26th November 2000

Members of the Save Mahinerangi remember the three known burials that occurred nearly 100 years ago near, or under, the Read house.

"We arrived at the cemetery at about 2pm on Sunday with three wooden crosses commemorating the lives of Mr Cox, Mr Fox, and Michael Hynes who died around August 1903 as a result of a rock fall at Cromwell while employed as a miner.

We placed them near the corner of the house, near the road frontage slightly to the right of where the white gate used to be, and which was the entrance to the cemetery prior to 1926.

This prompted an angry reaction from the two people (friends of Mr Read) who were drinking beer on the upper story deck. They were going to call the police to have us removed, they said, because we were trespassing on their property. Further, they said this was a "construction zone" and we were not allowed on it.

They said this was not the cemetery - the cemetery was 'down there' (pointing at the marked graves further down the cemetery). After more abuse, Mr Ian Clarke came down to ground level and started kicking the crosses over. When he went back to the deck we placed them again, in the same places.

Mr Clarke came back down and after trying to stop us taking photographs of the crosses by standing in front of them, became quite angry and started pulling them out of the ground. He took them to an area away from the house which the council's surveyors had marked as the edge of the property containing the house, and dropped them on the ground.

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Mr Ian Clarke look at the wooden crosses placed there. and roundly abuses us. His friend is in the background.