The Vaughan Cemetery’s quiet beauty often draws in passers by.
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Some even decide to get buried in the quiet cemetery.
Since the 1860s thousands have been put to rest in the town’s cemetery. It took over from the Vaughan Burial Ground, a tiny plot of ground, that was almost completely full after 10 years of gold mining.
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Jeannie Lister joined the Vaughan Cemetery Trust seven years ago now. Mrs Lister lives in Bendigo, but grew up in Vaughan.
Three of her siblings – a brother and two sisters – will be buried at Vaughan, but not herself.
Mrs Lister believes people just want to come home for their final rest. For her, her home is with her husband.
“You just come home. In my case Ronnie and I have been married for 41 years, so I would be wherever he was,” Mrs Lister said.
“I think families, they just come back together.”
Some people choose to be buried at Vaughan just because they like the picturesque site.
Dappled sunlight falls through the boughs of gum trees, onto the rolling dips and rises of the cemetery’s grounds. The peaceful site stretches back hundreds of metres from the quiet road.
Many of the smaller bumps in the ground are the site of unmarked burials. Only the wealthier could afford a gravestone, and on the Vaughan goldfields, not many were wealthy.
“It says a lot about the dreadful poverty,” Mrs Lister said.
Before the cemetery was gazetted, the people of Vaughan still had to bury their dead.
The burial ground they chose still sits above the springs.
It was never formally gazetted as a cemetery, but it served its purpose for the people of Vaughan in the 1850s.
After eight years of burials in the small ground, the people of Vaughan petitioned for an official cemetery.
Vaughan was all but cut off from the wider world by bad roads and the lack of a bridge over the Loddon River.
It was home to 14,000 people, and the goldfields had a notoriously high mortality rate.
By 1859 the burial ground would have been almost completely full.
The official cemetery was gazetted in 1860.
It’s unclear how many people are buried in the earlier burial grounds, as so many were too poor to afford headstones.
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The Vaughan of today looks very different to the days of the goldfields.
“It used to be huge. It used to feed all this district,” Ms Lister said.
“A lot of the centre of the town was washed out in … floods.
“What wasn’t washed away was burned.”
Many Chinese people were among those who flocked to the Vaughan goldfields.
Their graves testify to how they were treated. At the Vaughan Cemetery the Chinese section is out of sight, round a rise and at the very back of the grounds.
Only two headstones survive today.
Mrs Lister recalls one story of a Chinese man who was arrested for murder on the slightest of evidence.
A girl names Annie Hunt went missing from Glenluce. When her body was found a Chinese man Ah Peew was arrested. A part of his pipe had been found nearby.
He was later hanged in Castlemaine jail.
“It was the most flimsy evidence, you could never hang someone on evidence like that today,” Mrs Lister said.
Despite events like this the Chinese culture undoubtedly influenced the town.
Golden Dragon Museum researcher Leigh McKinnon once took a group of Chinese scholars to the Vaughan Burial Ground once.
He was interesting to discover that they thought the Feng Shui of the burial ground was particularly good, and the Chinese graves well located.
“It’s sort of overlooking the valley, it’s a spot that is an ideal place for a grave,” Mr McKinnon said.
“It’s quite different to where the Chinese would usually be put in a European cemetery.”
Ranger team leader at the Castlemaine Diggings National Park Noel Muller manages an area with eight unofficial burial places.
They’re one of the relics of the gold mining history of the park, which preserves the imprint of miners on the landscape.
Mr Muller believes the physical remains of the goldmining age are part of what sets Catlemaine Diggings apart.
“That’s what makes this park very special, the story here is the story of mass migration, it’s the story of democracy,” Mr Muller said.
“People have still got that interest in gold, and that’s what our park celebrates.”
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