The graves of stillborn babies, paupers and a teenage coal miner will all be protected at Helensburgh Cemetery, thanks to decades of determined advocacy by the Helensburgh & District Historical Society.

“There's parts of this cemetery that have never been recognised – that’s the stillborn babies' graves and the paupers' graves,” family history researcher Jenny Donohoe told the Flame on a tour of the cemetery in March.

“I knew there were graves in there – and we found them."

How this came about is a story that stretches back 20 years. Worried that bulldozers would excavate where stillborns lie and paupers’ graves would be forever lost to encroaching bushland, Jenny and other society volunteers have spent countless hours comparing old plans, talking to relatives and trying to puzzle out burial sites in the 133-year-old cemetery.

Then, in November 2024, they had a breakthrough.

The lucky backburn

Hard as life must have been for Helensburgh’s first coal miners, they chose to bury their dead in a challenging site on a rocky ridgetop, where sandstone made digging hard work and bushfires regularly tore through. Historical Society president Jim Powell – the retired 325 Station captain who turns 80 on April 8 – fought many of the big fires and even has a larrikin’s poem about the risk of double cremation here.

Since it was dedicated in 1892, the cemetery has lost many wooden crosses to fire. Today, to help relatives find graves, Jenny locates the nearest surviving headstone, then counts backwards.

“All the markers went in the bushfires,” Jim said. “Going back to 1952, massive fires come through here. A lot of houses were burnt on the highway. It just ravaged right through the cemetery.”

But last year, fire did them a favour.

Jim and Jenny went to meet Wollongong Council staff to discuss the state of the cemetery, and discovered that a controlled burn had revealed headstones never seen before on its western edge, behind the Anglican section.

“The bushfire brigade had done a backburn through that area a fortnight before,” said Jim.  “So it was all cleared. We could actually see stones where the graves were, which we wouldn't have been able to do otherwise – it was just by chance.”

This was the paupers' section – for those too poor to afford a burial or people with no family to care for them. “Well over 100” paupers were buried there in the early 1900s and through the Great Depression.

“I have been saying for 20 years, we have people in here, but you just couldn't see the graves – it was just bush,” Jenny said.

A new Paupers and Unknown Burials section will now be added to Council's cemetery map.

Teenage miner's grave uncovered

At Jenny’s request, Council recently marked the newly found site of a young miner who rests in bushland near the Catholic section.

The son of Mary Hogan and Emile Cunningham, Emile Wenlock Cunningham upped his age to get a job as a clipper at the Metropolitan Colliery. Not long afterwards, he fell under a set of skips and was killed instantly.

“He died in 1908. I'm hoping at some stage council will put a rock with his name on,” Jenny said.

“He was 16 – but he was 18 by the mine’s records,” Jim added.

Jenny also hopes to establish where other early coal miners were buried, as she knows there’s an ‘accidental deaths’ row but not where it is.

Stillborn babies protected

No one knows how many stillborn babies are buried on the cemetery’s eastern side, in an undistinguished area with native grasses, mulch and tall eucalypts behind the Memorial Wall. Although their deaths were not documented, according to local knowledge the area was used from the 1890s up to the late 1960s.

Jim said fathers usually buried stillborn babies, but the site was confirmed thanks to a local mother. Margaret Dowson’s husband was away in the navy, serving on the HMAS Sydney, when she miscarried and had to bury her baby alone. Margaret never forgot how many paces her child lay from the cemetery tap and, before she passed away, shared this knowledge with the historical society.

Jenny said it’s vital to recognise and protect the stillborn babies section to prevent any further damage – many years ago, a bulldozer displaced stones here.

Thanks to the society's research, Council has now set white markers in the soil and tape in the bush as a first step to marking forgotten burial areas. The Stillborn Babies section will also be added to the official cemetery map.

Mysteries remain: 1892 map discovered

The mysteries of Helensburgh Cemetery are far from solved. Despite piecing together reports from old newspapers, church records and the government's Birth, Deaths and Marriages registry, Jenny still can’t identify over 100 sites.

But this year she discovered a 19th-century map with clues to the confusion.

“I have in there 137 [graves] that I can't identify and I can tell you why,” Jenny said. “In the archives the other day I found an old map of 1892.

“People have been buried in areas we don’t know about. There are sections in here [on the 1892] map that aren’t on the more recent map.”

While the map sheds light on lost areas, the Presbyterian section – where Scottish miners are buried in uneven rows and sites of various widths – is too great a puzzle even for Jenny. “This is one of my worst sections to identify. The rows are not straight, they are higgledy-piggledy everywhere. Nothing lines up.”

The map is titled “Tracing of a General Cemetery, Village of Helensburgh West, Parish of Heathcote-County of Cumberland”  and drawn in a scale of “2 chains to an inch”.

It had been stored in a file in the Old Mine Surgery, one-time workplace of mine doctor Frederick Cox turned Historical Society HQ. This surgery – which Jim said is unique in Australia as a museum set up in the manner of the times – will be open to visitors on Saturday, April 12, and residents are invited to add their stories and photos to the town’s historical records.

Founded in the 1880s, as coal was discovered and the railway built, Helensburgh has its fair share of colourful and criminal characters, some of whom will feature in Jenny’s next history book, Murders and Misdemeanours. Local legends attached to its cemetery range from the story of the drug dealer with the missing stash whose grave has been dug up multiple times to a religious man who donated his body to science but didn’t want anyone to know so organised for a coffin full of bricks.

Council supports society's efforts 

Thanks to ongoing cooperative work with Council, the society is looking forward to more improvements at the beautiful bushland cemetery. After an inquiry by the Flame to the council last month, Jenny was pleased to report that council staff have promised to meet and discuss the issue of three old trees growing into graves.

“I’ve been asking to clear them for 20 years,” she said.

The cemetery's damaged entry portico – built in the 1960s and rendered useless after being hit by a truck one night in 2021 – has been the subject of heated debate, with some residents seeing its upcoming removal as a big loss.

But the Historical Society deems it of no heritage value and welcomes council’s $235,000 plan to knock it down and build a sandstone arch with a gate that hearses may access (the portico restoration alternative was both more costly and required another entry road to be built, putting historic grave sites at risk).

“We can use local historical sandstone from the quarries,” Jim said. “You can have a nice couple of pillars with the wrought-iron gate on it and [a sign] ‘Cemetery established 1892’.

"That's all you want.”

Society Open Day in April

From 10.30am-2pm on Saturday, April 12, Helensburgh and District Historical Society will hold an open day at the Old Mine Surgery at 78 Parkes Street. The theme is 'Genealogy in the Helensburgh District', with residents asked to contribute items about pioneering families to the archives. Buy a raffle ticket to have a chance of winning the Tunnel watercolour by painter Edith McNally and check out the new photographic exhibition, with old school photos where you might find a relative or two. And be sure to wish president Jim Powell a happy 80th birthday for April 8th! Contact info@historichelensburgh.org.au