Box Hill Cemetery
Columbarium
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| Details | |
|---|---|
| Established | 1873 |
| Location | Box Hill, Victoria |
| Country | Australia |
| Coordinates | 37°49′21″S 145°8′8″E / 37.82250°S 145.13556°ECoordinates: 37°49′21″S 145°8′8″E / 37.82250°S 145.13556°E |
| Size | 12.5 ha (31 acres) |
| No. of interments | 50,000 |
| Website | |
Box Hill Cemetery is a cemetery located in Melbourne’s eastern suburb of Box Hill, Victoria in Australia. It currently occupies 12.5 ha (31 acres). It is known as the resting place of notable figures from Melbourne and its heritage-registered Columbarium and Myer Memorial. Around 50,000 decedents have been interred since the cemetery was gazetted and commenced operations in 1873. The original 10-acre site was extended in 1886 and again in 1935.
The Myer memorial was designed by British architect Edwin Lutyens in association with local architects Yuncken, Freeman, Freeman & Griffiths. The columbarian, a brick building in the style of a Byzantine church was designed by architects Rodney Alsop and A. Bramwell Smith and constructed in 1929.
The first moves to establish a public cemetery at Box Hill, east of Melbourne, were made in 1872 when an area of twelve acres was set aside and eight trustees were appointed at a public meeting. A grant of £35 was received from the Government of the day for the erection of a fence around the site. The area was part of a large reserve bounded on two sides by Whitehorse Road and Britnells Road (now Middleborough Road) from which the Sagoe Common School and police paddock had been excised.
The first burial took place the day after the cemetery was officially gazetted on 30 August 1873. Prior to this, burials took place on land surrounding the nearby United Methodist Church and in the small Lutheran cemetery established at Waldau (Doncaster) in 1860. Public cemeteries had also been established at Kew and Burwood.
Box Hill Cemetery was enlarged on two occasions in subsequent years. A small adjoining section, still referred to as the ‘New Survey’, was gazetted in 1886, following the extension of the railway line from Box Hill to Lilydale. In 1935 a further adjoining area of twelve acres was purchased by the Box Hill Council to bring the cemetery to its present size of ≈12.5 hectares (30.8 acres) Part of this area included the police paddock.
From 1875 until 1973, the main entrance to the cemetery was from Whitehorse Road by way of an attractive avenue. The fine entrance gates and pillars to this approach still stand today, but they are no longer part of the cemetery. The present entrance from Middleborough Road was established in 1973 to eliminate the need for funeral traffic to cross the railway line and the Whitehorse Road entrance avenue was passed over to the then City of Box Hill in 1979.
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