Helping hands spruce up RSA cemetery
Twenty willing hands made light work of sprucing up hundreds of gravestones at the Marsden Valley Cemetery.
A team from Mitre 10 Mega’s Helping Hands Project got stuck into cleaning up the cemetery’s RSA section on March.
Mitre 10 Mega marketing coordinator Murray Leaning said the aim was to make the cemetery presentable for the unveiling of a new monument this month.
A couple of the team members were returned servicemen and a lot had family buried in the RSA cemetery so it was a ‘‘very emotional’’ job, Leaning said.
He said more than 260 of the plaques were on concrete strips which made tidying easy. It was the ‘‘300 odd’’ plaques that were recessed into the ground that needed a little more work to clear away overgrown grass and weeds.
‘‘A lot of them were so overgrown you couldn’t see them ... which is terribly, terribly sad. It means we’re just kind of forgetting what it’s all about, we’re forgetting what they did. It was a pretty emotional time.’’
The clean up included pruning roses, feeding the gardens and trimming, washing and scrubbing all the headstones.
At the end of an almost 10 hour day, RNZAF Sergeant Mason Robinson played The Last Post.
‘‘We figured we’d woken up all the old diggers during the day using the weed eaters so it would be nice to give them some due respect’’, Leaning said.
Robinson instigated the project by applying to Helping Hands. He is due to unveil a labour of love on April 15 that will see the RSA section of Marsden Valley Cemetery looking very different.
Mitre 10 Mega Nelson has donated materials and funding for Robinson’s vision which he wants to keep under wraps until the unveiling.
The Helping Hands project undertakes 10 worthy projects over 12 months, with 10 hours of labour and 10 team members at each event.
The Marsden Valley cemetery project was number six. Leaning promised the final project would be ‘‘a real climax’’.
‘‘It’s huge. It’s never been done here before and a local charity will benefit’’.