115 – Toowong Cemetery

Toowong Cemetery is the largest cemetery in Queensland. It spans 44 hectares, and over 119,000 people are buried in approximately 46,000 graves.

That is average of 2. 6 people per grave. I know there are some mass graves which might account for some of the extra people, but it is a weird statistic all the same.

Officially opened on the 5th of July 1875, Toowong was originally called the Brisbane General Cemetery. It was not the original cemetery in the area, and not everyone was in favor of putting a cemetery in this location. But they did.
Believe it or not, a lot of thought goes into where a cemetery is placed. Or sometimes it does. Thought apparently was not involved in one of the areas original cemeteries, and that poor judgement led to the founding of Toowong.

In the 1844 Paddington Cemetery, Milton Cemetery or the North Brisbane Burial Grounds (it was called all 3 names, but was officially North Brisbane Burial Grounds) was opened and was the eventual resting place of over 10,000 people.
No one is sure exactly how many were buried there because records were lost, but the problem with Paddington was not that it was crowded or that records were not precise.
Whilst the proximity of the new cemetery allowed customary procession on foot, and natural drainage away from the early settlement served to allay sanitary concerns, as early as 1851, the public were petitioning the  to relocate the North Brisbane Burial Grounds.
It was centrally located, on easily accessible paths which allowed the customary procession to the cemetery on foot. The ground was level and had natural drainage away from the early settlement, which was an added bonus for sanitary issues, so it appeared to be an ideal place for the cemetery.
Except by 1851, the neighborhood was already petitioning for the cemetery to be moved.
Why? Because with all the wonderful attributes of the location, the cemetery was in fact, built on a swamp. After a rain, when the groundwater rose, the cemetery would smell like ‘the stench of old death.’
By 1875, the cemetery was officially closed, and the government passed a law which allowed them to exhume the bodies from Paddington and move them to other locations, including the new Toowong Cemetery.
Except they did not move all the bodies. They reclocated about 500 and called it good. They did bother to take the headstones to ‘clear the area,’ which was might nice of them, but they moved the few with the bodies and the rest were simply stacked in a pile.

But wait… there is more.

As population grew in the area, it was the practice of the day to use “thunderboxes,” or what I would call an outhouse. Every week the ‘nightsoil,’ or excrement was taken from the ‘thunderbox’ and dumped on old Paddington cemetery/not cemetery. Which helped the smell issue. To be worse.
By the time the 1920’s came around, tons of nightsoil was being dumped everyday on the graveyard, not surprisingly leading the people living in the area to once again complain.
The grand answer was to turn the old Paddington into the garbage dump, because that would help.
It did not.
So, things went along without resolution, except for the ever mounting garbage and stench. When the great depression rolled around and people needed jobs, one of them was to build roads.
Since supplies were short, and they in fact ran out of road base while building the nearby Hale Street, the workers found the pile of old gravestones and ground them up to use as base for the road.
That base supposedly still exists today. From the river for a full mile up Hale Street, a foot thick layer of grave rubble holds up the road. My guide said it was haunted by the people whose stones were used, and that is why there are so many traffic issues on Hale Street. Believe what you will.

None of that solved the stench issue. Eventually, the garbage dump was closed and the area developed into Lang Park. the home of the rugby league.
A couple of generations had gone by since the old cemetery was closed and people don’t learn their history, so with the bodies, the sewage and the garbage covered up with a shiny new stadium, the past was forgotten. Until 1974 when the great flood hit the Brisbane area. When the water receded, the groundskeepers were confronted with several coffins sticking up in the middle of the field. Apparently they were all from the old Catholic section of the cemetery, or that was an important detail in the tour. Coffins in the middle of a stadium does not inspire attendance, so the groundskeepers were told to quickly rebury them under the western try-line and to keep their mouths shut about the incident.
Well, eventually Lang Park needed an update, (Now known as Suncorp Stadium) but this time archaeologists were brought in before things started to be uncovered. I’m guessing a groundskeeper didn’t stay quiet.
But, the result was they found several graves… which were left intact. And they found 394 unidentified individuals. The unidentified were collected and placed in a mass grave at Toowong, which is on the tour and is one of the graves that throw the average of 2.6 bodies per grave. Which is why I told a story about Paddington Cemetery.

