I gave the Aberfeldy Cemetery its own story recently but there are three others close by and yet remote, are well-known to four-wheel-drivers and others. They are also now the de facto responsibility of the Aberfeldy Cemetery Trust.

I am talking about the Edwards Reef, Donnelly's Creek (Store Point) and Toombon cemeteries.
There were many small communities of a rough and ready sort in those ranges and there were many places where the dead were buried including Jericho and the Jordan, Blue Jacket and further east Grant, Hogtown and Bulltown. They were rugged little settlements and there was only rarely a flat place for a grave, or the time to transport a body elsewhere.
Obviously, too, records were scant and the best source of information I have found is the book "Lonely Graves of the Gippsland Goldfields and Greater Gippsland" by J.C. Rogers and Nelly Helyar.
However, we are concerned here just with the three places I mentioned. For the timing of the three communities we might well use the school dates, as they are well-recorded. As soon as there were families with children anywhere a school was sought and as soon as the community died the government would close the school.
The Toombon school ran from 1885 to 1907 (The Toombon was going for a few years prior) and the biggest problem that was felt in setting it up was that there was no flat land anywhere. Eventually house and store were taken over to provide a very split-level school.
Edwards Reef had a continuing school from 1866 and it became a government school in 1876 but the Donnelly's Creek school was only about 2.4 kilometres away and the Edwards Reef State School was closed in 1879. There were not enough children for two schools, though the journey between the two was extremely difficult.
Donnelly's Creek also was known as Store Point. The Store Point school opened in 1878 as a half-time school with Edwards Reef but even the small distance between the two was so rough as to be almost impossible and the teacher just stayed full-time at Store Point (later called Donnelly's Creek) and abandoned the Edwards Reef school. Store Point became bigger than Edwards Reef which quickly faded, but then Store Point followed it into educational oblivion in 1899.
In 2007 we had the "Great Divide Complex" bushfire. That was really a series of smaller fires, mostly caused by lightning strikes, which joined up and grew into one very big fire. The first fires were on December 1, 2006 and they grew into a huge fire which burned more than 1.2 million hectares.
Most of the land burned was public forest but 51 houses were destroyed and one man died in an accident while preparing a property for the fire. As almost always with big fires there were stock losses and kilometres of fencing destroyed.
Not counted among the usual statistics was the clearing of the Toombon and Edward's Reef cemeteries. I note that in the fire reports reference is made to the Toombon Cemetery and the "Edward's Reef Burial Ground" and I don't know the meaning of the different titles. Perhaps one was consecrated land and one was not. Perhaps one was registered with the government and one was not. After much research I have no answer.
The fire cleared the Toombon sites, though. The rectangular shapes of graves became very visible after more than 100 years of obscurity. With help from a four-wheel-drive club white stone markers were put around each grave.
The Edwards Reef burial ground records were inadequate or were destroyed. Only one of the interred has remained known, and that was Christina Shaw, nee Ferguson. The names of the people in the other 20 one graves are known, but no-one seems to know which names match which graves.
Christina Shaw was one of the many who had an untimely and cruel death in those hard days. She came from Ballarat to Donnellys Creek in 1875. Two years later she died, aged 36, four weeks after the birth of her fourth child. The cause of death was recorded as "insanity" and I use the inverted commas deliberately.
In 1930 her son Alexander set out to find exactly where his mother was buried, and a plaque was put on her grave by the Aberfeldy Cemetery Trust and West Gippsland Relic, Mining, and Heritage Protection Corporation. There were six generations of her family there for the unveiling of the plaque.
Donnelly's Creek became known as Store Point and the cemetery there was tiny, rugged and forgotten. Of the 170 names listed on the Aberfeldy Cemetery Trust website, 39 were of people buried at Donnelly's Creek. There are 24 names from Toombon, 23 from Edwards Reef and 84 at Aberfeldy itself. The compilation of this list must have been a huge research task but now historians of the future, and people searching for their ancestors have been given a powerful too.
I found three Beardmores on the list – which must have been a connection to Beardmore's mine and the place just called Beardmore's in the same area which was once, I've been told, a small inn. There is also now a Beardmore's Track.
I expected to find many 'Unknown' listed but there were very few. I also expected to find a fair number of Chinese interred but I only found two. Tak Wye was buried at Toombon in 1891 and Ah Hoey was buried at Donnelly's Creek in the same year. At that time there were perhaps a hundred or so Chinese working over old claims and doing quite well.
An illustration of the difficulties in properly dealing with a death comes from Omeo, but it was common to many, many places in the ridges and valleys of the Great Divide.
The records-keeping was not helped by the distance between the responsible officials. When Sam Ward died on 29 March 1862 at Tongeo (sic.) it was because a horse stumbled and threw him, his head taking the impact. A quote from "Lonely Graves" says "As Mr Coroner Wills is absent on leave, and there is no J.P. nearer than the Mitchell, there was no inquest or magisterial inquiry, but there is no doubt the occurrence was purely accidental".
This was in 1862 and Omeo was already a district centre, though a very primitive one, but there were no relevant officials available and, strangely, there is no mention of the local constable. The constables, where there were any, often authorised a burial, even one that had already been carried out.