Cemetery site of sighs and stories

Toodyay’s Bilya Walk Track starts at Duidgee Park on the town’s west side and follows the Avon River for 5.6km before ending at Nardie Cemetery to the east.

But I won’t be spinning an allegorical tale of life and death. Indeed, I don’t even walk the track (that’s for another day, and another story). Instead, I go straight to the cemetery, a few minutes drive out of town, to discover more about its fate, and the fate of those interred there, whose number includes the ancestors of some of Toodyay’s oldest families.

I say “its fate” first, because both its location near a Dumbarton industrial estate — which includes an earthworks! — and its state of neglect are striking.

Though I hasten to add the local Shire, the Toodyay Historical Society and the Toodyay Friends of the River have clearly made efforts to ensure this haunting location is accessible. The signage and interpretative material, including a map of the Bilya Walk Track and a brief history of the cemetery, are excellent.

It is in the latter that I read the following:

“Many members of Toodyay’s pioneer settler families have their resting place here: the Fergusons, Whitfields, Clarksons and McDermotts to name a few.”

Two small children were the first to be buried on this site, in unmarked graves, nearly a decade apart: Charles (later Toodyay’s first Anglican Minister) and Julia Harper’s infant daughter Isabella (1839) and four-year-old Mary Elizabeth Whitfield (1848).

Blacksmith Alexander (Sandy) Ferguson was the first to be officially buried at the site after residents purchased the land from a local farmer and Nardie was gazetted in 1856. In 1867 Bishop Hale consecrated Nardie and Newcastle (now Old Newcastle Public Cemetery — Newcastle being the old name for Toodyay) cemeteries. Unlike Newcastle, Nardie is no longer used as a cemetery (its last inhabitants being interred there in the 1960s). But its legacy lives on. The aforementioned history concludes thus:

“Theheadstones reveal rich stories from the early years of the Swan River Colony, like that of Nancy Green (nee Turner) who died in Toodyay in 1867. Nancy arrived in Fremantle on the Warrior in March 1830 with her family along with Captain Molloy and his wife Georgiana, who became a famous collector and researcher of WA flora. Other passengers included the Bussell family, after whom Busselton is named.

In 1834 Nancy was widowed when Captain James McDermott was lost at sea. She inherited his property east of here, known as Mountain Park.

Walking among the overgrown graves in various states of disrepair, I see these names and others inscribed on the headstones. Others again are harder to read, having been worn away by the elements. There are family plots, and there are lonely, isolated graves set apart from the others. The countryside beyond the river is lush, and there are occasional outbursts of wildflowers.

I am reminded of the opening of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial (1658):

“When the general pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes; and, having no old experience of the duration of their relics, held no opinion of such after-considerations.”