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THE only remaining residents at the ghost town of Whroo are those who are six feet underground.
On Sunday, the town cemetery trust will commemorate the more than 400 people buried there with the unveiling of a memorial plaque.
The name of each person known to have been laid to rest at the site has been inscribed in bronze.
One day, cemetery trust chairman Bob Holschier hopes to know exactly where each person has been buried.
But in many instances, grave markings have long since deteriorated.
“Nothing’s clearly marked,” Mr Holschier said.
A rough plan, from years ago, has helped identify where the graves are.
“But who’s in there is another thing,” Mr Holschier said.
“We’ve been able to identify a bit over 200 people.”
The trust has had three researchers working on the project for the past few years.
“There are miners who succumbed to illness or died from accidents in the shafts, and a large number of children taken in infancy when illnesses such as diphtheria or dysentery swept through the community,” Mr Holschier said.
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Among them were six children from the same family, the eldest of whom died when she was just over two years old.
The children’s mother died in her early 40s.
Also buried were a number of Chinese miners, who had their own camp space near Whroo.
“Things were very tough in those days – very harsh. Conditions were terrible,” Mr Holschier said.
The promise of gold lured people into the forest, and down below the earth’s surface, from about 1853.
Several thousand people called Whroo, and neighbouring Rushworth, home during the height of the gold rush.
“Were were some substantial homes after about 1900, but before that there were just shacks and shanties,” Mr Holschier said.
More than 20 tonnes of gold surfaced from the Balaclava Hill goldmine.
Once the promise of striking it rich dissipated, so too did the town’s population.
“There was no other employment apart from the gold,” Mr Holschier said.
People moved on to richer prospects, and the last Whroo resident departed more than 60 years ago.
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The first burial at the town’s cemetery was in about 1859, and the last in the 1970s.
Mr Holschier said the plaque would be a “very permanent record” of the people buried in the cemetery.
“Which has been one of our big problems – there have been no permanent records,” he said.
Money to purchase the plaque has been donated to the trust – the first in the cemetery’s modern history.
Mr Holschier is one of four active members.
“We did have six, but a couple of them have retired,” he said.
Their five-year terms expire at the end of the year.
“Since we became the trust and have done the work we’ve done we’ve aroused a lot of interest,” Mr Holschier said.
Other projects have included repairing headstones and erecting a new fence.
“We are restricted in what we can do through lack of money,” Mr Holschier said.
He invited people to attend Sunday’s event at the cemetery, which starts at 1.30pm, to learn more about the site, the trust and its work.
“While the trustees hope to see many descendants, the general public are equally welcome,” Mr Holschier said.
The Balaclava Hill mine and the Aboriginal waterhole were among other Whroo attractions he recommended.
The research into the Whroo cemetery follows historian Alan McLean’s work to unearth the identities of people buried at Rushworth’s first cemetery, at which people were buried between 1853 and 1861.