Cemetery gate with blue­stone piers

The gates to the Timaru Cemetery were described by The Timaru Her­ald in 1904 as ‘a length of neat iron pal­is­ad­ing fence on low stone wall’ with orna­mental car­riage gates and smal­ler ped­es­trian gates ‘hung on massive stone gate posts’. Photography By Roselyn Fauth

If you want to under­stand how a town thinks about death, one way to learn is to start at the gate.

​Most of us pass through the gates of Timaru Cemetery with pur­pose. We might be vis­it­ing graves, look­ing around or walk­ing or cyc­ling through. But if we pause at the entrance and look closely, the gates tell a layered story of loss, law, archi­tec­ture and civic respons­ib­il­ity.

The blue­stone entrance piers, built of local basalt, anchor what The Timaru Her­ald described in 1904 as “a length of neat iron pal­is­ad­ing fence on low stone wall”, with orna­mental car­riage gates and smal­ler ped­es­trian gates “hung on massive stone gate posts”. This was delib­er­ate civic design.

In Janu­ary 1897, the Timaru Cemetery Board called for tenders for a stone wall and entrance piers under archi­tect James S Turn­bull.

His father, Richard Turn­bull, had earlier gif­ted iron gates to the cemetery in 1869.

Prac­tical neces­sity drove much of this work. In the 1860s, stock wandered in and dam­aged graves as fen­cing deteri­or­ated.

In a young set­tle­ment bordered by graz­ing land, enclos­ure was essen­tial as well as dec­or­at­ive.

Timaru Cemetery was estab­lished as a pub­lic muni­cipal cemetery rather than a church­yard. The land was ves­ted under the Pub­lic Reserves Act 1854 along­side another reserve, near what is now the Aigan­tighe Art Gal­lery, that was reportedly never used. The first recor­ded inter­ments took place in 1860. Among the earli­est were Deal boat­men Mor­ris Clayson Cory and Robert Boubius, who drowned dur­ing a res­cue attempt off Timaru’s coast while work­ing for the land­ing ser­vice.

From 1870, the cemetery’s man­age­ment was reg­u­lated under pro­vin­cial legis­la­tion.

The Cemetery Reserves Man­age­ment Ordin­ance allowed burial fees to be waived for those without means, but exclus­ive rights had to be pur­chased before monu­ments could be erec­ted.

So, buri­als could be guar­an­teed, but memori­al­isa­tion required pay­ment. Later acts form­al­ised trustee gov­ernance and even­tu­ally trans­ferred respons­ib­il­ity to local author­it­ies under the Burial and Crema­tion Act 1964.

In 1881, archi­tect Maurice de Har­ven Duval added a brick mor­tu­ary chapel just inside the entrance with a care­taker’s cot­tage nearby.

A 1904 news­pa­per walk-through described the “pretty mor­tu­ary chapel in stuc­coed brick” and noted that by then about 3400 inter­ments had taken place and the ori­ginal reserve was nearly full.

By the 1930s, ideas about burial were chan­ging. In 1933, the cemetery board debated estab­lish­ing a crem­at­orium and con­sidered a pro­posal pre­pared by Percy Watts Rule, who had worked in part­ner­ship with James Turn­bull.

The plan would have added a gas-fired crem­at­orium to the west side of the exist­ing chapel. It was cos­ted and ser­i­ously dis­cussed but never built.

The gates, designed a gen­er­a­tion earlier, had already wit­nessed a shift from tra­di­tional burial to the pos­sib­il­ity of mod­ern crema­tion.

The chapel was demol­ished in 1968, and gov­ernance later passed fully to local author­ity con­trol under the Burial and

Crema­tion Act. The Sex­ton’s res­id­ence is gone. The admin­is­trat­ive build­ings have changed. The gates remain. They have framed epi­demic buri­als in 1918, war­time losses, pub­lic debate about buri­als, and the daily acts of remem­brance that con­tinue today. They frame grand monu­ments and unmarked ground alike. Within the gates, regard­less of status or story, most of us arrive in the same place at the end.

The cemetery in many ways has also become a timeline of Timaru’s past, writ­ten in stone – and in the marker’s absence. It is also import­ant to recog­nise that burial tra­di­tions here long pred­ate colo­nial legis­la­tion. Māori have ances­tral con­nec­tions to this land­scape, and con­cepts of tapu and remem­brance exis­ted here well before this muni­cipal reserve was formed.

Today we con­tinue to pass through these gates to remem­ber, to reflect and some­times simply to walk. Built her­it­age mat­ters because it shows us what earlier gen­er­a­tions val­ued enough to build in stone. These gates tell us that Timaru chose pro­tec­tion, order and pub­lic respons­ib­il­ity. As we con­sider the future of our cemeter­ies, per­haps they quietly ask what we will choose to value now.

Brought to you by the Timaru Civic Trust, cel­eb­rat­ing our built her­it­age and the people who keep it alive.