Advance reserving of lawn plots at Griffith Cemetery has now ceased. Photo: Virtual War Memorial Museum.
Griffith residents will no longer be able to reserve lawn burial plots in advance at the Wakaden Street cemetery, as the local council moves to manage dwindling space and plan for the future.
Griffith City Council announced this week that reservations in the cemetery’s Lawn Section have stopped because the number of remaining plots has fallen below council’s planning threshold.
While families will no longer be able to prebook lawn plots, burials in that part of the cemetery will still be available when someone dies. The remaining sections of the cemetery will remain unaffected.
At a recent meeting of the council-run Cemetery Masterplan Committee meeting, Infrastructure and Operations Director Phil King said the cemetery was now estimated to have only seven to eight years of burial capacity remaining. He noted that the presence of two new crematoriums in the city might reduce future demand for burials.
Committee members discussed several ideas to create more space within the current cemetery before a new one is needed.
These included removing some trees and converting parts of the existing carpark into burial space.
Community member Virigina Tropeano asked whether the Roman Catholic vault section known as RC5 could be reduced, but Mr King said there was already a waiting list for those vaults and strong demand from the community. He also noted the vault section generated income for council.
Council uses long-term data trends, including a five-year moving average of burial activity from 2007 to present, which shows about 105 burials occur each year across the cemetery.
“Not all of these occur in lawn sections, however this planning approach helps ensure future needs are met,” a council statement said.
At a meeting last year, councillor Mark Dal Bon raised concerns about capacity of the cemetery and suggested stopping advanced reservations.
“We might end up with a full cemetery of empty lawn plots in the future,” he said.
Councillor Jenny Ellis told the more recent committee meeting the town needed to plan for a new cemetery.
Over the past 20 years, Griffith Council has commissioned and produced various reports on constructing a new cemetery in town. These included a scoping level flora and fauna assessment (2005), a geotechnical assessment report (2005), a hydrogeological assessment report (2006) and a cemetery management plan (2009), which suggested the existing cemetery could reach capacity by 2015.
In 2019, the council engaged a consultant to do another cemetery master plan on a new burial ground on Rifle Range Road in Lake Wyangan. Due to budget constraints, this site is not expected to be operational until after 2030.
