Almalgamation

All of a sudden, it seems like everything has changed at Rookwood.  With the exception of the Catholic portion, the Trusts have all been disbanded and brought together into a single General Cemeteries Trust for Rookwood Necropolis.  What does this mean to heritage?  What will it mean to the employees?  What about the prospects for this wonderful place?
Hopefully, good things.  It will be great if all the employees from the different trusts are, well, working together.  Of course, to a degree, we already were.  Certainly at Monuments in Memoriam, we had a good and growing relationship with the Jewish Cemetery Trust and with the Independents and we had started doing some work in the old areas of the Muslim trust.
Interestingly, the amalgamation has been pushed by government for decades...  if not a century or more...  but all of a sudden its real and very immediate.  The idea has been supported by the National Trust Cemeteries Committee for a long time, although for my part I was skeptical as it seemed to me like the cemeteries in Rookwood were already too big (but maybe that's just me coming from a small town and a smaller cemetery), but I'm not sure that anyone envisioned that it would be completed without the endorsement of the different Trusts themselves.  It will certainly be a huge loss if community members feel less engaged and empowered:  as groups such as the Jewish Cemetery Trust have very committed individuals who provide an important contribution to the cemetery and strong linkages to the wider community.
The hope is that with a combined management over the whole site (well, over the whole site except the large Catholic component), it will be possible to build upon the different successes of the various trusts while also unifying operations and regulations and all of that sort of stuff.
I'm hopeful that it will also help us continue our progress towards greater care and maintenance for the historic monuments all over Rookwood.

I've made up a map showing what I think are the areas now included in the General Cemeteries Trust of Rookwood Necropolis...  the large missing chunks are
upper left:  Old Catholic
middle right:  War Graves
middle:  Rookwood Crematorium...   which has it's century old lease running out in 15 or 20 years...
lower portions:  Catholic
with the new development area at the furthest south being part of the amalgamated GCT, with burial space to be divided between Jewish and Muslim communities

I'll try and embed the map below, but if it doesn't appear in you browser, this link should work and open it in Google Maps:


http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=202792280362984896153.0004bf50e8b02536e2d07&msa=0

View General Cemeteries Trust of Rookwood Necropolis in a larger map