Despite facing substantial obstacles, the members of the FOSBC have achieved a lot at the cemetery over the years.

People Power

We believe that getting more people interested and engaged in the cemetery is key to its long-term protection, so perhaps our most important achievement has been to grow from a founding group of just three women in 2005 to having dozens of members now and bringing in hundreds of volunteers to our Guardian Angel cleaning days, and thousands on our tours in recent years. 

Research

Early FOSBC volunteers documented graves in the cemetery and helped to correct official records where necessary. We are now commencing the ‘South Brisbane Cemetery Database and Mapping Project’, recording extensive data about every person and every grave in the cemetery as part of a searchable database. We are also developing a complementary mapping component. This project will create a definitive record of the cemetery for all time and encourage in-depth research in the future.

We have also assisted hundreds of people with their family history queries, enabling the sharing of information, documents and images, and leading to the installation of numerous new grave markers in the cemetery. 

Tours and Talks

We run the most extensive range of daytime and night cemetery tours in Australia. They have attracted rave reviews and thousands of attendees in recent years. Tour themes include general history, capital punishment, women of history, ghost stories, and macabre history. Most of our tours take place at South Brisbane, although we also run tours at Toowong and Mt Gravatt cemeteries too. These tours are not-for-profit and generate revenue to fund all our activities and projects.

We have also initiated ‘History Among the Graves‘, a series of public talks held in the cemetery itself.