Victoria’s early settlers followed the Eastern Maar in burying people in these dunes. Now only the wind keeps the graves company
alk 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.
‘It was not very sensible,’ Syme says of the cemetery. ‘Within 10 years people were choosing not to be buried out there.’By 1901, the Belfast Gazette was declaring it “a neglected burial place”. 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.
Syme says that when the cemetery was built, there was already one in town, on a 2,000ha parcel of land owned by the Sydney solicitor and entrepreneur James Atkinson.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.
“But it was not very sensible,” Syme said. “Within 10 years people were choosing not to be buried out there.”
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