One might think with the disastrous location of the Paddington/Milton/North Brisbane Burial Grounds still fresh in the minds of the locals, they would take great care to locate their next cemetery in a less damp environment.

Anyway, Toowong is apparently a corrupted western version of “Tu-Wong” which was the aboriginals named the river bend near the Indooroopilly Bridge. Tu-Wong, I am told, was a name for a local bird. In 1862, early settlers started to subdivide their blocks of land because of the rapid expansion of the area. One of those was Richard Drew, who named his subdivision the ‘Village of Toowong.’
In 1866, land was reserved for the cemetery, and the first cemetery trustees were appointed in 1870.

Except not everyone was excited. In fact, the site was hotly contested for over 2 decades. The site was too isolated. There was no access to public transport. Those who did not live in the ‘odor zone’ of Paddington did not understand why they needed another cemetery. It was on a hill instead of flat ground. Even in 1870, when ‘trial sinkings’ were done at Toowong to prove the idea, the ground was found to be unsuitable.
So, bickering and a lot of nothing happened until the beloved second governor of Queensland, Samuel Wensley Blackall officially threw his 2 cents on the pile. Strongly opposed to “blackbirding” (the use of South Sea Islanders as slave labor), he was constantly at odds with the state government of the day and extremely popular with the ordinary people.
But Blackall suffered from consumption – or tuberculosis as we call it today. Although there was no cure back in the day, they believed they could relieve the symptoms if they spent time in places with an excellent breeze. In this part of the world, the place to go was Mount Coot-tha, which is where Blackall went. On the way back don from the summit, Blackall and his friends stopped on a hill to admire the view, and knowing his time on Earth was coming to an end, he remarked he wished for his bones to be laid to rest on this spot.
That spot happened to be in the area planned for Toowong Cemetery, even though it was used as military training ground at the time.
Blackall died on 2 January 1871 and a month of mourning was declared. 12,000 spectators lined the route of the funeral cortege. Hundreds of horse drawn vehicles and horsemen followed the hearse to the spot Blackall designated for his bones. A band played the ‘Death March.’ 17 minute guns were fired over his grave. It was an epic display for the area, reported on and attended by everyone in the area.
His grand gothic column stone was erected by the Parliament of Queensland, and it is the tallest monument in the cemetery to this day, and he has the honor of being the first person buried in Toowong Cemetery, even before the cemetery officially opened in 1875.

Things started grand, but slow. Between Blackall’s burial and the opening of the cemetery (4 years) there were 6 burials. People were more interested in the area since Blackall was buried, but they still did not want to carry coffins up hill, or way out into the countryside.
The trustees were dealing with churches and other religious and social groups who wanted their own section designated for their particular groups so the religious and social class distinctions were perpetuated in mortality. Thus, the land was divided into portions. Church of England; Wesleyans; Hebrews; Roman Catholics; paupers; public graves; criminals and so forth. In 1879 the Chinese were allocated a portion, then reallocated to a different portion, then again reallocated. Eventually, many of the Chinese exhumed their dead and returned the bodies to China instead of being moved around so much.

Other interesting yet odd facts about Toowong Cemetery.
The oldest surviving headstone in Queensland is in the cemetery. It dates 15 November 1831, and was originally on the banks of the Brisbane river where 3 children were buried. They were moved to Toowong in October of 1881.

In 1988 the first season of “Mission: Impossible” was filmed in Queensland, and some scenes were filmed in Toowong Cemetery.

In 2011, while staff prepared a new grave, the headstone of a John Peel was discovered. Except there was no record of a John Peel in the Brisbane City records.
the Friends of Toowong Cemetery took on the mystery and figured out that John Peel was one of the 505 missing headstones from the North Brisbane Burial Grounds. Not the ones used as road base, or at least I want to believe that story because it was interesting and fun to tell, but in 1913, the headstones from the North Brisbane Burial Grounds were stored ‘in good order’ behind Christ Church in Paddington. In 1930, they suddenly disappeared.
Until John Peels stone was discovered in Toowong Cemetery, and several archaeological digs since have found several more.

