Ipswich General Cemetery

Establishment of the Cemetery

Early in 1842, as a preparation for free settlement, Henry Wade carried out several surveys for a town on the site of the old convict station. The new town was named "Ipswich". Surviving copies of Wade‘s surveys show a location for "burial grounds" south of the town centre. However this does not mean that the burial ground was established in 1842 or 1843. These notations were added to Wade‘s drawings at a later date - the style appears slightly different and the scale marker awkwardly overlaps the burial grounds on one of the surveys.

This lack of a cemetery is confirmed by a letter written in early 1844 by John Wickham, Police Magistrate in Brisbane, to the Colonial Secretary in Sydney. In this letter, he stated that there was no burial ground at Ipswich and asked for one to be established in the town. The request was approved and in May-June 1844, surveyor Burnett marked out seven portions of land at Ipswich for burials.

The burial area was divided into denominations: 1 acre each to Episcopalian (Church of England), Roman Catholic and Presbyterian; and 2 roods each for Wesleyan, Independent, Jews and Aborigines. (1 acre = approx 1/2 hectare, 2 roods = approx 1/4 hectare).

In 1849, the ministers of the various religions complained about the shallow depth of soil in the cemetery. Surveyor Warner was instructed to select a new site and he found one a little further east where he said there was a good depth of soil which was "stiff black loam". At this time, Warner found that the boundaries of the original cemetery had not been clear to local people and they had been burying some of their dead closer to the town. He asked several local inhabitants to accompany him to the cemetery so he could show them the correct boundaries for future burials. (In 1886, the Cemetery Trustees received permission from the Government to relocate about six bodies which had been buried outside the cemetery "some 30 years back". These were probably the bodies "closer to the town" mentioned by Warner.)

The new cemetery area was in use by late 1850, one of the earliest burials being that of a local publican Michael Burns.

However there appears to have been some bureaucratic confusion. In 1856, Warner submitted a plan for an extension of the suburbs of Ipswich, as far as the old cemetery. The Surveyor General of New South Wales Major Mitchell queried why the cemetery area marked on Warner‘s plan did not match Burnett‘s 1844 plan. District Surveyor Galloway had to tactfully remind Mitchell of the change of site. Galloway also said that the dead still had not been moved from the old area. At this time, the old area was "discernable only by some few graves enclosed within a now ruinous palisading". Mitchell‘s office stated that Warner‘s 1850 plan had never been received in Sydney, and asked for new copies. It is not clear from archival documents whether these graves were ever moved.

Like the old cemetery, the new cemetery area of 1850 was divided into sections for different denominations. Each church looked after its own area and the sections seem to have been considered as separate entities - burials were described in newspaper reports as being in, for example, "the Roman Catholic Cemetery" or "the Presbyterian Cemetery". The individual sections were separately fenced.

In 1858, Archbishop Polding of Sydney visited Ipswich to lay the foundation stone of a new Catholic Church. A ceremony was also held to consecrate the Catholic cemetery – a large crowd watched as the Archbishop in full robes walked around the perimeter of the Catholic enclosure. The consecration was presumably not performed earlier because there was no Bishop in the Moreton Bay District at this time, and consecration is usually undertaken by a bishop.

To learn more about the history of the Ipswich General Cemetery scroll down the page and click on the Ipswich General Cemetery Conservation Management Plan - History, 2011.

Did you know that there are over 32,000 recorded burials in the Ipswich General Cemetery?

You can helps us to reveal the people and stories from the cemetery by transcribing the headstones and plaques.

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