| Historical notes: | The Newcastle Crematorium was constructed c1936 for Cremations (Newcastle) Limited, on a site of 25 acres at Beresfield, ten miles from central Newcastle. The Crematorium and its landscaped grounds are associated with the themes of Phases of Life, Birth and Death, and Creative Endeavour. The Crematorium was designed by a prominent Sydney architect, Louis Leighton Robertson, in a similar style to his Woronora and Eastern Suburbs Crematoria in Sydney, using the Art Deco style in a restrained fashion to create a peaceful and respectful atmosphere. The Crematorium is among those constructed in the Inter-war period, just as cremation was becoming mainstream in Australia.
Burial had become strongly associated with Christian beliefs from late antiquity, against a background of generally practiced cremation in the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. From the fifth century AD, cremation became almost unknown in Christianized western Europe. Interest in cremation was reawakened in the western world in the late nineteenth century. The Cremation Society of England was established in 1874, and a small group of proponents worked against considerable opposition towards the acceptance of the practice. The proponents of the practice argued that cremation was more hygienic and modern than traditional earth burial.Their campaigns were assisted by the application of new technology which saw the development of specially designed furnaces and purpose built crematoria. Cremation was pronounced legal in the United Kingdom in 1884, as the result of a trial of a man for cremating the body of his dead child in Wales. The first official British cremation took place the following year. (Cremation Society of Great Britain website)
In Australia, cremation was advocated seriously from the 1860s onwards, particularly by a series of prominent medical practitioners like Dr John Le Gay Brereton, and Dr John Mildred Creed in Sydney, Dr James Neild in Melbourne, and Dr Robert Wylde in Adelaide. Dr Creed became known as the father of cremation in Australia. He tried unsuccessfully to have cremation legislation passed in NSW in 1886 and 1887, and in 1890 he formed Australia's first Cremation Society to promote the cause. The cremationists had to counter considerable opposition. Many people thought cremation was at best irreligious and at worst barbaric. The strongest opponents came from the Catholic Church which banned cremation for its members in 1886, and did not finally remove the ban until the 1960s. Others argued that Australia had plenty of land for earth burials and there was no need for change. Supporters came from a surprisingly broad range within the community. They included medical practitioners, politicians, scientists, public health officials, religious figures, educationists, social reformers and women's rights campaigners, successful businessmen and lawyers. Many were from Australia's professional and social elite, creating an early image problem for the cremationists in their attempts to get all classes interested. South Australia achieved the first Cremation Act in 1891 and, after a decade of fund raising, built the first modern crematorium, adjacent to Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery. The first cremation there was on 4 May 1903. In Victoria, after a Cremation Bill was passed in 1903, a simple outdoor furnace was constructed at Melbourne's Springvale Cemetery and used from 1905 onwards. But it was many more years before a second modern crematorium was available. The only alternative was open-air funeral pyre cremations, and several of these were conducted on the outskirts of Melbourne, Sydney and Perth in the 1890s. (The Cemeteries & Crematoria Association of NSW website)
In NSW, Dr Creed reformed the cremation campaign and the Cremation Society in 1908, but their work was sidelined by the outbreak of World War I. After the war, the local cremationists formed a private cremation company and eventually obtained the lease on some government land in Rookwood Cemetery. They raised funds and commissioned local architect Frank I'Anson Bloomfield to draw up plans for a modern crematorium. In 1923 a NSW Cremation Act was finally passed and building work began on a simple design which allowed for future expansion. The first cremation at Rookwood Crematorium was conducted on 28 May 1925. There were 122 cremations in the first year of operation and the success set off something of a crematorium building boom around Australia. In Melbourne, Fawkner Crematorium was opened in 1927. In Sydney, Northern Suburbs Crematorium was opened in 1933, Woronora Crematorium in 1934, and Eastern Suburbs Crematorium in 1938. The Newcastle Crematorium at Beresfield was opened in 1936. There were also modern crematoria built in Brisbane in 1934, at Melbourne's Springvale in 1936, Hobart in 1936, Perth in 1937 and Launceston in 1939. Rookwood and Northern Suburbs were run by the Cremation Society and its private company, Eastern Suburbs and Woronora by their Cemetery Trusts, and Beresfield by another private company established by Newcastle businessmen. By the 1950s cremation was being widely accepted by Australians. From the 1960s it began to overtake earth burial as the first choice of a majority of people. Depending on proximity to a crematorium around Australia it can now be the choice for anywhere between 50% and 70% of people. (The Cemeteries & Crematoria Association of NSW website)
The NSW crematoria at this time were all architecturally designed large-scale undertakings. The Northern Suburbs Crematorium, like that at Rookwood was designed by Frank Bloomfield. The Newcastle Crematorium was designed by prominent Sydney based firm, Louis Leighton Robertson, which was also responsible for the designs of the roughly contemporary Woronora, and Eastern Suburbs Crematoria in Sydney.
