Drive north out of Thames on the Coromandel coast road and there is a cemetery on the hillside above you that most people never notice. A Thames-Coromandel District Council report says about 10 of its graves are now close enough to the edge that the people buried in them could end up on the highway.
The report, written in December last year and put in front of the Thames Community Board this month, warns that memorialised plots holding human remains at the Tararu Cemetery could “move downhill at velocity to the road below” if the slope gives way. “Such a movement would sever SH25, possibly cause harm to passing motorists and result in significant reputational damage to TCDC,” the report says. The details were first reported by Jordan Smith of Local Democracy Reporting, which is co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
The cemetery sits on the eastern hill above the Thames Coast Road, about 350 metres north of the Tararu Creek bridge, and is reached by a long flight of steps that starts almost at the road edge. It opened in 1873 and has been out of use for burials for years. The report says many of the graves have degraded badly through a lack of maintenance, and that the old sexton’s hut on the site is falling apart and is “evidenced to be frequented by drug users”.
The last recorded slip was in 2010, which wiped out the access to the site, and there has been no significant movement since. Thames Community Board chair Adrian Catran says that is not a reason to wait. “It’s prone to slipping in the past and it could happen again so we don’t want to wait until that happens before we start to do something about it,” he said.
Catran said the consequences of a slip would run well past a blocked road. “It’s a compound thing, not only with the deceased people’s bones and caskets ending up on the road but of course it would close the road as well. That would be a major job to collect anything [or] anybody who came down… it’d be a huge cost and a huge emotional exercise,” he said.
State Highway 25 is the only sealed route up the western side of the Coromandel Peninsula. Cutting it at Tararu would leave the settlements north of Thames, including Te Puru, Thornton Bay, Tapu and Coromandel town, reliant on a long detour over the ranges or on nothing at all, depending on where the slip landed.
The report sets out a menu of engineering options at very different prices. Soil nails driven into the bank come in at roughly $480,000. An in-ground palisade wall is put at $285,000 to $430,000. Simply monitoring the graves and protecting them where possible runs at $5,000 to $15,000 a year. Lifting and relocating the graves themselves is costed at $114,000 to $260,000. Stormwater controls and tree work are also on the list, and more than one option may end up being used together.
Whichever is chosen, the council has to find the money, and the obvious partner has already stepped back. NZTA is quoted in the report saying it will not put funding or resources into the work because the site “isn’t a priority”. Catran was blunt about that. “Their [NZTA] road will be closed if that cemetery slips and the subsequent consequences of that would be removing the deceased people and the old caskets,” he said. He added that he was “not too sure who’s going to pick up that tab”, and raised the question of whether the cost should fall on the Thames ward alone when cemeteries are a district-wide responsibility. Heritage New Zealand, he suggested, “might have to come in and assist to preserve the cemetery”.
What is on that hillside is a fairly complete record of the first generation of the Thames goldfield. The field opened on 1 August 1867 and the town filled up within months. Tararu, developed by Robert Graham, the property developer behind Grahamstown, wanted a burial ground of its own rather than sending its dead to Shortland at the southern end of town, and the cemetery was in use before the land was even signed over.
The eight-acre block, known as Tanutanu, was bought from six Māori owners for £31 with a further £25 in incidental costs, according to research published by The Treasury, the Thames research and archive centre. The owners were Mere Watana, Pare Watana, Te Arani Watana, Mereana Rewiti, Mata te Kura and Miria Rangioke, and the first three were sisters. One of them is far better known than the cemetery is. Pare Watene of Ngāti Maru, who lived at Thames, is the subject of Gottfried Lindauer’s 1878 portrait held by Auckland Art Gallery, one of the best known paintings in the country.
The earliest burial recorded in the register is William Thomas Steedman, aged 14 weeks, on 19 August 1873. By 30 September 1902 the trustees counted 568 registered burials. The register is thick with children and with men who died young, which is what a quartz mining town produced.
For a while it was the smart cemetery. A description in the Evening Star in October 1875 recorded walks that “are seven and a half to nine feet in width are circular, winding round the side of the hill on which the cemetery is situated”, laid out with room for 650 single graves and a reserve in the middle held for a mortuary chapel that was never built. Tararu residents were proud enough of it to needle the wealthier part of town in the letters column. “Surely if Tararu people, who are so few in number, and with one or two exceptions are poor working men, have done this, the rich people of Shortland should be able to do a great deal more,” one wrote in August 1875.
The money ran out long before the plans did. Council minutes across the following decades are a loop of broken fences, wandering cattle, slips on the access road and sextons let go for want of burials. The Treasury records that the land is Crown owned and has been informally managed by the district council, which is part of why nobody has clearly owned the problem.
The next step is for council management to pick a preferred option so funding can be chased. Catran said the looming council amalgamation should not be allowed to stall it. “We need to be proactive and start thinking about now what are we going to do,” he said.
Have you climbed the steps at Tararu, or do you have family buried there? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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