Notional Significance: Disinterment

The entry to Bolton St cemetery is unremarkable: a gap in a white fence off a respectable street, a canopy of pines, plain crosses against a corrugated iron fence. But I know that I’m passing into a territory that would have the earth-magic wing of the psychogeographical movement panting with occult excitement. Iain Sinclair or Peter Ackroyd would have a field day with the plethora of obelisks, resonant names and eroded inscriptions, but wouldn’t that be the case with any cemetery? It’s like shooting mystical fish in a semiotic barrel. Nevertheless, certain monuments catch my attention, so I decide to play along.

Broken Pillar

There’s a broken marble column near the entrance, and at first I file this away as a symptom of vandalism or neglect, but a closer examination of the carving shows the break to be too clean. A shattered pillar seems like an obvious signifier (a life cut short; the futility and imperfection of human endeavour; all that Ozymandian sort of thing), but a little research unearths other connections. The Broken Column is an important symbol in Freemasonry, though perhaps a relatively recent one. What’s more, it seems that some Masons map the Three Great Pillars of Masonry to the Kabbalistic Sephiroth, and when the central column of Beauty is broken, it represents Man’s separation from divine knowledge: the severed pathway between Beauty and the Infinite. But in this place it was the act of building a pathway that caused a severance, tearing the cemetery in two when the motorway smashed its way through. Beauty and the Divine were certainly not on the Ministry of Works’ agenda.

As the path winds down into a severed gully, past other broken columns, I remember back to one of my first walks in Wellington, what seems like many decades ago. It was a gloomy, misty Sunday, with low cloud whipping through the treetops and fine rain drifting down through the dark foliage. The graves seemed shattered, lonely and abandoned, overgrown by indifferent vegetation, and my (shamefully Eurocentric) imagination turned this into a science fiction movie: a doomed colony on an alien world, the last remaining settlers burying their dwindling colleagues as the host planet erased their hubristic attempts at replicating home. Even today, in the brightness of late summer, the drooping aerial pohutukawa roots can seem monstrous, and by the time that I realise that they are also invaders here, I know it’s time to move on before my allegories tangle themselves into total incoherence.

But first, I come across a grave that even I can see is explicitly Masonic. The compass and set-square make that clear, even if I had to go back and look up the capital G (for God and Geometry, and perhaps for Gnosis), the stone ashlar, the tessellated pavement and the uneven columns topped with terrestrial and celestial globes. This lavish memorial to Captain Henry Tucker was erected by Captain Edwin Stafford, who later completed their pact by joining him in the grave. Such dedication would seem unusual today without a more intimate connection, and I wonder whether a different interpretation could be put upon the two upstanding columns than the Boaz and Jachin of Masonic lore. But it would be prurient and pointless to speculate about what the Herald called “the fine feelings, and the rare sentiment” between these two men. The pillars have been toppled in the past by falling trees and ‘60s yobbos (“because there’s nothing else to do in Wellington on a Sunday”), but they escaped the bulldozers. Their friendship can stand on its own terms.

Masonic Pillars

Other monuments were not so lucky. Mass graves are not something one expects in New Zealand — they seem to belong to another world, a world of pogroms and plague pits — but the remains of 3,693 people are crammed into a “memorial vault” on the other side of the highway, their original tombstones scattered through the remainder of the cemetery. Time is a commodity that we can only value when it’s in our grasp: we’ll willingly mangle or erase the past to save a few seconds in the present, all the while burning through the resources of the future. Whole books could be written on the saga of the Foothill Motorway, but for the moment I’ll just mention that in 1965 a Councillor Morrison was reported as saying that “although some other transport system might be technically preferable the important consideration was that the National Roads Board had the money and was prepared to spend it.” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

But the catastrophic changes wrought by the motorway construction were not the only reason why Margaret H. Alington called her history of the cemetery Unquiet Earth. From the start, this burial ground was fraught with contention, chaos and perturbation. Even before the land was granted, the plans were beset by sectarian squabbles and high moral dudgeon, and the land was frequently assaulted by encroachments, road-building and park construction as well as the natural hazards of fire, wind and landslides. Exhumation is nothing new, since overcrowding often resulted in the accidental unearthing of unmarked remains when new graves were being dug. It was alleged that some of these were quietly and unceremoniously dumped, and in one disturbing instance a child’s coffin lay in the adjacent stream for years. On many occasions the Inspector of Nuisances was called in to investigate “putrefactive fermentation”, “human corruption” and “foul miasmata”, and the sextons often had to battle vandalism, rubbish dumping from opportunistic neighbours and the nocturnal occurrence of what were decorously described as “improprieties”. Some of those activities may still be popular, if the infamous Wellingtonista “Spot the Dog” post is anything to go by, and perhaps the incongruous amphitheatre that overlooks the mass grave sometimes attracts an audience keen on improvised erotic theatre. Today, the only action is a pair of conservatively-dressed men practicing Tai Chi moves, their graceful movements tracing slow arcs above the restless resting place of thousands.