The first burial at Coolgardie was of a man only known as ‘Ginger’ who succumbed to a severe bout of dysentery in 1893 and was buried as ‘Buffalo’ because a copy of that Lodge’s Rule Book was found in his camp at the foot of Mt Eva.
Later, an old prospector was taken to his last resting place by a mate who had armed himself with a flask of stimulant and who sought help from another to assist with the last rights. By the time the flask was empty they were hopelessly lost and did not reach the burial ground till after dark. With the aid of a box of matches and a fiery stick, the service was read by the makeshift undertaker, then both laid down on the ground and promptly went to sleep.
Coolgardie Pioneer Cemetery 1903
Another burial party, using a tip dray, forgot to put in the locking pin, and when the dray passed the waterhole near the Forrest Street cemetery, the dray tipped up and the coffin slid into the water, causing one of the party to observe: ‘He went out on a wet wicket.’
Inquirer and Commercial News – 14th Dec 1894
The Rev. Thomas Trestrail writes to the Courier this week complaining about the barbarous state of things existing at the Coolgardie cemetery. He asserts that bodies are thrown into shallow graves anyhow, and no record is kept of the burials. Foul odours are he says, commencing to arise from the cemetery, and the present state of affairs is a terrible disgrace to civilisation.
The Sun Sunday 10 May 1903, page 6
COOLGARDIE CHIPS By Spinifex.
Perhaps there in no more desolate spot than the neglected God’s Acre which arrests the attention of the wanderer towards the western end of the town. Coolgardie’s early dead repose there in a small, badly fenced, worse tended, enclosure. The crumbling wooden grave marks— some large enough to see, although the inscriptions are fading fast others mere stakes thrust into the flat ground, for the vagrant wind and the willy-willy have blown away the once tapering mounds are askew and tottering and lie as prone as the decaying mortals who sleep on beneath.
Soon, unless steps are taken to straighten up the rough tributes paid, to the dead in the days when there was little time to spare for moments of sentiment, it will be difficult indeed to locate friend from stranger. One inscription-is easily discerned, that of William Keane,and this is the best looked after grave among the crowd. In remember him well. His father was a Queensland police inspector, and young Bill wandered to the West to be stricken down with early day typhoid. Around him others are planted, but some of the graves are nameless. The old cemetery could well do with a bit of renovation.
Note: The cemetery was originally fenced in 1895.
An argument in favour of cremation
We bury our dead in a box in a hole scooped a few feet below the surface as our fathers were buried, and thereby lay up unto ourselves sufficient typhoid microbes to kill a community that would cover a continent; and next summer, when the gaunt old scavenger Death comes along, looking for a harvest amidst the flowers of our manhood, some amongst us will be ready to curse God and die. It is passing strange that amidst such a paradise of colossal intellects that no one should have thought of cremating our dead. Possibly it was not an oversight, perhaps they imagined that most of the dwellers in these parts would get cremation enough in the next world without adopting it here.
But the practice of depositing a dead man in a hole, and covering the festering and decaying remnants of humanity with a few shovel fulls of earth, is not one that should recommend itself to a really intelligent community in such a climate as we have in this part of the world, and many a rotting skull is grinning in the graveyard yonder at the folly of the foolish who laid them snugly away, in good warm soil where they can spawn the germs of death and send them up through the porous earth, ready for the festival of the fever fiend when the summer months are with us once again.
The present custom is a filthy one. We take our dead and thrust them out of sight, to rot, to fester and become a horrible, loathsome mass of putrefaction, of which we dare not think, for fear of sickening the soul with the image of our own conjuring; in vain we cover the soil with wreaths of choicest flowers, for we shudder to think of the thing below, with the flesh falling from the bones, and the hair dropping from the skull, and the eyeless sockets staring up at us from amidst the creeping things that falters upon all that once we loved. Even our religion teaches us to look away from a sight so gruesome, and points our thoughts skyward. Anywhere away from the awful object below our feet; yet whilst we try to picture something above us with wings and a harp, and a feathery palm leaf, our thoughts will turn to that other thing that we know is gaping at us amongst the worms and the other nameless abominations of the charnel house. Else why does the mother sob for her buried baby when the winter nights are bleak and cold? Why does the strong man shudder as he thinks of the wife in the churchyard when the rain is falling and the wind is howling drearily?
Away with the burial ground, give us the swift kiss of the flames; turn us into a decent package of wholesome, harmless ashes, and cork us up in a jar, or a pickle bottle, or a pocket handkerchief, that when we are dead we may do no more harm if we do no more good. Do not plant us where we will grow noisome and foul and send forth vapors that may kill those whom we perhaps loved whilst living. We should be ready if only for the sake of self preservation to do away with the human plantations which we designate cemeteries and at once erect a crematorium upon this goldfields.
There wasn’t to be a crematorium in the Goldfields till 1980.
Coolgardie Pioneer cemetery today.
Moya Sharp
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