Cracow residents restore lost local graves

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Residents in the tiny township of Cracow have embarked on a project to restore unmarked graves in the local cemetery.  Records of the plots were lost in the 70’s when the town's gold mine closed, leaving more than 60 graves abandoned for decades.

Transcript

00:00For Nicky and Brophy Burke, the Krakow Cemetery is a sacred place, where pillars of their

00:07community have been laid to rest.

00:09This cemetery is full of veterans, our town pioneers, and it just wasn't right, the

00:15state of it.

00:16The tiny central Queensland community is one of Australia's last gold-rushed towns.

00:21In its peak in the 1930s, more than 3,000 people called Krakow home.

00:25The records to the cemetery were lost in 1976 when the gold mine closed.

00:30Over the decades it became overgrown and abandoned.

00:34What would have been someone's burial site at one point was relegated to a sleeping post

00:39for a cow.

00:41Dedicating themselves to restore the site, the Burkes painstakingly compiled a list of

00:45people buried at the cemetery.

00:47Went on Trove and looked through newspaper documents and through people's personal

00:52reminiscences and asked descendants what they can remember and went to the state archives

00:57and more or less did the same thing.

00:59In 2017, the Banana Shire Council put a bone radar scanner over the site to determine where

01:05the unmarked graves were.

01:07With help from the operators of the local gold mine, steel crosses have been placed

01:10to mark the plots.

01:11We thought it was an awesome idea for us to get involved in that, so we helped out with

01:17some sponsorship, but it's been a real combination of efforts.

01:21And he and Brophy hope the cemetery can be preserved for future generations.

01:25I'm proud and it's recorded now and it will always be here and it won't be lost again.

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