McLeod Street Pioneer Cemetery is a heritage-listed cemetery at 127-145 McLeod Street, Cairns North, Cairns Region, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1877 to 1954. It is also known as Cairns General Cemetery and Cairns Pioneer Cemetery. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992.
History
Cairns was established officially in October 1876, as a port for the newly discovered Hodgkinson goldfields. When the town was surveyed in late 1876, no provision was made for a public cemetery. Earliest burials took place along the Esplanade to the north of the town centre, near the hospital reserve.
On 15 September 1877, almost a year after the establishment of Cairns, a 5-acre site bounded on three sides by McLeod, Gatton and Grove Streets (Section 36, County of Cook, Town of Cairns), was gazetted as a permanent cemetery reserve. The following month, an adjacent five acres (Section 35, bounded on three sides by McLeod, Gatton and Upward Streets) also were gazetted as permanent cemetery reserve.
The site was chosen because it was thought to be on dry ground, was sufficiently far from the inhabited section of the town, and was accessible from the hospital reserve. Only subsequently was it discovered that the site was poorly drained and subject to seasonal flooding, with graves unable to be dug to a greater depth than .
Trustees were appointed in December 1877, but the cemetery reserves in McLeod Street appear to have been unregulated and little used until the mid-1880s. New trustees had been appointed in 1879, but by mid-1883 the cemetery was without supervision or management and no register of burials was being kept. There was no road to the site (McLeod Street was unmade beyond Spence Street in 1884), and the land was not cleared.
New trustees were appointed in September 1883, and in mid-1884 they applied to the Queensland colonial government for financial assistance to establish the Cairns General Cemetery, and to have regulations for the administration of the cemetery approved. A loan of was granted, and regulations for the administration of the cemetery were gazetted on 5 July 1884. In August 1884, the trustees called tenders for fencing the Cairns General Cemetery, and in February 1885, tenders for clearing the site and also fencing the burial ground on the Esplanade. A sexton had been appointed by February 1885, and in the same month the trustees submitted to the colonial secretary their first return of receipts and expenses, year ending 31 December 1884.
Initially, only half of Section 36 and none of Section 35 was fenced as a burial ground. The cemetery appears to have been divided into sections for the use of various Christian denominations, and an area for non-Christians, in which were buried Chinese, Malays, Javanese, and Aborigines. Hebrews may have had a separate section. The Chinese in particular had contributed significantly to the economic and cultural development of Cairns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and are believed to have celebrated the feast of the dead three times each year at the cemetery.
By the end of the 19th century the cemetery had become unkempt, and was cause for local comment. Consequently, in 1900 the trustees sought permission to increase the burial fees to defray the expense of ground improvements. A new sexton, William Parsons, was appointed, and by his efforts the principal pathway was metalled and bordered with variegated hedging plants and crotons, flowering shrubs and trees were planted along the fence fronting McLeod Street, the graves were cleared of weed and spear grass, and couch grass imported from the south was laid.
In 1914 a new fence and two gates were erected, but these are no longer extant. Whether this fence enclosed the whole of Section 36 is not clear.
On 22 December 1916 a new cemetery in Martyn Street was opened, following which, burials in the McLeod Street cemetery were restricted to those in family plots. The last burial took place in 1949, and the cemetery was closed officially on 11 May 1954. Registers of burials in the cemetery exist only for the period 1887–1919, and a Register of Deaths for the period 1887–1949, but these indicate that between 1887 and 1949 there were approximately 2500 burials in the McLeod Street cemetery.