While some graves have proven indestructable many are lost.
While some graves have proven indestructable many are lost.
Northern Advocate feature writer Lindy Laird and photographer John Stone accept an invitation to meet the living and the dead, the future and the past, at Towai Cemetery.
Yes, I agree with the earnest group of people showing me around, it is a very pretty place. So quiet and green.
And, yes, I see their problem. How can they entice more people to be buried in the old Towai Cemetery? How do you go about promoting a local, rural cemetery as having a great future?
Perhaps as a start, quips Frances-Jean Allan, the Towai Cemetery Committee could advertise the view.
''You don't have to be local, and there's plenty of room left. Anyone who wants to lie in a beautiful place with million dollar views is welcome to come and lie here.''
Ken and Leslie Allan who have deep family roots in the area.
From the top of the old graveyard which steps fairly steeply down the hill to the metal road below, the view is of patchwork pasture and bush, gentle dales and hills in the larger sweep of the picturesque Maromaku Valley.
Under a shimmering, mid-December afternoon sky, there are countless shades of greens and greys, and in the distance, the blues and mauve of a ring of hills.
Towai Cemetery Committee chairwoman Sandra Wallace says her farmer husband once said why would anyone choose a south-facing site. Then he came along on the tractor to mow the lawns and was surprised at how sheltered and sunny it was.
''Those old people knew what they were doing when they chose this place,'' Wallace says.
From left, Pam Going, Frances-Jean Allan, Leslie Allan, Ken Allan, Colleen Going and Sandra Wallace at Donald Allan's gravesite and plaque.
The cemetery was probably opened in the late 1880s and closed for burials by an earlier equivalent of the Far North council in 1953, citing concerns the hill would slip.
It didn't, but the road at the toe of the cemetery was widened.
Sunday school children would later be marched along to give the place a bit of a spruce-up, occasionally someone would clean or leave flowers at a headstone, attempts were made to keep the grass down.
Another whole generation passed on or just passed by, and the cemetery began to disappear from view, literally.
Some graves at the bottom were destroyed in the road widening but the real damage was caused by the wilding pines, gorse, bush and ferns that colonised the graveyard.
Thirty years after their stealthy invasion began, not a grave or headstone could be seen.
Committee member Colleen Going, involved in the cemetery's restoration since the 1990s, said anyone looking for relative's grave had to bash their way through the dense bush or crawl under brambles to try to find graves.
Even if they had a map of where the graves were, there were no reference points in that impenetrable jungle.
Going points to the land on the other side of the fence, covered in bush, wild pines, bracken and other weeds. The committee members think the boundaries aren't correct and there could be more graves on that side of the fence too.
There are burial records, and the council and sextons were diligent in that regard, but no one now knows where all the graves are, or who some belong to.
Long before the cemetery was closed 65 years ago, two devastating fires had ripped through. The sexton's shed and valuable records were lost, and wooden headstones on the oldest graves were destroyed.
In the 1990s, local interest, and dismay that the resting place of so many Towai folk was lost led to community working bees and the equivalent of thousands of volunteer hours spent clearing the bush, trucking away the debris, cleaning up the resting place of the dead.
Far North District has been helpful with finding burial records, but councils no longer maintain small local cemeteries. The community has to do that, and the only revenue is from burials.
A fresh injection of financial support and volunteer labour is needed to assure Towai's long-term future, Frances-Jean Allan says.
''How do you ask someone to be buried at the Towai Cemetery so we can keep the place alive, so to speak?
'We need to reach out to let people with a connection, or even those who are not local at all, know that this beautiful place is a fully functioning cemetery again.''
Her 90-year-old father Ken Allan remembers his and other local lads' first working bee there back in 1938 when it was common for communities, not local authorities, to take care of their own.
One well preserved grave is that of his brother, Donald Allan, who died aged 18 months, in 1926, after swallowing a button.
Allan knows a few stories of people in the ground and of the land.
''The Brock girls used to ride horses past the cemetery on their way to the dances at Towai and they had a real job getting their horses to walk past here,'' he says.
There's also a story about a local undertaker's assistant who was kept pretty busy collecting bodies during the Spanish flu. He combed his huge handle-bar moustache with kerosene every day and swore it kept the flu away.
Allan and his wife Leslie Allan walk hand-in-hand through the cemetery with its cloak of lush grass and telltale dips where graves might be. The names they look at are like a map of local roads: Mason, Callaghan, Balero, and more.
There are several Baleros buried there. It isn't Ken Allan but a Northern Advocate obituary written in July 1919 that talks about one of them: ''From all quarters of the North where he had resided in the course of the past 40 years or so, the highest eulogy is expressed in reference to Mr Andrew Balero, Sen, who although a Philippine Islander by birth is conceded to have been a ''white'' man in every meaning of the term.''
In its old-world language, unacceptable today, the obit describes how the ''sailorising'' Balero survived shipwrecks, slavers and other ''incidents of exciting character'' to land in Russell in the 1870s, and later acquire a bush-clad farm near Towai.
He now lies somewhere near Rose Callaghan who bears another local road name and whose headstone says she died in 1935, James Thomson who died in 1925, Laura Poole in 1931, Florence Veysey in 1889 and, possibly even earlier, Elizabeth O'Neil whose burned wooden headstone can hardly be read. It took a few years as the evangelistic Towai Cemetery Committee led the charge on the ground and in the council offices. In 2003 the Far North District Council and relevant government departments declared the cemetery open for business again.
To date there has been limited demand for the historic hillside's embrace.
In 2010, longtime nearby resident Stanley Stuart was the first to buried at the reopened Towai Cemetery, in a moving service organised by the community after no Stuart relatives could be traced. Formerly a local woman, May Deane was buried there in 2014.
Colleen Going is worried that although there are more than one generation of several families buried there, ''the chain has been broken, other family members have since been buried elsewhere".
But Pam Going believes the not all the threads are broken.
''There are heaps of threads, heaps of stories, even those not yet retold,'' she promises.
Sandra Wallace and her friend used to visit to clean one particular grave while they were still at school. The cemetery was so overgrown and rough she had no idea there were other graves there. Now she chairs the committee that works so hard to maintain it.
Towai Cemetery is mown and clipped and looks quite the picture, if somewhat sparse in the graves department.
A grassy track circling up the terraces is the ghost of a road where in early days horse drawn wagons or determined pallbearers carried caskets up to the higher field of graves and, later, hearses drove up.
Little gardens - refreshingly lacking contrived panache - are embedded in seemingly random places. Perhaps the flaxes, hydrangeas and other shrubs have taken root on long lost graves.
A memorial wall bears the names of people whose graves can't be found. Indentations in the ground hint at where the lost lie.
A few headstones tilt precariously. Names on some are almost indecipherable, others still legible, and some can be read only with the help of fingers, braille-like.
One or two graves are marked by upstanding stone columns. Stone-edged, cement covered slabs sit alone or in little groups. Here and there, plaques crouch above ground level.
Sitting apart, a fragile iron fence surrounds a double sized plot carpeted with grass, with no obvious grave and no headstone.
