Back

Barton Park Cemetery, Wallerawang is Heritage Item

The earliest graves of the Murray family in Australia are to be found in the private cemetery of the Walker/Barton family at Wallerawang. Though the homestead site of the James Walker's head station is beneath the lake of the Wallerawang Power Station, the associated Barton Park Cemetery has been relocated and preserved. It is enhanced by its setting on a small point in the lake. While the cemetery contains the graves of the Walker and Barton family, other early settlers of the Wallerawang area are buried there, including Wilhelmina Reid Murray. There is also a headstone referencing the death of her daughter, Jessie Murray Corfield who died in childbirth (1853) on lonely Teebar Station, on the pastoral frontier inland of Maryborough, Wide Bay District. Jessie's lone grave is located just below the original homestead site on Teebar, on the creek flat. All that remains is the simple stone on which "Jessie" is barely discernible. However, her Warrawang family erected a headstone to her memory in Barton Park Cemetery. Others buried here include Thomas Brown, founder of Lithgow who died in 1889, Mary Blackman, and Bobby Cullen. Cullen was the son of an aboriginal woman of the Wallerawang aboriginal clan and of an European father. In his diaries, James Murray refers to his regular Sunday visits to James Walker at Wallerawang and then to "tea" with Thomas Brown at Eskbank, Lithgow. For access to this heritage cemetery, arrangments can be made with security at the Wallerawang Power Station. And one may visit historical "Eskbank" house in Lithgow and see the front room where James Murray and Thomas Brown shared tea and many conversations. [PHOTO: Ian Stehbens]

Back