Hawkesbury Cemeteries

Hawkesbury City Council commissioned a Strategic Conservation Management Plan (SCMP) to facilitate the ongoing management of 13 cemeteries under their care and control.

The cemeteries hold significance on a variety of scales, ranging from individual families through to local communities, religious groups and national bodies. Understanding the significance and context of each cemetery is crucial to ensuring it is managed appropriately.

The cemeteries demonstrate the skill and aptitude of local craftspeople and their use of accessible local materials evident in the range and styles of the funerary monuments, metalwork and other cemetery elements. They also show the ethnoreligious make-up of the region throughout the nineteenth century, including Anglicans, Roman Catholics and a range of Protestant denominations.

Volume 1 provides a broad overview of significance and general management policies by cemetery ‘type’. It identifies where both general maintenance and specialist heritage input is recommended. The 13 handbooks about each cemetery in Volume 2 are handy guides to help Council easily manage individual cemeteries. Each handbook includes a detailed description, site analysis, and a site-specific overview of each cemetery, with a consideration of setting, fabric, condition and current uses. The SCMP successfully collates large volumes of information in a user-friendly way, also identifying priority maintenance and research activities.

This project was assisted by the NSW Government through the Heritage Near Me program.