St Patricks Cemetery, Parramatta, Catholic cemetery in North Parramatta, Australia.
St Patricks Cemetery is a burial ground in North Parramatta located at the intersection of Church Street and Pennant Hills Road. The site contains hundreds of gravestones and memorials from different periods, including a Gothic chapel built during the 19th century.
The burial ground was founded in 1824 and was Australia's first formal Catholic cemetery of the colonial period. It grew into an important center for the early Catholic community and documents the presence of this faith in Australia's early European settlement.
The chapel is dedicated to St Francis of Assisi, not St Michael as was usual for mortuary chapels, because Dean Coffey, a Franciscan, wished to honour his friend Father McCarthy of the Capuchin Order. A Chinese funeral cypress (Cupressus funebris) avenue once led from Church Street to the chapel.
The cemetery is closed and no longer accepts burials; it was transferred to the City of Parramatta in 1975. The site sits at the corner of Pennant Hills Road and Church Street, and the sandstone mortuary chapel stands at its centre. A cypress-lined avenue runs from Church Street toward the chapel, marking the historic approach.
Research in 2010 on the surviving burial registers and convict records at State Records NSW confirmed 44 convict burials, among them two Irish rebel convicts, with ten more possible. The registers also record the first three headstones, dated 1824 for Thomas Nugent, Phillip Reilly and Thomas McKenna, two years before Father Therry secured tenure of the land.
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