Allambe Memorial Park: Gold Coast cemetery reveals $8m upgrade, wetlands

A Gold Coast cemetery is spending $8 million on a major upgrade to combat a city-wide burial plot shortage. Get your first look and its incredible new features. 

A GOLD Coast cemetery is helping to ease the city’s grave concerns by opening thousands of new burial plots.

Allambe Memorial Park in Carrara will spend $8 million creating an additional 4500 plots by early 2020 to support the city’s dead for the next 20-30 years. The development, which covers eight hectares, will also add a wetlands for nature conservation.

It comes after several years of warnings that the Gold Coast is running out of cemetery space.

A staff member at Allambe said it had only 12 months worth of plots remaining before the expansion. The cemetery has about 20,000 plots.

A digital rendering of the new section of Allambe Memorial Park. Photo: InvoCare

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Andrew Dreghorn, the general manager of cemeteries and crematoriums at InvoCare Queensland, Allambe’s owner, said while cemetery life was not “an exact science” there was some concern.

“We were really conscious that if we didn’t do this development it would have been very limiting to us,” he said.

“It was important to us to spend the money in order to still be servicing the Gold Coast.

“We identified in 2005 that we were needing this investment, and we had a series of plans and worked through a number of iterations to get to the final outcome.”

Construction began in August last year and is set to finish in early 2020.

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A digital rendering shows the new wetlands area. Photo: InvoCare

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Grave sites on the Gold Coast are near capacity, with the city council earlier this year discussing increased fees, introducing new sections for ashes and plaques rather than coffins, and a possible “buyback” scheme to get residents to surrender their pre-purchased plots.

Details from a council meeting in May included a concept plan for expanding Pimpama Cemetery, set to be “undertaken immediately after planned regeneration works”.

A decision will also be made for site expansion in Mudgeeraba, where much of the land is unusable, if the demand is still there in 2022.

The same meeting found there were few sites available for any new cemeteries.

Councillor Glenn Tozer said there were only six traditional monument plots available in Mudgeeraba Cemetery as of two months ago.

Staff are excited to see the new area finished. Picture: Lawrence Pinder

“While they’re not the most popular plots, they’re still an important asset, and it’s important to have an appropriate selection for people,” he said.

“There is a strategic plan in place to expand Mudgeeraba Cemetery, however that will be realised in the next financial year.”

He confirmed $266,000 had been approved in the council budget for “regeneration work” on the cemetery.