THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF A CEMETERY THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF FINDING THE LOST GRAVES OF WOODMAN POINT QUARANTINE STATION This presentation is about a project initiated by the Friends of Woodman Point and funded by Lotterywest. The project was to rediscover the lost cemeteries and graves of the Woodman Point Quarantine Station. I was approached because I had done such work before at the East Perth cemeteries and at Kenwick cemetery. I came to the project fondly believing I knew what I was getting into but this secretive place was not going to give up its secrets lightly. A cemetery in our society is a very structured social artifact. Each one is a cleared area with a layout of paths and graves aligned in rows. The 1918 Woodman Point cemetery looks like this: (photograph courtesy Earle Seubert) and the older cemetery is even more overgrown:
(slide 3). On my first site visit I knew this was not going to be any easy task. Lotterywest was generous enough to provide funding for a ground penetrating radar survey of both cemeteries but when I reported back on the site conditions the radar technicians bowed out of the project. This left archaeological survey and excavation as the main tools in finding the lost graves. This in itself created a further problem. The older cemetery is within an area registered as an Aboriginal heritage site. Any ground disturbance required community consultation and agreement. The cost of this was deemed likely to be too great for the secured funding budget therefore work during this project was confined to the 1918 cemetery. At this point I am going to give you a very quick outline of the construction history of the station and cemeteries for the benefit of those who do not know the site as well as the Friends of Woodman Point do. Woodman Point has been a quarantine area since at least 1836 (slide 4 1836 plan). The peninsula is divided off from the rest of WA by a thick line. A solid limestone wall, which still partly standing, was constructed along that line at some point in time:
(slide 5 1955 plan), possibly before the area was gazetted as a quarantine station in 1876 or as part of the building program associated with the gazettal. The wall encloses the original 20 acres of the site which was expanded in 1904 to 250 acres. This plan is dated to 1876 but shows: (slide 6, 1876? plan) buildings not built until 1886 and an area not gazetted until 1904. Despite research for a conservation plan, interpretation plan and two theses, the pattern of early building development remains murky. Just like the cemeteries, the hospital does not like to give up its secrets easily.
Three plans show the location of the first of the two known cemeteries. This is the cemetery marked as cemetery 2 on the aerial photograph: This particular plan: (slide 7). (slide 8) is interesting as it is the only one that shows the location of graves within one of the cemeteries. Two are shown, one inside the boundary and one outside. The location of the grave outside the cemetery is very interesting. The boundary shown would have been marked in either 1876 when the area was gazetted or 1886 when the hospital complex was built. But the area had been used for infectious diseases for forty years
by 1876. It is likely that some people died and were buried on site during that time in an earlier grave plot; the location of a grave outside the known cemetery boundaries suggests an earlier plot in a similar location. Aerial photographic analysis of the site also suggests this is possible. The information on the historic plans was converted and the location and size of the cemetery plotted onto the aerial: (slide 9).
The boundaries enclose both an area of trees and regrowth. If you look at the area of bush which has been cleared in the past, noticeable as the grey area with few green tree canopies, it is rectangular, covers both grave locations and is orientated at right angles to the later boundaries being north south instead of east west. The road on the right hand side of the aerial looks like it may have been built over part of this area. Is this clearing an earlier cemetery plot? How many people were buried in the first forty years, how many people are buried within the ca 1876 boundaries? We don t know but we are starting to answer some of those questions for the 1918 cemetery to the north. The early cemetery started out somewhat off to one side but by 1900 it was enclosed by roads with the access road and the road to the hospital being built first:
(slide 10), again at an unknown date. The access road is constructed of limestone and still exists, it has been suggested it could be quite early and convict built, but like much of the area, this is not certain. A comment in the conservation plan identifies it as the Smallpox Road and as the main road into the site until 1909. This road runs past the 1918 cemetery and was included within our survey area. The Friends already knew generally where the cemeteries were, 1 the problem was locating them on the ground when one was completely bush and the other was reduced to a small clearing with a monument: (Slide 11, photograph courtesy Earle Seubert). The general location of the 1918 cemetery boundaries was identified through historic plans and aerial photographic analysis. This was somewhat difficult given that neither the aerial or plans had exact scales and was accomplished through comparing the size of a known feature shown on all the plans and then converting up a small scale in feet to a larger scale in metres: 1 [Friends Hon. Historian, Gail Dodd, supplied Gaye with all the historic plans and historic cemetery photographs from her prior research in Canberra and Perth].
