Camperdown Cemetery

Camperdown Cemetery was founded in 1848 and contains a number of Very Important People from Australia’s colonial past, or so they say. It also contains the person who was the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ Miss Havisham! Apparently she also got a jilted at the altar as well and left the wedding feast on her table til it rotted away… her name is «Eliza Emily Donnithorne» but I haven’t found her gravestone yet.
S’anyway this is full of tombstones… old tombstones… and more tombstones. It’s actually a pretty beautiful place to visit, a bit quiet at times. It seems… to have a changed a bit since I first stumbled across it nearly 3 years ago. They’ve cleared out a lot of the areas, and some of my favorite tombstones have gone (did I just say I had a favorite tombstone?). It’s a little less otherworldly and detached than it used to be, but still a good place to visit.
They have tours every first Sunday of the month for $ 10. And it’s creepy as at night.

Hey! Who hid this sneaky little bad boy back here?
Often, when I was sailing three sheets to the wind at the Newtown Festival, with a sauce-​laden haute dog in one hand and a cold damned beer in t’other, I’d look up at the big grey bulwark of a wall, stained and monolithic, huge and ancient, and wonder what was on the other side. Narnia, most probably.
But damned if I didn’t find out the answer just by accident. Had a meeting up on King St. Parked down the side street near St Stephens. Had some time to kill (hey look, a cemetery pun) and wandered in to look at the church but overshot, ending in this quiet, sprawling, crumbling, beautifully decrepit graveyard bounded by the wall, yes, the bulwark, beyond which is Newtown’s celebrated park, that very festival site where I’ve seen so many bands and tried on so many hats.
Jeebus it’s got a lot going for it. I was the only one in there, wandering around reading the gravestones (my favourite had a big rusty propeller, was erected by the mates of some shipbuilder that died, possibly tragically) and all I could think was, Man, if I was in a band this is where I’d shoot my music video.
I walked out feeling cool, calm and collected, like the Dalai Lama must feel every day of his life. That feeling is hard to get these days.

In the middle of busy, grimy Newtown is this beautiful walled cemetery in the grounds of St Stephen’s Church. It offers peace and tranquility where you never thought you would find it. There are plenty of shady trees and tombstones, with lush grass interweaving a path between them. An oasis where you can’t hear traffic noise or see anything commercial, it’s a great place to get away from it all.
You will find people wandering through and reading the inscriptions, walking their dog, sitting in a circle playing music, smoking the funny stuff and generally just hanging out. It’s my favourite place to come the day after the night before with something greasy from King Street (eg Clem’s Chicken) and let nature restore my health.

No, I’m not a goth looking for somewhere to palely loiter. This is actually a beautiful piece of green space just behind busy King Street and packed full of historical interest.
Open every day during daylight hours, it’s a little tree-​dense haven used by locals as a place to walk, to sit and to visit the past. When I wandered through the other day there was an old guy taking the Hound of the Baskervilles for a walk which added to the atmosphere nicely. You walk past the old cottage and ginormous over 150 year-​old fig tree and are presented with rows of sculpture, glorious trees, a bamboo grove thick enough to disappear into forever, and a chance to reflect.
I find it a great antidote for those days when it’s tempting to feel a bit sorry for yourself. A quick glance at the amount of graves marked with ‘aged 12 months’, ‘aged 18 months’, deaths by drowning and disease and you soon feel pretty darn grateful. You can find here the grave of Eliza Donnithorne, said to be the ‘real’ Miss Havisham, a tribute to ‘the whole of the Aboriginal race’ as well as those named and unnamed buried here, and erected in 1944. The stories are incredible, and I was thrilled to find tours are now being offered on the first Sunday of the month. Contact
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As for feeling grateful, there’s a great phallic monstrosity on your left as you go in, in memory of a masonic lodge-​master recorded as ‘James Blair, Esq. JP’. Underneath, almost as a literal footnote, is his wife Elizabeth, recorded only as ‘Relict of the Above’. Gee, thanks. She outlived him by six years, bet they were happy ones.