Port Macquarie First Burying Ground

The oldest cemetery in Port Macquarie, now a park, preserving graves from the convict settlement era

Address Clarence Street, Port Macquarie NSW 2444

Port Macquarie's first burying ground was established when the penal settlement was founded in 1821 and used until 1841. It is now a small public park on Clarence Street, with surviving headstones from the colonial era still standing among the grass. The inscriptions cover convicts, military officers, their families, and some of the earliest free settlers to reach this part of the coast.

The site is modest — not manicured like a formal cemetery — but it rewards a slow walk. The range of people buried here reflects the social world of an early penal colony: soldiers who died of fever, convicts who outlived their sentences, children of both, and a few prominent men whose names recur in the town's early records. Several stones have weathered to illegibility, which gives the site a genuinely aged character.

Combined with St Thomas' Church a short walk away and the courthouse on Clarence Street, the burying ground is part of the most coherent cluster of convict-era heritage in Port Macquarie. Free entry.

things to do sight historic site
A story
The cemetery was closed in 1841 when it filled up, and for decades the graves were neglected and overgrown. A local history group in the 1960s spent years clearing the site and documenting the inscriptions before many more were lost. Some of the most legible stones mark convicts whose names had been entirely absent from the official records.

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