Black Cockatoos and the Hoare Obelisk

Cemetery Black Cockatoo by Sach Killam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

There's been a flock of yellow-tailed black cockatoos hanging out with me in the Independent Cemetery.  They're great fun...  with eerie calls which seem, well, ancient.  I don't know why, but it seems like a prehistoric sound...  maybe pre-human...  echoing  from a million years ago.  You can almost imagine happening on a dinosaur...  in a landscape dominated by massive Bunya trees and their ancient dinosaur defences.  Maybe it's the overgrowth in Rookwood.  Maybe it's also the ruins.

I have been working on reinstalling the Hoare family obelisk (not that the cockies were interested)...  which is probably why I've had ruins on my mind.  The Hoare vault collapsed spectacularly– and terribly– in 2009.  The Independent Cemetery Trust had attempted to do something to address the area, but the advice from their first heritage consultant (which involved a lot of concrete and some 'crazy paving' of the broken vault pieces) was not approved by the Heritage Branch...  so, while everyone is anxious to do something...  it's very hard to know what is right.  Obviously, it would be great to reconstruct the historic vault...

Here is a photo of the Frazer Mausoleum showing the Hoare family vault and obelisk intact, taken by Jane Stott of the Friends of Rookwood in 2008

©Jane Stott 2008

A full reconstruction would, however, cost an amazing amount of money...  probably a lot more that the whole thing initially cost in the 1884....  Unless it was funded by a grant, how could such money be justified when there are so many other monuments and vaults at risk at Rookwood...  shouldn't we do proactive work to protect them first?

The reinstallation of the obelisk is, however, a positive development.  It's a joint project of the Independent Cemetery Trust, the Friends of Rookwood, and the Rookwood Necropolis Trust.  (It was formulated before the shake-up and amalgamation of the various non-Catholic trusts at Rookwood...  but the changes in administration appear to have already had a positive impact on maintenance, morale, and co-operation at Rookwood!)  We are installing the obelisk on a new foundation in a position which reflects the original (although, obviously, not as high as there is no vault right now).  The installation will be secure and stable but also reversible...  if funds ever do become available, the obelisk could be reinstalled in its historic location on top of the (reconstructed) vault.

The obelisk will be wrapped (plastic over damp hessian) while the lime mortar sets...  but should be unwrapped for the Rookwood Open Day...  September 23rd!