Here’s a mathematical equation for you: with Queensland's death rate projected to double within 30 years, and Brisbane City Council's (BCC) three active cemeteries expected to be ‘full’ (technically, they already are) within two decades, demand for Brisbane burial spots is expected to quadruple.
All of which could add up to bad news for old headstones.
A state government inquiry - The environmental impacts of conventional burials and cremations - was set up in March to look into the subject of funerary practices and has found Queensland is fast running out of burial spaces. An issues paper tabled by the committee this week contained a range of options to address this problem, which reportedly include digging new graves in spaces between older ones, reusing unmarked 100-year-old burial sites, and reusing lease-lapsed graves every 40 years. The full list of options, which seem quite reasonable, are listed here.
Although the 40-year reuse idea was described in the press as ‘radical’, graves in Brisbane cemeteries have been reused like this before. Check the BCC online grave location records and you will two or three unrelated people in most graves, buried years apart. I think the reuse gap used to be about 30 years. Nothing new or radical there.
However, the issue of particular concern to me is that of headstone protection. MP Carryn Sullivan, who headed the parliamentary inquiry, said;
‘There are a lot of graves in Queensland that are more than 100 years old and of course some of them are war graves or significant graves and they should be exempt.’
Does the use of the word ‘graves’ here also refer to headstones? If so, will there be removal of headstones to accommodate new graves?
This is an important question, because the BCC submitted to the inquiry that their supply of new graves would be exhausted in as little as 10-15 years, and the BCC has previous form when it comes to getting rid of headstones. Back in the 1970s they removed and dumped hundreds of them in their efforts to speed up the then-anticipated demise of South Brisbane Cemetery.
The BCC (as well as the state and federal governments) have long taken an economic rationalist approach to Heritage, basically saying, ‘if it’s not making money, we don’t want it’ (except of course for their precious City Hall). I also get the impression from personal experience that some officials in the cemeteries department don’t do enough to protect the heritage values of their cemeteries. Brisbane has some of the worst maintained and least protected historical municipal cemeteries I have ever seen in Queensland. There again, a new wave of cemetery usage might make them lift their game as far as maintenance goes. There’s no point paying thousands of dollars for a nice new grave and headstone if the council just let falling or growing trees destroy it (not to mention the occult rituals, parties and illegal restorations taking place in Brisbane cemeteries, but that’s another story).
Another important question is, who decides which graves are ‘significant’ and which are not? Significance is a very moveable feast. Everything around us has ‘historical potential’ in that, over the course of time, even the most everyday items will become gain historical significance. Heritage is often lost during that twilight time when something is merely 'old' but not yet 'historical', and so is deemed not yet worthy of protection.
I sincerely hope this process of deciding what is significant and what is not does not turn into another exercise in removing ordinary people from the historical record while protecting the rich and powerful.
While it is good to see some cemetery problems being acknowledged, hopefully leading to good outcomes for our historic burial grounds, there is a potential problem with old headstones and cemetery groups need to be demanding a guarantee from BCC that not a single headstone will be removed just to make way for a new grave.
At least not until the BCC convert City Hall into low-cost apartments... there is a housing shortage as well as a burial space shortage, you know.
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