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Cemetery Significance Statement (Part 3)

SMITHFIELD CEMETERY RESERVE (CEM.90 / R.76 / Por.46)
Stewarts Road, Barron, Queensland 4878.

Statement of Cultural Heritage Significance
© 2021 Phoenix

This statement of cultural significance was prepared by Dr Dave Phoenix in November 2020 in accordance with the ICOMOS Burra Charter (1999) and the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection’s guidelines for assessing cultural heritage significance

Part 3: Graves.

• Go to ⇒ Part 1: Description
• Go to ⇒ Part 2: History
• Go to ⇒ Part 4: Land Tenure
• Go to ⇒ Part 5: Governance
• Go to ⇒ Part 6: Burials
• Go to ⇒ Part 7: Images

Smithfield Cemetery Graves:

Although there may have been as many as 13 burials in Smithfield Cemetery between 1877 and 1878 when the township was in existence, and an additional nine burials between 1883 and 1893, the locations and details of the individual graves were not recorded.

In 1883 surveyor Behan identified just three graves in the northern part of the cemetery. Fifty years later, three graves were still identifiable in the northern part of the cemetery. The subsequent actions of neighbouring cane farmers mean that only one grave is now identifiable, and the fence around this wrought iron grave marker has been damaged. In addition, a cast iron grave marker has been damaged and uprooted from its original grave, the position of which has now been lost.

Because the cemetery reserve has been neglected, used as a rubbish dump, become overgrown with weeds and has had crops of cane and cowpea planted on it, the unmarked graves are now impossible to locate without specialised technology such as ground penetrating radar. The site has been searched with a metal detector and this resulted in the discovery of just a single Japanese coin.

Marked Grave:

The marked grave has a wrought-iron fence which has been badly damaged, and a rudimentary wrought iron grave marker without any diagnostic marks to identify whom it commemorates. Mulgrave Shire Council built a timber picket fence around the grave circa 1988, and the fence is now in poor state of repair. In 2013 'Converge heritage + community' consultants recommended Cairns Regional Council treat the ironwork around the marked grave to avoid further corrosion, although this does not appear to have been done.

There are several different claims as to who is interred in this plot. It has been suggested that the blacksmith, Crossland, would have been grieving over the death of his eleven-day old daughter Rebecca, and he would have had the tools and facilities to make the iron fence and grave marker. Heritage consultant Benjamin Gall notes that “the grave site itself is very small and suggests a child or an infant”. There were at least seven infants buried at Smithfield between 1877 and 1887.

Smithfield cane farmer Maxwell Stewart (born 1927) claims to remember seeing Louis Kopp’s name “freshly painted on the ... only grave standing”. It seems more likely that Stewart saw Kopp’s name painted on the decorative cast iron grave marker rather than on this grave.

Descendants of Martha Hudson claim the marked grave is hers. She died in 1915 and was the last registered burial at Smithfield. Others think that the grave belongs to a ‘Miss Murdoch’, whose date of death is unknown.

Based on surveyor Behan’s field-notes, it seems likely that this marked grave was one of the three that he identified in 1883, meaning it belonged to a person who was buried between 1877 and 1878 when the Smithfield township was in existence. Given the small size of the grave site, it may have been a child’s grave. There were three children buried at Smithfield between 1877 and 1878 – Mary Gernox, Christopher Kelly and Rebecca Crossland.

Cast Iron Grave Marker:

There is an additional grave marker at the cemetery that is not attached to a grave. It is a decorative cast-iron tablet which contains the inscription “In Affectionate Remembrance of …” but there are no further details to identify whose grave it belonged to.

This type of grave marker was designed in the 1870s by Melbourne artist and author Emily Sophia Patton. She patented this particular design on 30 August 1876, and the tablets were manufactured by Thomas Nathaniel Tarver’s Vulcan Foundry in Sandridge. They cost around £4, which was thirty percent cheaper than stone grave markers, and the tablets were “more durable than the ordinary class of tombstones”.

Ironmonger Alfred Shaw & Co. Ltd. of Queen Street, Brisbane was a major Queensland supplier and they advertised these tablets as being “particularly suitable for transmission up country”. The tablet would have been posted to regional and remote areas and the name and details of the deceased would have been painted or engraved onto the face of the tablet.

The Smithfield tablet is damaged, with the left-hand corner broken and the bottom section missing. It would have originally been mounted on two triangular feet at the head of a grave, but at some stage it has been broken and at least one of the triangular feet has been uprooted from the grave and left on the surface.

The tablet and one of the triangular feet were found leaning against the iron fence surrounding the marked grave when the unkempt growth of Allamanda vine was trimmed back in 2000. Cairns Regional Council treated the broken tablet with Plus Rust Converter and Primer^TM and then mounted it on a concrete plinth near the marked grave. The whereabouts of the triangular mounting foot is unknown. The concrete plinth does not mark a known grave.

If this tablet originally marked one of the three graves identified by surveyor Behan, then it belongs to one of the 13 burials that occurred before 1883. Maxwell Stewart’s statement that Louis Kopp’s name was “freshly painted on the ... only grave standing” might refer to this tablet. Kopp lived at Smithfield from its establishment in 1877 until his death in 1893, and he was buried at Smithfield cemetery.

Go to Cemetery Significance Statement ⇒ Part 4: Land Tenure.