Category: AUSTRALIAN

Coast Cemetery

Hidden among popular Sydney golf courses is a little remembered graveyard populated by smallpox victims.

Hidden amongst the finest golf courses of Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs is the Coast Cemetery, an aging graveyard that remembers a time when the whole area existed solely to house smallpox victims.

In 1881, Sydney fell victim to an outbreak of smallpox, a highly infectious disease for which began tearing through the local population. Thus a makeshift city was built near the coast, removed from the Sydney city center to prevent its spread by quarantining any sufferers far away from the general population. As the outbreaks continued, the permanent Coast Hospital was built, including its own cemetery where any patients that died of the disease were required to be buried. 

The hospital and cemetery continued to be used into the 1900s with outbreaks of the bubonic plague, typhoid fever, and leprosy infecting the city. In 1934, the hospital was renamed the Prince Henry Hospital and in 1946, the majority of deadly outbreaks staunched, it became a teaching hospital. 

The cemetery is quite unique as the people who were buried there, some 2,000 patients and nurses of the hospital, having been relocated to the isolated hospital, are not necessarily from the area.

The site today is often overlooked in favour of the nearby suburb, the historically significant La Perouse. But this site offers something different, a snapshot of a very real, very frightening part of Sydney’s history reflected in the quiet, and often haunting, graveyard.
Know Before You Go

Follow Cape Banks Road until you reach a small trail named “Cemetery Trail.” There is just enough space to leave your car at the start of the trail and then you must walk the rest of the way.

It was a battle of ‘mass slaughter and mass grief’, the first time Australians were confronted with ‘the full force and horror of industrialised warfare.’

That’s how Veterans’ Affairs Minister Dan Tehan this week described the 14-hour bloodbath that became known as the Battle of Fromelles 100 years ago.

Nearly 2000 Australian soldiers died and nearly 3000 were wounded in one day. One of them was 38-year-old Indigenous digger, Albert Charles Leane.

It will probably never be known how many Indigenous Australians have served in the Australian defence forces. At the time of the First World War, Aboriginal people were not even entitled to vote.

Those who enlisted were not required to declare their ethnicity and even today, ticking the “Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander” box is voluntary.

Albert Charles Leane’s Service Record

Albert Leane, who was born in 1877 in Holsworthy, New South Wales, had signed up at the age of 37 the year before the battle. He had sailed from Sydney to Egypt to join the 55th Battalion and then shipped out to the Western Front.

On July 19, the full horror of war erupted at Fromelles and as German machine gunners strafed the battlefield Albert was wounded in the legs. He was captured by the Germans and became a prisoner of war, first at Stendal in Germany and then at Wittenberg.

He wrote several letters to his family from the PoW camps. In two of them, which are with the Australian Red Cross Society and on his service file, he reassures his loved ones by saying he’s doing well “under the circumstances”.

Australian Red Cross Society Wounded and Missing Enquiry. Bureau file, 2954 Private Albert Charles Leane. Australian War Memorial

When the war ended he was released and shipped to England in December 1918, returning to Australia the following March.

At the Centennial Memorial Ceremony held at Fromelles earlier this week, Mr Tehan said 16,900 Australians remain unaccounted for from the fighting on the Western Front.

“The industrial scale of the killing, the machines and weapons that swept away life created limited time for recognition, recovery or even burial,” he said.

“The grief and uncertainty of families with no plots for their loved ones was immense, pieces of their lives could never be fully recovered.

“It is our duty to honour their duty … they are unknown but not remembered any less.”

Mr Tehan thanked the French people and particularly the people of Fromelles for the respect they continued to show to the Australian fallen.

The AWM have at present approximately 1000 names of Aboriginal Australians who fought in the First World War. Many who tried to enlist were rejected on the grounds of race but this did not deter them changing their nationalities, names and places of origin in attempts to enlist.
Note: NITV wishes to thank Aunt Judith Joyce Niece of Albert, who provided the photos and information used for this article.

Aunt Judy is a Darug women, who wishes to Acknowledge and pay respect to her elders both past and present. She also would like to thank Philippa Scarlett and Rebecca Batemen for all the research they have done into her family’s history.

Strange things happened when Picnic at Hanging Rock producer Pat Lovell visiting the actual rock in Victoria.

FIFTY years ago this week a writer called Joan Lindsay published a mystery book about a group of schoolgirls who vanished on St Valentines Day 1900.

The place where the girls disappeared was one of Australia’s most eerie locations, Hanging Rock.

Often shrouded in mist, it’s also shrouded in mystery with baffling and unexplained incidents happening close to the rock.

The six million year old rare volcanic formation rises up on a plain between two tiny townships 70km northwest of Melbourne.

Less commonly known as Mount Diogenes, it comprises several distinctive outcrops including the ‘Hanging Rock’, a boulder suspended between other boulders under which is the main entrance path. Close by are other rock formations — the Colonnade, the Eagle and the UFO.

