After record rainfall damaged Helensburgh Cemetery, Wollongong City Council spent four months fixing it – but more needs to be done, says a leading member of the local historical society.

Jenny Donohoe is the treasurer of Helensburgh and District Historical Society, a volunteer association that advocated for the preservation of the site for many years. On a visit to the town’s cemetery in mid-October, Jenny described the repairs as “half a job”.

“What council has done is fine for an interim,” she said. “What hasn’t been kept up is keeping the bushland away from the graves, and I really feel that’s council’s problem.”

Council swung into action earlier this year after rain damaged internal roads and gravesites. Josh Saunders, Acting Operations Manager for Memorial Gardens and Cemeteries, said: “Because of the sensitive nature of where it had occurred and the heritage significance and all of that coming into it, once that damage was reported, repairs were very much fast-tracked to be rectified in that area.”

March 2022 was Helensburgh’s wettest March on record, with the Bureau of Meteorology recording 794mm of rain for the suburb, in a month when the average rainfall is 161.6mm.

At the time, community members reported the curbing of four heritage gravesites – dating back more than a century – was disintegrating as overland waterflow eroded topsoil in the cemetery.

Four months of council restoration work was completed in September, by which time Helensburgh had recorded 3008mm of rain. (As a comparison, the average annual rainfall for the suburb is 1417.5mm.)

Josh said the aim was to improve drainage systems and durability of internal roadways.

“Council engaged their own engineers to come up, assess the site, and then basically design a plan for the repairs to the road as well as some repairs and redesign of the drainage in the area to prevent it happening again,” he said.

Josh said this had been done by a surface swale and “raising up land here and there to direct that water away”.

Council also cleared vegetation and put in new concrete pipes.

Josh said there had been no risk of graves washing away, but the damage to sites required a specialist heritage stonemason.

“He does a lot of restoration and refurbishment works for old monuments and knows how to restore them to their original condition … which is exactly what we needed for those four monuments.”

Council is also planning to repair the cemetery’s dilapidated entrance portico, which has been fenced off since last year.

For many years, the Historical Society has urged council to clear surrounding bushland where unmarked graves are acknowledged and to remove invasive trees from the cemetery.

Jenny said, “A lot of the families have moved on, or they’ve died, and I think we should respect them [and] as council, being the owners and caretakers of this, to remove any debris that’s on the graves themselves and get rid of the trees out of them.

“They’ve done what they’ve had to do but the rest of the cemetery is a disgrace for the council.”

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