along a thousand kilometres of secondary country roads hint at the complexity of these interwoven natural communities; so too do the cemeteries.
New interest has been kindled in these invisible banks of biodiversity, along with efforts to see them revalued within a larger recognition of the importance of cross-tenure landscape conservation. Australia, endowed with a rich endemic species assemblage, has an appalling extinction record. Widespread clearing and dominant monocultural practice, once the mark of advanced agriculture, now have been recognised as leaving a legacy of systemic destruction on landscape scale, requiring industrial-scale defence against invasive pests and soil and water degradation; and heavy reliance on energetic, chemical, engineering and physical inputs. How did productive systems work, unaided, in the past? What does a healthy grassy ecosystem look like? How relevant might this be to farming which aspires to sustainability? These are not fringe questions. They have brought serious crop and livestock scientists, extension experts, agricultural economists and natural resource managers together. Looking over generations, what makes a farm productive or even viable?
Atttention has converged on landscape scale biodiversity conservation; coupled with fine level attention to microsystems; to the presence or absence of key species; to soil microbial composition; to porousness and weather cycles; to dispersion of genes; to disturbance and repair; to refuges and recolonisation; to rewilding and edge weeding; to biological control and intelligent grazing regimes; to management of ephemeral wetlands; to slowing down runoff; to maintaining hollows and snags; to controlling feral populations; to cooperative cross-tenural strategies; to reskilling, recognising and rewarding a skilled rural workforce around these new parameters of managing land, over and above commodified production.
But we started with cemeteries – in each case no more than a handful of acres, not valued beyond the headstones, and managed against risk of fire, or to allow for sporadic interments.
Nevertheless, underneath this neglect the animals and plants native to the area can flourish. At Bigga cemetery – maintained by the Picker family on a voluntary basis – a recent survey includes 300 native plant species, outnumbering pioneer burials. Plant lists as impressive may emerge from other of the dozen or so rural cemeteries in the Shire, despite their situation surrounded by cleared and grazed paddocks, visited by macropods, and open to the public.and still in use for burials.
Stonequarry Cemetery Reserve
One cemetery where animal and plant lists have been put together is Taralga’s Stonequarry Cemetery, situated in the countryside 4kms from the village, just beneath the brow of the Dividing Range, and one of the oldest still operating. The Cemetery reserve of 6 acres comprises an active graveyard, with a fenced off annex, intended as overflow, but also for unconsecrated burials. The Stonequarry reserve had been excised from farmland in the 1850s, although likely not fully cleared at the time. Responsibility for the reserve had reverted to the shire in the 1980s with its direction entrusted to a local citizen committee, a successor to the voluntary board that had looked after the cemetery on behalf of the major denominations. Since the graveyard has been maintained by Council – spraying around and mowing between plots, while the annex was unattended, accumulating a quantity of debris, and by 2013 completely overgrown by hawthorn making passage through hazardous or impossible.
International Volunteers for Peace, which had been clearing out the creek behind the Taralga showground, put a proposal to the committee to clean up the annex, with a view to testing the presence of original plant associations. After consulting with the committee, the Taralga Historical Society and Shire officers, and with guidance from bushland restoration experts, IVP commenced four seasons of work to remove the hawthorn, blackberry, vinca, and broom, to open the site to close weeding of reshooting stems, and replanting heavily weeded patches with appropriate native shrubs.
The volunteers – from overseas but also local – brought classes from the Taralga primary school onto the site to learn about what was living and growing there, and also visited the classrooms to explain where they were from (France, Germany, Korea, Japan, Malaysia) and what they were doing. They mixed socially with people from town, and were introduced to district history. Interactions with Shire staff occurred at different levels; with cooperation needed to remove hazardous fencing, and woody waste. An IVP delegation attended the monthly Council meeting to report on progress, and explain methods employed.
After the conclusion of the project, a guide to the species encountered on-site was produced. The front cover shows the project’s emblem – a female swamp wallaby, which had made a home within the site, and reappeared at intervals over the four years. The site was home too to wombats, echidnas, a variety of birds, small and large, insects, and ants. Three rarer species were observed – a grey currawong, small eagle, and brown tree creeper. The forty native plant species emerged in the half of the site that had been unaffected by broom, blackberry and vinca.
The clear boundary between disturbed, weed-infected ground and intact native grassland/ woodland showed signs that the native associations were recovering. The site is now accessible and allows for quiet contemplation of a fragment of open woodland/ grassland where there most likely exist unmarked graves, and which complement the more traditional layout of the cemetery proper with conventional plantings next door. The list in the guide covers many of the common species to be seen in any patch of bushland in the district.
The surprising thing is to find such diversity in this open woodland island surrounded by grazed paddocks, For children growing up in Taralga, the cemetery reserve provides a surprisingly rare opportunity to observe undisturbed public bushland, to learn about the intricate webs of dependency among native creatures. The project was greatly aided by bushland ecologists/ naturalists who lent their knowledge in identifying species and advising the volunteers on bush recovery practices.
It is hoped that care for the bushland annex can be continued, in the form of fine-level weeding as native species advance into previously infested areas, and in interest in observing what lives or visits. Further it is hoped that the annex can be adopted as a tranquil place to call in on while visiting graves in the cemetery proper, out of interest in the history it evokes, or from association with relatives or forebears buried there.
srthorn 