VOLUNTEERS KEEPING CEMETERY ALIVE

By Bayley Cocking

THERE is a chill breeze as the man pierces the earth with his shovel. He is digging merely a couple metres from a row of headstones – if it weren’t for his cheery red polo shirt, the man could easily be mistaken for a gravedigger.
A woman wearing floral pants and a purple shirt kneels in the dirt nearby, looking after a small plant she recently sowed. Despite her tender care for the sapling, the woman is not tending to the grave of a recently departed loved one.
The man in the red shirt and the woman with the floral pants are not in mourning. They are working.
For more than 18 months, the Bannockburn Cemetery Trust has been meeting to beautify their local cemetery. The Trust’s eight volunteers work tirelessly to ensure that the burial ground is a spot that the community is proud of.
Cemetery Trust member Melissa Gillett says the group usually meets on a weekly basis.
“Every Tuesday from 10am, we meet and host a working bee,” Gillet explains. “Those of us who are available will head down to the cemetery and potter around. The majority of our members are retired, so depending on who’s free, we might have three people meet, we might have eight.”
Gillett was inspired to join the Cemetery Trust shortly after her mother died close to two years ago. With some of the group’s members getting older, the gang of volunteers thought it best to inject some younger blood into the Trust.
“I was more than happy to join the Bannockburn Cemetery Trust,” Gillett says. “My mother is buried there, and she always loved gardens, so it’s really special for me to be able to go there and look after the plants and flowers around the area.”
The group has overseen the completion of many projects throughout the Bannockburn Cemetery. Some of the works include old, post fencing being replaced with an aluminium fence, the front entrance being transformed to accommodate for onsite parking, as well as the installation of a park bench to allow weary visitors to have a rest.
However, these projects don’t come cheap. While the Trust makes use of the funds they receive through burials and plots, the volunteer workers have also applied for a range of community grants. Through the Golden Plains Shire’s Community Strengthening Grant and the local community’s Bannockburn Connected Communities Grant, the Trust consolidated around $10,000 to put towards the cemetery’s projects.
“We’re so thankful for the funds the community and council have afforded us,” says Gillet. “A lot of the projects we’ve undertaken wouldn’t be possible without that kind of financial assistance.”
Despite the lockdowns initiated by the state government affecting any major developments being implemented throughout 2020, the group still came together to take care of the cemetery. Keeping to strict social distancing guidelines, the volunteers would catch up for a smaller, yet still effective, weekly working bee.

ALJ330 Assignment 1, Task 2: Text

ALJ330 Assignment 1, Task 2: Image

According to statistics from the National Funeral Directors Association, it is predicted that the cremation rate will rise from 56.0 per cent in 2020 to 63.3 per cent by 2025. That same dataset suggests that the burial rate will drop from 37.5 per cent in 2020 to 30.6 per cent by 2025.
While it seems that cremation is slowly becoming more popular than traditional burials, Gillett stresses that cemetery maintenance will not be fading away.
“It’s still incredibly important to look after burial grounds,” she says. “There are some people buried here that don’t have any surviving relatives around to care for their grave. The Cemetery Trust makes sure that their graves are maintained, looked after and not forgotten.”
The graves in the cemetery, as well as the Trust itself, date back to as far as the 1860s. One headstone reads: ‘To the Memory of Joseph, the beloved son of Martin & Susan Peacock, who departed this life on the 1st December 1867. Aged 11 years & 4 months.’ Almost mirroring the present, a Geelong Advertiser article from 1869 sourced from Australian archive website Trove, discusses a meeting of the Bannockburn Cemetery Trustees. The article summarises a Trustee meeting, in which the Trust agree to apply for government funding to pay for cemetery repairs and fencing. Alan Whitten has been a member of the Bannockburn Cemetery Trust for close to 30 years. He says that the cemetery is an icon of the community and must be properly maintained.
“The Bannockburn Cemetery is a local landmark,” he says. “It’s been around for many years and cared for by many devoted people. It’s not a council operated cemetery either, so the enthusiasm of our volunteers and generosity of the community is really what keeps it going.”
Whitten initially joined the Cemetery Trust with his wife in the early 90s. However, when his wife died eight years ago, Whitten’s health deteriorated, meaning he was unable to help his fellow Trustee’s look after the graveyard. Fortunately, when the group started sourcing new members and kicked off the weekly working bees, Whitten felt strong enough to get back to the cemetery and lend a hand.
The group hope to continue their beautification projects and improvements long into the future. General maintenance, such as mowing, weeding and rubbish tidying will always be a necessity, but adding more garden beds, benches and pathing will keep the Cemetery Trust busy.
“We have plans to turn our gazebo into an information centre of sorts,” Whitten says. “We’d like to close it off and put in some historical facts about the cemetery on signs inside, as well as some information about unmarked graves you can find in the cemetery. Not everyone who visits cemeteries is there to visit a buried loved one, some people like to explore and take in some of the history.”
Locals will have to keep an eye on the cemetery in the coming years, as the group don’t intend to quit anytime soon.
Whitten thinks of the cemetery fondly. It is a place where friends, volunteers and the community meet to contribute to something meaningful, he says.
“I like to say that if you’re living in Bannockburn, you can’t be buried at the cemetery. Which is a shame because I just know people are dying to get in there.”

ALJ330 Assignment 1, Task 2: Text