Conservation of Cemeteries

My conservation mentor in Canada– Tamara Anson-Cartwright– has been encouraging me to write up my understanding of the importance and value of conserving monuments (specifically for presentation to the Ontario Association of Cemeteries and Funeral Professionals [in Canada] but hopefully to be useful generally).  It's not that I'm some sort of profound world expert:  instead, I think, its for the same reason that she & Per Neumeyer {late conservation master stonemason and friend to whom I owe so much} so appreciated having me help in teaching the Essentials for Monument Care course:  because I'm a person who started out as a simple cemetery worker.  I have come to care and understand the value and beauty of cemeteries from (simply) working in them.  Maybe I'm an insider amongst the motley characters who work in cemeteries...  part of a long continuing tradition of sextants, gravediggers, and now 'burial technicians' as the industry insiders re-brand us.

Cemetery landscapes are both irreplaceable and unlike any other public spaces in our world.  (The closest equivalent in probably historic sites and ruins.)  Cemeteries comprise a unique combination of public and private space:  being both a publically accessible as a park encouraging contemplation and passive enjoyment of nature; and, a place embodying specific histories and private grief.

The heritage value of cemeteries like Rookwood is not replaceable:  the intact and often untouched plantings, the monuments, the objects historically placed on graves, the designs and carvings and symbolism....
Cemeteries embody history.  Just as they are a safe and enduring space for us to place our dead (and celebrate lives as we work through our griefs), they become living records of our understandings of life and death, of meanings symbolised through carving, and, well, through symbols permanently etched in stone.  These meaning emerge from all sorts of individual family stories, collating and extending into a actualisation and realisation of how society as a whole has understood it's place in the world....  And, greatest of all, this is recorded in cemeteries over a long stretch of time....

In Rookwood, you can literally walk through different decades cultural understandings, of architectural styles...  simply by moving through different sections and blocks of the cemetery.  Likewise, differences between cultural groups in recorded in the different denominational areas...  and even in the different managemental policies and maintenance regimes now enacted upon those areas.  So much written in the place.  (One of my favourites is the Old General...  but that's another story.)