Louis Leighton Robertson (1897 - 1966), was son of prominent architect Louis Spier Robertson. Robertson senior was born in Sydney in 1868, son of Louis Robertson, a draughtsman in the New South Wales Colonial Architect's Office, and practised in Sydney as an architect and building surveyor from c.1890, possibly in partnership with F.G. Castleden as Castleden and Robertson. Later he moved to Rockhampton where he married Elizabeth Frances Leighton on 26 April 1896 and began a successful architectural practice in January 1897. In 1905 he moved back to Sydney, but continued to undertake Queensland work. In 1910 he designed the first self-supporting fully steel-framed building in Australia, Nelson House erected in Clarence Street, Sydney. Robertson senior died in 1932, and Louis Leighton Robertson, who had worked in partnership with his father, continued the practice. As well as for his three beautiful crematoria, the younger Robertson was well known as a practitioner of the Inter-war Chicagoesque style, which was most frequently employed on unpretentious commerical buildings. (RAIA NSW Architects Bibliographical Information; Apperly, Irving and Reynolds, Identifying Australian Architecture, p. 183; Freeland, Architecture Australia, pp. 249-50)
From the early decades of the twentieth century, Newcastle began to take on the status of NSW's second city. Newcastle's splendid City Hall and Civic Theatre, completed in 1929, were architectural markers of this status. (Citywide Thematic History, p. 8) The Crematorium at Beresfield, constructed as the city climbed out of the Depression on the back of the steel industry, was another such marker, being a significant Art Deco building, and the first crematorium in the State to be constructed outside the Sydney region.
Newcastle Crematorium originally comprised a chapel, columbarium, cremating chamber, rest pavilion, and offices and retiring rooms. The chapel, flanked by colonnades, was designed to accommodate about 200 people, seated. Provision was made for the addition of a second chapel at a later date. The columbarium was designed to house memorial urns and tablets. The cremating chamber is located to the rear of the chapel, and originally housed two Gibbons coke-fired cremation retorts. The layout of the site was also carefully designed with car parking, drives, lawns and plantings, developed as a 'Garden of Remembrance'. (Architecture, 1st April, 1936, Building, 24th April 1937)
Maitland and Stafford note that although the Art Deco style had more commonly been 'associated with places of leisure, such as hotels and cinemas, its potential for more sombre and contemplative buildng types was demonstrated in the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park, Sydney designed by C. Bruce Dellitt' in 1934. The 1920s-30s crematoria took on the Art Deco, or sometimes the Inter-war Mediterranean style, as simple and dignified architectural language with which to create a sense of clarity and tranquillity through a modern interpretation of classicism. The Newcastle Crematorium adopted an Art Deco design similar to that of the slightly larger Woronora Crematorium, and it was again repeated for the Eastern Suburbs Crematorium. The Woronora Crematorium was described in a 1930s promotional booklet as a place where 'beauty softens grief', and this same effect has been achieved at Newcastle. (Maitland and Stafford, Architecture Newcastle, p. 137); Graham Jahn, Sydney Architecture, p. 127; Architecture, 1st March, 1936).
The three Louis Roberston crematoria are similar in style, construction and feel, and employ simliar materials, although the Woronora Crematorium was designed with two chapels, giving the building a different layout and massing. The contracting engineer, Norman R Smith, of Bexley, also worked on both the Woronora and Newcastle projects. In c1937, the firm designed a third Crematorium, the Eastern Suburbs (Botany) Crematorium, which is again very similar in spirit. He also worked on a rest pavilion and crematorium at Northern Suburbs Cemetary (Architecture, 1st March, 1936; RAIA NSW Architects Bibliographical Information)
The Newcastle Crematorium was already of interest in architectural circles when it was in process of construction, with an article appearing in Architecture magazine in April 1936, which described the design and intent of the building, and its affinities with the Woronora Crematorium. An article also appeared in Building magazine in April 1937, when the Crematorium was complete. This review was very admiring of the restrained elegance, and minute attention to detail of the exterior and interior design, finding 'nothing out of place', creating an appropriate 'atmosphere of reverence'. (Architecture, 1st April, 1936, Building, 24th April 1937)
The building and its grounds have continued to operate as a memorial park, cemetary and crematorium for the Newcastle region. In 1977 a second chapel was added, sympathetically designed by Maitland architect Ian Pender. |