Thousands of Aboriginal people have been buried in unmarked graves in the Northern Territory

IT’s a government oversight that has likely left thousands of Aboriginal Territorians in unmarked and unrecorded graves

IT’s a government oversight that has likely left thousands of Aboriginal Territorians in unmarked and unrecorded graves.

A team of researchers in Barunga have rediscovered 175 graves in the community cemetery after they were brought in to help find lost loved ones — and they’ve said their work is only beginning.

A spokeswoman for Community Development Minister Gerry McCarthy
said issues with oversight and a lack of documentation of cemeteries had “challenged” multiple Northern Territory administrations for more than a century.

“The current Cemeteries Act can be traced back to a 1952 Commonwealth Ordinance …. The Cemeteries Regulations cover administrative matters such as keeping registers, burial times, depths of graves and visiting hours,” she said.

“To date, the only gazetted cemeteries, that is those where local government councils are legally responsible for their management and upkeep, have been those in the main European towns across
the Territory.

“The new cemeteries legislation is currently being drafted and it is anticipated that an Exposure draft of the Bill will be available for public consultation in October 2018.

“The new legislation will have similar requirements for urban and regional cemeteries.

“It will also require registers to be kept, identifying where people are buried.

“This new legislation will allow for the gazettal of cemeteries on Aboriginal land associated with Aboriginal communities as ‘Community Cemeteries’.” No records were kept in the majority of burial sites in Aboriginal community cemeteries within the Roper Golf region.

In some places, records began only after the intervention of historians
and researchers.

It’s something that has been labelled a huge “Territory-wide” problem and early estimates indicate that the equivalent of 2 per cent of the current NT population could lie forgotten beneath
the earth.

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