Walk for about a kilometre along a rugged stretch of beach at Port Fairy, in Victoria’s south-west, and you will come across a sand dune. It is indistinct to the dozens of others along the coast. But should you decide to clamber up and over it, fighting your way through marram and sword grass that becomes thicker by the step, your eyes will fall on something peculiar: a marble headstone, almost 170 years old, appearing to be sucked into the undergrowth.
There were as many as 200 people buried here in what was known as the sandhill or new cemetery after it opened in 1855. Now, there’s only a handful of headstones that can be seen without hacking through metre-high scrub.
It was once a 240sq-metre site divided into two separate plots, with a row down the middle for a wagon. But it soon became obvious this strip of land was not ideal for a cemetery.
It was buffeted by ferocious winds and only accessible by the Old Portland Road – little more than a track that was frequently muddy in winter and a haven for insects in summer. It was permanently closed in the 1880s.
By 1901, the Belfast Gazette (Port Fairy used to be known as Belfast) was declaring it “a neglected burial place”.
“The sand-drifts raised by the westerly winds are gradually creeping over the deserted looking spot,” the paper reported in July of that year.
And so started more than 120 years of wondering what to do to fix a unique mistake: a cemetery being built in the wrong spot.
The Eastern Maar have been burying people in the sand dunes outside Port Fairy for millennia. John Clarke, the Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation’s general manager of biocultural landscapes, says his ancestors were generally buried seated upright, almost in the foetal position, facing towards Deen Maar, also known as Lady Julia Percy Island.
It was believed their spirits went to the island after their death.
The early settlers buried at the sandhill cemetery do not face this way, but parallel to the ocean.
The majority of the headstones that are visible are sandstone, probably milled at Warrnambool to the east, apart from a large marble headstone that belongs to Michael Connolly, one of the founders of the town and one of the men who sent John Batman to establish what would become Melbourne.
Even some locals don’t know the sandhill cemetery is there.
There are no markers or tracks. Once you clamber up the dunes and fight through the scrub to the point where you can see some headstones, there’s a sign, which was only erected in the mid-2000s, outlining a brief history of the place.
After the mission of gaining access to the site from the beach to the south, it is quite odd to look north from the top of the dune beyond the cemetery and see cleared farmland – in theory a far more sensible way of accessing the site – stretching as far as the eye can see. But that is private land. The only public access remains from the beach.
The lack of accessibility and awareness of the cemetery is by design, as it helps protect against vandalism or pilfering, local historian Marten Syme reckons.
Syme says that when the cemetery was built, there was already one in town, on a 2,000ha (5,120 acre) parcel of land owned by the Sydney solicitor and entrepreneur James Atkinson.
Atkinson bought the land for a pound an acre and planned to use it to attract workers from the UK.
When Atkinson made the purchase, Syme says, there were only about 50 people in Port Fairy, the second European settlement in Victoria. But by the mid-1850s, there were almost 2,500 – a population that would remain the same until the 2000s.
Port Fairy was booming and the sandhill cemetery was built as an alternative, in part to service those who did not live on Atkinson’s plots and also because it was believed the original cemetery was too close to town.
The location was probably selected, Syme believes, because it was just outside the boundary of Atkinson’s land and on a main road.
For a time, it seemed to work: even people from Hamilton, a farming community to the north, who came to the town for recreation bought plots in the new cemetery.
“But it was not very sensible,” Syme said. “Within 10 years people were choosing not to be buried out there.”
Syme is sitting around the dining table in a house built by one of the last people buried in the cemetery, Capt Lewis Grant.
Grant built the house, Seaview, in 1852. Symes bought it more than 120 years later and worked to restore it.
He says his research shows Grant’s young daughter was buried in the early 1870s at the new cemetery and he believes Grant bought a plot for himself next to her at that time.
Grant was buried there in January 1886 and the cemetery was officially closed the following year.
Some of the interred were moved to the original cemetery but others stayed. Syme says records are incomplete about how many.
Letters to the Belfast Gazette from the late 1880s show locals were fed up with the site and wanted something to be done. Nothing ever has been.
Over the decades, headstones have been used as targets by shooters and cows have broken in, knocking over stone fences. There have been applications for heritage registration, funding applications and spats with state government departments about how to maintain the site.
A spokesperson for the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning told the Warrnambool Standard in 2019 that access to the cemetery was better kept limited to ensure its “heritage values” were protected.
The department did not respond to questions from the Guardian, including about whether a claim made in the same 2019 article that it would “work with other stakeholders to consider future management options” had materialised.
Syme says that just as when locals appealed to the settlers of the town to fix the problem, it has been hard to make a case.
“Are they going to spend money on – pardon the pun – a dead cemetery?” he asks.
