By Roselyn Fauth
At first glance the cemetery looks like neat rows of stones. Look closer and you notice the gaps, not because there are no graves, but because some people never received a marker at all. I never noticed that before. Once you’ve seen it, though, you can’t unsee it.
I’ve been looking for Ann. She died 165 years ago. She was the mother of the first recorded European baby born in Timaru. We know when she died, but no one knows where she is. I can’t find her.
And that not knowing has pulled me deeper than I expected, into maps, minutes, and memories of people I’ve never met.
The Timaru Cemetery, first established in the 1860s, is one of the earliest public memorial landscapes in the region. Its monuments, from early settler graves to ornate family plots, show how the community chose to remember the people who shaped early Timaru....
The cemetery sits high on the hill overlooking the town and the sea. That placement wasn’t just practical, it was symbolic. In Victorian times elevation meant virtue. The dead were literally placed above the living. The decision about its location, its layout, and the style of monuments reflected colonial values about order, hierarchy, and visibility.
There were actually two reserves originally set aside as cemeteries. One is the site we know today. The other stretched from near the Aigantighe to the corner of Wai-iti Road and Selwyn Streets. The two were divided by religion. Anglicans were to go south, and Catholics and Wesleyans north. The Wai-iti Cemetery was never used for burial, only for grazing sheep, and was sold off in the late 1880s. The southern site became the cemetery for Timaru.
Local government and church committees guided its early development, reflecting civic priorities about hygiene, morality, and social order. The cemetery’s location above the town symbolised moral and physical elevation, quite literally watching over the community.
If you walk through the cemetery, you see those values carved in stone. Angels, clasped hands, anchors, and biblical verses speak of permanence and virtue. Every detail was chosen for a reason. These stones were messages to the living.
Over time, the cemetery became a place of ritual and remembrance. Families visited on anniversaries, laid flowers on Anzac Day, and tended their family plots. Even now, local volunteers meet on Sundays to make the inscriptions legible again. It is an act of care as much as it is of preservation.
But there are other stories here too.
More than 700 people were buried in what was called the free ground. Their burials were paid for by the government. If a family could not afford the cost, they were not allowed to erect a headstone unless they paid the government back. Many never could.
Today that area looks like a stretch of grass with humps and hollows. You could walk across it and never know you are stepping above hundreds of lives. I did that for years without realising. Now I stop every time.
The cemetery tells both stories at once, privilege and poverty, permanence and disappearance. It reminds us that remembrance itself has never been equal.
The monuments invite attention. They ask us to slow down, to read, to remember. But absence speaks too. When there is no stone, no inscription, no sign of care, forgetting becomes easy. Neglect doesn’t always come from a lack of love. Sometimes it is simply the silence of not knowing who lies there.
The monuments encourage us to look closer. They draw us into the details, the carvings, the words, the traces of love left behind. But when a grave has no marker, it is easy to walk past and forget.
Ann Williams has become a symbol for me. Her story stands for the hundreds of others who rest without markers, people who helped shape Timaru’s beginnings but faded quietly from view. To honour her is to honour them all.
In recent years locals have fundraised for a new monument at the cemetery. It will recognise those who have no marker, those buried in free ground, those whose records were lost, and those whose stories slipped from memory. It is a simple way of saying every life mattered.
The cemetery still gives meaning to our landscape. From its vantage point, visible from the sea and from much of the town, it connects the past to the present. Sometimes I wonder what future eyes will see here, if they will still be able to read our stories, or if they will just feel them.
Every stone tells a story. But so does every patch of grass.
Searching for Ann made me think about my own family, the relatives I have never met, the graves I cannot find, the stories I am still learning. I keep thinking how different this work feels from writing history. It is quieter, slower, more like listening than researching.
Side Quests and Connections
As I searched for Ann, I found myself drawn into side stories that all connect to this one.
The Lost Wai-iti Cemetery. A forgotten reserve that never became a burial ground, only a paddock for sheep. Its existence shows how faith shaped our early town planning, even when the ground itself remained untouched.
The Free Ground and Pauper Burials. Over 700 people lie beneath what now looks like open lawn. Some were labourers, mothers, or children. Poverty kept them from a stone. The only record is in the council ledger and now, the online database.
Symbols in Stone. Victorian iconography filled the cemetery with meaning. Lilies for purity, ivy for eternal life, roses for love, ferns for humility. Angels and broken columns spoke of loss and faith. The language of grief carved in marble.
The Monument Makers. Timaru’s masons left their mark too. McBride’s Monumental Masons has worked since the 1870s, alongside Aorangi & Harding, Crombie, and E. B. Carter. Their craftsmanship turned sorrow into sculpture.
Legislation and Landscape. The Burial Grounds Closing Act of 1874 and the Cemeteries Act of 1882 shaped how and where New Zealanders were buried. They banned inner-town graveyards, separated denominations, and introduced new moral order into the design of our cemeteries.
Headstones and Change. From tall marble monuments of the nineteenth century to the simpler granite plaques of today, each generation leaves its own signature of remembrance. Even in their weathering, these stones speak of who we were.
Sometimes I think of the people who will come after us, tracing the same lines across the cemetery, wondering about the stories behind the names and the spaces between them. Maybe one day someone will do for us what we are now doing for Ann.
James Curl found this advert in an 1860s guide to Highgate Cemetery in London, showing a range of grave monuments