New Genie Link - St John's Parramatta

St. John’s Cemetery, the oldest surviving European cemetery in Australia, was established as a general burial ground for all denominations in an old stock paddock on the outskirts of Parramatta, the land of the Dharug People’s Burramattagal clan. The first burial was that of James Magee, the child of First Fleet convicts, and occurred on 31 January 1790 — considerably earlier than the Old Sydney Burial Ground under Sydney Town Hall (est. 1793), the Devonshire Street (Sandhills) Cemetery under Sydney’s Central Station (est. 1819), and Rookwood (est. 1868). The first marked burial and eleventh interment at St. John’s was that of First Fleeter Henry Dodd, the Superintendent of Convicts at the Government Farm, who grew the first successful wheat crop in the colony. Dodd’s death gave the cemetery two important firsts: the earliest memorial in situ in Australia and, as his funeral was reportedly ‘attended by all the free people and convicts at Rose Hill,’ the first public funeral in the colony.

Website: St John's - The Gateway to old Parramatta