Public meeting called to discuss grave finds at Lawrence

Wednesday, 23 January 2019

A University of Otago archaeology team at work on an exhumation at the Chinese section of the Gabriel St cemetery in Lawrence.

An archaeological team digging up old graves in Lawrence have called a public to discuss their finds.

Phase two of an exhumation project that started in April last year to study the lives and times of Otago-Southland's earliest gold mining pioneers, particularly Chinese, resumed last week at Gabriel St, the newest of Lawrence's two cemeteries.

University of Otago Department of Anatomy associate professor Hallie Buckley of Dunedin, a bio-anthropologist and co-director of an exhumation project at Lawrence.

Already, the University of Otago team had made a number of discoveries, but wanted to talk to the people of Lawrence and any descendents before they made the findings public, bioarchaeologist Professor Hallie Buckley said.

She and project co-director Dr Peter Petchey, of Southern Archaeology, called for a public meeting to be held next Thursday at 7pm at the St John meeting rooms in Lawrence.

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Buckley would not be drawn on any specific findings but said the team had found burials and also excavations below the mown area of the cemetery.

They also found previously exhumed graves, believed to have held two Chinese men whose bones were sent back to China, as part of their religious beliefs.

Some of these deceased ended up on the SS Ventnor, which sank off the Hokianga Heads in October 1902.

History states the boat had been chartered by the charitable association Cheong Sing Tong, a Chinese New Zealand community group set up to send the remains of those who had died here back to China for reburial in their home villages (mostly in the Poon Yu county of Guangdong).

The sinking took the lives of 13 crew and passengers, and the remains of about 500 Chinese men were thought to have been lost in wreck, though it was later discovered that some bones washed ashore and were buried at Rawene in the Hokianga.

The team found a total of 11 bodies in unmarked graves in Lawrence last year, eight from Gabriel St, and three from the old cemetery at Ardrossan St that closed in 1867, believed to be Chinese by the burial and clothing style.

Work had begun at the Ardrossan St cemetery on Tuesday.

'Work is ongoing. We're not really going to know what we've got until we know how many (graves) are found,' Buckley said.

This cemetery was on private land, therefore it was essential that all graves were found, she said.

This year's efforts would increase the sample of Chinese bones for international scientific analysis.

At the end of last year, Buckley's department was awarded a three-year grant from the Marsden Fund to carry out similar exhumations in California and Victoria, where Chinese gold miners lived to seek their fortunes.

The Pacific Rim gold miners' project would compare and contrast the conditions encountered by Chinese miners in New Zealand, the United States and Australia through analysis of their bones and teeth.

'The Otago frontier was considered less 'Wild West' in the way people behaved; people still broke the law, but it was considered to be less extreme, and if there's enough evidence, it could be given in the bones, from fractures, trauma or injuries.'

The team would also be testing for vitamin D deficiency, to compare their state of health leaving their homeland with the conditions they encountered in New Zealand - all to be found in bones and teeth.

The findings would be compared with a vitamin D deficiency study that was a particular focus in maternity health in Dunedin, she said.