The Camperdown Cemetery Fig

The canopy spans more than thirty metres, in a walled cemetery of four acres. It shades a good share of the dead. The tree went in in 1848, the same year the cemetery itself opened, and the date is carried by a 1962 local history of Camperdown, a 1997 landscape management plan and the cemetery's own tree survey, with a 2010 account written from a site visit giving the same year independently. The reason given for the planting is softer. It is believed to have marked the roofing of the Cemetery Lodge, which the sources report as tradition rather than record, so take the ceremony loosely and the date firmly. With the oaks put in the same year, it is the oldest tree in the Marrickville district. Camperdown is the oldest surviving cemetery in Sydney, the walled remnant of a much larger burial ground that Newtown grew around, and the fig stands near the Lodge by the Church Street entrance, so it is the first thing you meet coming through the gate. Nobody has published a trunk measurement, which for a fig of 178 years is a gap worth closing. If you tape it, send us the number. The cemetery is free and open through daylight hours, fifteen to twenty minutes on foot from Newtown or Stanmore stations. Our pin sits on the cemetery rather than the tree, though at that size it will not cost you long.