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ASK most Rushworth residents to point you in the direction of the cemetery and you'll end up in the town's centre. But historian Alan McLean knows of another, to which he guided EMMA D'AGOSTINO.
ALAN McLEAN’S car slows, and he indicates off to the side of a road just outside the town centre.
Following from behind, it’s not immediately obvious where he’s going.
Then the unsealed road comes into view.
Tall trees grow on both sides of the path, which we follow until we reach a clearing.
Alan parks and draws my attention towards a fenced-off part of the bush, to our left.
Save for two curious magpies, we are the only living souls present.
Buried in the ground below us, marked by clusters of stones, are about 30 people who died in the height of the gold rush.
We will never know the names or stories of some of those who were laid to rest in this peaceful part of the bush, Alan has come to accept.
“No official records of any burials have ever been found,” he says.
“The site was never gazetted as an official cemetery.”
But research has led him to discover the identities of some of the bodies buried in the forest.
Alan has scoured every newspaper chronicling life in the Rushworth area in the 20-odd years after gold was discovered in 1853.
In doing so, he found references to four deaths at and near the township in the years leading up to the opening of the Rushworth Public Cemetery in 1861.
Through their death notices, Alan has deduced that the old cemetery is the burial place of:
- Walter Scott, a Bendigo prospector who died in a shaft at Specimen Hill in 1860;
- Catherine Thompson, aged two years and eight months, who died from diphtheria in 1859;
- Ann Munroe, the 23-year-old daughter of a well-known Sydney policeman, who died in 1857; and,
- James Barr, a stockman who died in apparently scandalous circumstances in 1861.
It is also possible a further five people were buried in the old cemetery, Alan says.
John McCaffery, Andrew Mason, Peter Clowson, Conrad Haub and John Poparpanzi are named in newspapers as having died at Rushworth just after the public cemetery opened in 1861.
It's the missing piece in a family jigsaw puzzle.
- Alan McLean
However, Alan says they are not listed in the cemetery’s records.
“It is possible that both cemeteries were used for a short period, and that these five also took their longest rest in the old cemetery,” he says.
He is hopeful unearthing the stories of the burial site will help families find their long-lost ancestors.
A bouquet of flowers, lying beside a plaque marking the old cemetery site, is evidence Alan has already struck gold.
His research led Shepparton resident Gay Pogue to Catherine Thompson, her great grandmother’s sister.
Alan believes the child has rested undisturbed at the site for well over 150 years.
“It is very satisfying to discover these names, and if there are any descendants of these people, I’m guessing they will be gratified upon learning the information,” Alan says.
Catherine’s is one of a number of small graves at the site.
Some, Alan believes, are the final resting places of children. Others, he suspects, are the burial sites of Chinese miners.
Alan says there was an idea that it was important to bury the miners standing upright.
It is the families of the Chinese miners whom he fears will never learn of their fate.
The news of a miner’s death might never have reached home to begin with, he says, and the deaths of the Chinese miners were seldom reported in the newspapers.
“After the people who attended funerals in the 1850s also passed on, there must have been some written records, but these seem never to have come to light and are presumed destroyed,” Alan says.
Stumps of wood at the heads of some of the graves indicate there were once marked timber crosses identifying Christians who laid below. But those crosses are long gone.
Only the individual mounds of earth, some of which are ringed with stones, remain.
It was researching the history of the region for his book, 100 Years of Mysteries in the Rushworth District, that sparked Alan’s interest in the cemetery’s occupants.
The 62-year-old has also compiled a book about the town’s historical legal misadventures, called Order in the Court.
Alan was born and bred in Rushworth, and said he had known of the old cemetery for years.
Standing there this week, soaking in the autumn sun as it filtered in between the trees and a silence undisturbed except for the occasional bird, he tried to imagine what the area would have been like during its heyday.
If the story of Walter Scott’s demise is any indication, it was much more dangerous.
The gold miner plummeted to the bottom of a shaft in Specimen Hill, severely injuring his spine, after having complained of foul air.
His mates were in the process of heaving him out of the hole when he fell from the rope, dropping about 18 metres.
His tools made a safe return to the surface, having been sent up the shaft first.
Walter was well known in Bendigo from his connection with quartz reefs, according to his death notice.
“He having been one of the first prospectors on the celebrated Victoria line,” the article in the Bendigo Advertiser on November 5, 1860, states.
Walter died on October 23, 1860.
“Of course, it is a long shot to find descendants of Walter around Bendigo,” Alan says.
“But that was also the case with the newspaper archive of Catherine Thompson’s death.”
Alan is keen to hear from any families who have records of an ancestor who had died in the Rushworth area between 1853 and 1873.