GRAVEDIGGER

Bonnie Emery buried more people than he can remember in the 50 years he dug graves for Tasmanian men, women and children and he takes pride in having treated all those who passed with respect

It sounds like a macabre job but a man who dug graves in Tasmania for 50 years sees it differently.

It requires a tough stomach to dig the last resting places of those who come before us. Oatlands’ Bonnie Emery would know, he dug graves throughout the Midlands of Tasmania for decades and would often uncover skeletons in unmarked graves. He once dug three out of the same hole in Colebrook. The first was a baby. “It was just a small lot of bones, so I rang the undertakers and they said keep going,” he says. “I said OK, you’re the boss, they were employing me.”

About four foot down his shovel struck more remains. Emery rang the undertakers again, who said they would have been very old and to throw them out.

“I had to dig a double-depth grave, by the time I got down to seven foot I’d hit another set of bones,” he says. “The bloke that was helping me would not get back in the grave, he said ‘I don’t care if you don’t pay me, I’m not getting back in there.’ I took a different bloke with me to help fill it in.

“I dug many a bone up … there were a lot that were buried without headstones. In Colebrook it was very common, they had a landslide there apparently and lost track of all the graves.”

He says they got sick of notifying the undertaker in the end and would just put them to one side before burying them in the same hole again.

For more than 50 years, until he retired five years ago aged 63, due to a back injury, Emery dug graves as far as Swansea and Triabunna. He has the blisters and eight screws in his vertebrae to prove it.

“I started digging graves when I was 10 years old to help my father,” he says. “I was digging then by hand with a crow bar and a stone pick, it took up to two or three days to get a six-foot hole down.

“Those days we even used to put gelignite in to blow the rock because up here at Oatlands it’s just solid sandstone. You’d probably go through four to five feet of rock before you get a person in.”

In what now seems like a dying profession, with more than 80 per cent of Tasmanians preferring cremation over burial, according to the state’s palliative care representative body, Emery says he enjoyed his work as a gravedigger.

When asked if he ever felt emotional while he dug them, he says: “It was a shocking thing having to bury newborn babies, their life hadn’t even started, and they’d already been buried.”

He dug both his parents’ graves. When he finished his dad’s he got in it and lay down.

“My wife, daughter and son, they all helped me do it over the years,” Emery says. “It was a job I really loved doing in the finish, when I had the excavator.”

He says one time he went with his wife to fill in a grave at Campbell Town the day after a thunderstorm. “It was clay muddy ground and we couldn’t get it off the shovel,” he says. “It was a hot and sticky day, the sweat was pouring out of us and there we were scraping each other’s shovels all day to get the dirt back in the hole. That’s when I decided I was going to buy an excavator.”

Emery sold his business a few years ago, after he had become known as one of the most respected and kindest gravediggers in Tasmania.

With one particular grave, Emery had to bury a shroud — a body wrapped in a sheet stapled to a piece of wood with no sides. Before filling in the hole with his excavator, he covered the body by hand with fine soil.

The priest, who was watching on from the shadows of the church unknown by Emery, interrupted him when he was finished.

“He took my hand and said ‘Bonnie that is one of the kindest things I’ve ever seen in my life as a priest. I’ve been to others where they’ve been buried like this and they just dropped the dirt with machine on top of them. But you showed a bit of respect and I’ve got to shake your hand for that, I thought it was great’,” Emery said.

And what does Emery think of the Anglican Diocese’s proposed land sell-off, a man who has probably seen more churches than just about anyone else in Tasmania?

“I think it’s wrong, they belong to the community,” he says. “Why should the churches be sold to cover the ministers’ sins where they’ve done wrong in the past? When the community built the churches, it was not the religion that built them.

“It’s just not right, they are part of the community, they belong to the people.”

It remains to be seen how many graveyards and churches will be sold come December.