(slide 12). This map is a bit the worse for wear after it was taken on site in the pouring rain to mark out the boundaries. The suspected boundaries were marked out on site using tape measures, compass, iron pickets and Earle [Seubert from Friends] as an enthusiastic volunteer risking getting permanently lost in the bush as we tried to establish and measure lines of sight through this: (slide 13 photograph courtesy Earle Seubert).
The boundary markers helped give some orientation to the site as we set up a base line and marked out five metres survey squares. This orientation was badly needed as we were not allowed to clear any of the vegetation as the site is within a nature reserve, which created just a few problems marking out neat five metre survey areas. (photograph courtesy Earle Seubert)
(photograph courtesy Earle Seubert) Earle just give a short patter on what we are doing if you want such as, throwing the tape through the bush, retrieving it when the catcher missed etc.
(photograph courtesy Earle Seubert)
(slides 14 19, photographs courtesy Earle Seubert) The location of unmarked graves was sought in several ways: a detailed site survey in five metre grids to map surface indications of graves such as grave furniture, mounds and depressions, an aerial photographic analysis of the small areas of the site not covered by tree canopy, a metal detector survey of the area to indicate buried evidence, one small test pit to determine what evidence the metal detector was locating, which turned out to be iron rich concrete from a grave, and shovel trenching to locate grave shadows. The shovel trenching was constricted in places by the need not to disturb the roots of Rottnest pines now growing in the cemetery but we did manage to test most of 25 sq metres and located 10 grave shadows before the weather defeated us. With the soil damp from rain the shadows were no longer visible. The finished survey looks like this (Point to the survey poster): with up to 25 unmarked graves identified. Ten of these are firmly located through their grave shadows;
(slide 20 photograph courtesy Earle Seubert) others are identified through surface findings of smashed grave furniture (slide 21, from grave in square 17, photograph courtesy Earle Seubert)
(Slide 22, rose dome from grave 4). photograph courtesy Earle Seubert) Extrapolating up from the historic plans suggested the cemetery was 66 metres long and 39.6 metres wide with an access road jutting from the limestone road into the bottom of the side of the cemetery and the top of the cemetery almost touching the limestone road. We found both the limestone road and the access road, both of which were lost in the bush and no longer used. The access road met our survey grid just after we had run out of surface evidence and were only getting metal detector hits all along a general line. The line of hits were in the location suggested by the historical evidence as the southern boundary fence and almost certainly indicate the location of a picket fence. We know at least part of the cemetery was surrounded by a white picket fence from oral evidence and historic photographs:
(slide 23). Both the boundaries in this photograph have been located on site, the southern by metal detector and the western by locating a picket still in situ: (slide 24 photograph courtesy Earle Seubert).
We also located some of the graves shown in these photographs. Some by surface survey, some by aerial analysis and others by finding the graves shadows in the shovel trenches. By retaking the historic photograph from the same spot: (slide 25 photograph courtesy Earle Seubert) it is easier to relate the photograph to the part of the survey area in the photograph. It is clear that graves 1,2,3,5, and 9 were not marked by headstones by the time the photograph was taken, so they are new evidence. Also we found an interesting thing about the grave shadows, which is that some of them are quite small measuring only 1 metre across. This suggests they might be cremation burials or the burials of very small children. Graves 2, 3, 9, and 10 are confirmed to be only small burials. This is the other historic photo of the cemetery
(slide 26) showing the area of Nurse Williams grave. Retaking this historic photograph was harder as there is now the trunk of a Rottnest pine tree right where the photographer was standing. However the graves indicated in squares 15, 17, 22, and 58 appear to be in cross locations. However there are more crosses then the evidence we have so far found. The cemetery has more to tell us and if the funding budget permits we will re visit the site next summer to carry on with the trenching. A trenching survey was carried out in 2009, in conjunction with the Earle Seubert, from the Friends of Woodman Point Recreation Camp [Inc].