Since the ‘Village of Toowong’ was founded, sightings and rumors of witches, satanic cults and dark magic have been woven into the history of the cemetery. In the 1960s through the 1980s multiple articles were written in newspapers about the satanic cults operating in the area. Holding rituals at night in the cemetery and even rumored to be involved in murders, the stories accented the dark side of society.
One of the physical representations of these activities is vandalism of the graves, but not just any vandalism. Many of the angels are missing their right hands. Why? Because in ‘magic,’ objects can be used to represent other things. In this case, a marble hand becomes the ‘hand of glory’ which was said to grant the owner the power of invisibility and stealth.
No, having a right hand does not count, darn it. The ‘Hand of Glory’ was the right hand of an executed criminal cut from the body while the body was still fresh. It also had to be ‘prepared’ correctly or it would not work.

Ew. I suppose in that context, I’d rather have a marble statue’s right hand.

The “Hand of Glory” was also used by black magicians to conjure up demons or even the devil himself. So, with the occult, and all the satanic things happening in the area, a lot of the angels in the cemetery have lost their right hands over time.

I saved what I thought to be the most interesting story for the last. It is very local, and very weird at the extreme the family and the town took the events. It is the story of the murderous Maynes.
Patrick Mayne was a local butcher who found himself at a local pub one evening. Not unusual, except this particular evening a very intoxicated person, one Robert Cox, timber-cutter, was talking about the large sum of money he had in his possession. Stupid, yes, and he paid the price. The next morning parts of his dismembered body were found in various locations. The police found a suspect, arrested him and as happens, the courts sentenced him to death.
All wrapped up, the case faded from the public mind. Until a year later when Patrick Mayne bought his own butchers store, began buying up real estate and building quite a bit of wealth for himself. Out of nothing.
He married, had a family, even became an alderman. But people became suspicious.
When Patrick was on his death bed in 1865, thousands stood outside his butcher shop and home on Queen Street to await the appearance of the Father who was taking Mayne’s death bed confession.
All assumed he would confess to killing Robert Cox and all assumed the Father would announce the confession.
There was no announcement from the Father about what was said in the confession. There was no proof of Mayne’s guilt, or anything other than public belief that Patrick killed Cox.
But the public is a fickle thing, especially in mass. After the undertaker loaded up Patrick Maynes coffin in the hearse, he had to whip the horses until they bled to make them move. The public took that as a sign the horses knew of Patrick Mayne’s guilt and proved to them that he was a murder.
But Patrick was dead, so confession or otherwise, he would not pay the price for his deeds. Or not deeds. Doesn’t matter. His family now had to live with what the public demanded be a confession of his guilt.
By the time of his death, Patrick was very wealthy. His wife and children made large donations to the community including to the University who still maintain the Mayne gravesite to this day, the city, the hospital and so forth. But no matter how much they did, good intentions or otherwise, the people saw every penny as blood money.
The children of Patrick Mayne were so affected by their father’s legacy, that they all vowed to never marry and never have children so they would not ‘pass on their father’s madness into future generations.’
And so they did. They were all wealthy, intelligent philanthropists in their own right, but all the money they gave back to the community, which is apparent in the names of hospitals, parks, colleges… everywhere, was looked upon with scorn. All the kids kept to their pact, and as the last of the Mayne children died, the family died with them.
Now, their monument stands, with grated holes at the base of the family vault which allow gas from decomposition and ground water to escape. It is said crimson red liquid pours from those grates and will continued to do so until all the blood from Patrick Mayne’s deeds is washed away.
Of course, others say it is rust from old metal grates, but either way, it makes a good story. Kind of sucks his family died out because he might, or might not have killed a man. Especially after giving all of their wealth back to the community, but… every town has a story.