It was a sacred Aboriginal site for the Wurundjeri people and well-known to Lindsay who reportedly felt it had a mystical power.

Her book Picnic at Hanging Rock was published on April 3, 1967, and was made into Peter Weir’s award-winning 1975 film.

According to a new book to be published this week to mark the 50th anniversary of Lindsay’s novel, when Weir’s crew went to the rock to shoot the film strange things happened.

An edited extract of Beyond the Rock, by Janelle McCullough published in Good Weekend describes Weir and producer Pat Lovell meeting Joan Lindsay in 1973 and buying her book’s film rights for $100.

Strange things happened when Picnic at Hanging Rock producer Pat Lovell visiting the actual rock in Victoria.Source:Supplied

The actual ‘Hanging Rock’ among the formations on Mount Diogenes northwest of Melbourne.Source:Supplied

Anne Louise Lambert (foreground) as Miranda in the 1975 mystery film Picnic At Hanging Rock.Source:News Corp Australia

Lambert revisits the rock in 2002, 27 years after starring in the film Picnic at Hanging Rock. Picture: Shaney Balcombe. Source:News Corp Australia

The next day they travelled to Hanging Rock, getting lost en route and approaching from the wrong side where the formation loomed in front of them beneath a cloud.

“Immediately, they sensed the eeriness of the place,” McCullough writes. “Lovell was immediately uneasy.

“The rock ‘seemed so alien to the rest of the countryside’.

“At the picnic grounds at the base of the rock, her watch inexplicably stopped.

“It was the first of many times this would happen, either at Hanging Rock or around Joan herself.”

A place known locally in the town of Woodend, near Hanging Rock, as “Anti-Gravity Hill” purports to feature a strange and baffling phenomenon.

Mountmacedon.org.au claims that if a person stands on Straws Lane facing up the hill and tips water onto the road it flows “up the hill” not downhill A ball placed on the road will do the same thing and roll up the hill.

During filming at Hanging Rock itself, Weir described the effect where the light that streamed down through the trees was only visible for one hour of the day, when the sun was in the exact spot.

Picnic at Hanging Rock director Peter Weir on set making the film in 1975. Picture: Archive News Corp.Source:News Limited

One of the ‘faces’ among the formations at Hanging Rock which rises up from the plains northwest of Melbourne. Picture: tripadvisor.com.au.Source:Supplied

The scene where the four girls take off to explore Hanging Rock and things turn weird.Source:News Limited

Lindsay, who was occasionally on set during filming, would only say when asked about her book’s plot, “some of it is true and some of it isn’t”.

Despite many attempts to find a historic account of the disappearing schoolgirls, no-one has succeeded and it seems that only the locations are real.

There is one record of a young man falling and dying from Hanging Rock in the early 1900s, but this was recorded and solved and had no connection to the Hanging Rock story.

In 1907, a 19-year-old man murdered another man near the rock and was caught by police.

Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is the story of schoolgirls from the fictional Appleyard College for Young Ladies’ school near the real town of Woodend.

In the film, the formidable actor Rachel Roberts plays Miss Appleyard, with Anne Louise Lambert in the leading role of the ethereal schoolgirl Miranda.

On February 14, 1900 the girls prepare for a picnic at nearby Hanging Rock with their mathematics mistress Greta McCraw, and French mistress Mlle. de Poitiers played by Helen Morse.

Miss Appleyard and the schoolgirls at Appleyard College aka Martindale Hall, in Mintaro, South Australia where scenes from Picnic at Hanging Rock was filmed. Source:News Limited

Anne-Louise Lambert at Martindale Hall in South Australia last year. Picture: Kelly BarnesSource:News Corp Australia

The formidable Miss Appleyard played by Rachel Roberts in Peter Weir’s film.Source:News Limited

As their buggy gets closer to the rock, the driver’s watch stops on the stroke of twelve.

At the rock Miranda and three other girls, Irma, Mario and Edith, decide to explore.

They are observed by picnicking English tourist Michael Fitzhubert to lie dazed on the ground before moving, in a trance, into a recess in the rock face.

One of the girls, Edith screams and flees down the rock and a depleted and hysterical group returns to Appleyard College.

Missing are Miss McCraw, Miranda, Marion and Irma.

A police search party fails to find them, a Miranda-obsessed Fitzhubert sets out but is found near-delirious and clutching a piece of lace from Miranda’s dress.

Only Irma is found, unconscious and missing her corset but alive. She cannot remember what happened.

The incident spooks Woodend and Appleyard College, two more die and the girls’ disappearance is never solved.

Weir’s film is set to haunting pan flute music and was a critical success before being nominated for a raft of awards, but winning only a BAFTA for Best Cinematography.

The film created renewed interest by visitors to Hanging Rock, which is now a popular tourist destination and retains its reputation for being a “haunted” site.

DVD cover of the 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock with Anne Louise Lambert as Miranda.Source:News Corp Australia