The Waverley Cemetery is a heritage-listed cemetery on top of the cliffs at Bronte in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Opened in 1877 and built by R. Watkins (cemetery lodge, 1878) and P. Beddie (cemetery office, 1915), the cemetery is noted for its largely intact Victorian and Edwardian monuments. It is regularly cited as being one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world. The cemetery contains the graves of many significant Australians including the poet Henry Lawson. Also known as General Cemetery Waverley, it was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 28 October 2016.
The cemetery is owned by Waverley Council and is self-funded, deriving its income from interments – including burial, cremation, memorials and mausolea – of which there has been over 86,000. Waverley Cemetery was used during the filming of the 1979 Mel Gibson film Tim and in 2021 the film Long Story Short. The cemetery was designed to function along similar lines to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and Kensal Green Cemetery in London.
Funerals are conducted Monday to Saturday.
History
Indigenous history
The land on which Waverley Cemetery is located is traditionally the land of the Cadigal people of the Eora nation. As with most Aboriginal groups in Australia prior to European colonisation, the Cadigal people lived a traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle that utilised the natural resources available in their environment to achieve the physical and spiritual nourishment to sustain their way of life. Evidence of the areas occupation by the Cadigal people is demonstrated in both archaeological (rock shelters, art sites, middens) and non-archaeological forms (creation sites, ceremonial places). Today, the Waverley area is a densely populated and urban environment and, although Waverley Cemetery is not known to contain identified Aboriginal sites (to date), its cliff top environment is regarded as archaeologically sensitive as it is considered likely to contain sites of Aboriginal significance.
Colonial history
European exploration into the coastal region of eastern Sydney commenced in the early 19th century when the establishment of a military outpost at South Head and the completion of the first roadway to the South Head Lighthouse (1811) gave settlers their first cursory view of the coastal landscape of the new colony. The opening up of the region soon saw the allocation of early land grants to prominent settlers in the locality.
In the early years of the colony, the first cemetery (although never formally gazetted) was established on the outskirts of the town on the site of today's Sydney Town Hall. At the time of its selection and development in the 1790s, the Old Sydney Burial Ground reflected the attitudes of the European colonists of the period towards death and burial – essentially relegating cemeteries to the periphery of the colony out of fear of ill-health, disease and contamination from the dead. At this time, cemeteries were a necessity and not a place of remembrance and commemoration.
By 1820, the Old Sydney Burial Ground was considered full and a new cemetery was laid out at Devonshire Street (Brickfield Hill), today's Sydney's Central railway station. Soon enough, by the middle of the century, this cemetery too was at capacity and an alternative location for the Sydney Necropolis was sought. In keeping with common social values, Haslem's Creek (now Rookwood Cemetery) was selected as the new location in 1862. Sited on the outskirts of both the Sydney and Parramatta settlements, Haslem's Creek was also served by the main western railway line. The relocation of burial services away from central Sydney soon caused difficulties for those living along the eastern coastline and those residents quickly became reliant on St. Jude's Anglican Church, Randwick (1853). Although a cemetery was planned from the 1840s, interments did not take place at South Head General Cemetery until 1869.