The Group has received a second nomination for the Chifley Heritage Award, this time for the Cemetery Restoration Project.
The award, which will be announced on May 6 at the Bathurst Macquarie Heritage Medal and Bathurst Regional Heritage Awards dinner, will go to the project that demonstrates the most outstanding contribution to the built, natural or cultural heritage of the Bathurst region.
Over the past few years, the group has repaired over 1000 headstones which decayed or have been vandalised. These repairs have been carried our by members of the group, community volunteers and C3 prisoners from Bathurst Jail.
The group maintains a database of all 20,000 known burials at the cemetery and in the course of updating the database, noted that many headstones were in need of repair.
In addition to repairing headstones, the group has also investigated the location of graves of prominent citizens who lay in unmarked graves and has resolved to erect a memorial annually for a prominent citizen who meets the group’s criteria.
Read more at the Western Advocate.