This week, Roy decided that with such beautiful weather it was time to take his friends for a bushwalk. His grandmother had many years ago told him about a cemetery near the old Prince Henry Hospital. She once worked at the hospital and remembered walking to the cemetery and looking at the old graves. She also remembered being fascinated by the overgrown Chinese burials and suggested Roy and I should our visit from earlier in the year.
The Prince Henry Hospital Cemetery is also known as the Coast Hospital Cemetery. You can find it by heading out towards La Perouse. Instead of heading to La Perouse though, turn into Cape Banks Road, (through the entrance to Botany Bay National Park). You will pass a golf course, but if you reach the pistol club you have gone too far. Keep an eye out for the ‘Coast Cemetery Management Trail’ on the left. Pull off the road (it isn’t far from the pistol club and there is parking there if the couple of spots at the start of the walk are taken) and follow the old cobbled road surface until you reach the cemetery.
There has been a hospital at Little Bay, not far from Botany Bay since 1881. It was first established after an outbreak of smallpox in Sydney. Infectious diseases like smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, leprosy and influenza could infect huge numbers of people quickly and cause a lot of panic in the community. If sick people were allowed to remain in the community whole pandemics could occur and at that time people died from such diseases. Even ‘the flu’, which we see as a common and not life threatening disease killed people. Sydney needed to establish a hospital where people could be sent when they had infectious diseases, well away from other people so that they kept the disease to themselves! Little Bay, not far from La Perouse, was isolated in 1881. Very few people other than Aboriginals lived in the area and so sick people could safely be kept there. A hospital was established to take the smallpox victims and soon after the hospital, called Prince Henry, became Sydney’s Infectious Diseases Hospital. It took people suffering from all sorts of diseases, including leprosy.
Of course, the people sent to Prince Henry didn’t always survive. Many of the diseases they suffered from were very serious and many people died from their illnesses. Nursing staff also sometimes contracted the diseases and died. If you died at the Infectious Diseases Hospital though, you had to be buried there, and a cemetery was established not far from the hospital itself soon after the hospital was created. Over 2000 people were buried there, though many of the headstones have now gone. The cemetery is unique though, because the people buried there were often not from the area. Some of them had come from overseas and brought diseases with them, and many were brought in from other areas in the colony. There is a mix of ethnicities buried in the cemetery, including Chinese who have beautifully carved Chinese characters on their headstones. According to Roy’s Grandma, there used to be many more headstones, and some of the old wooden ones can be seen in the Prince Henry Hospital Museum.
