By Victoria Stone-Meadows
IF YOU had told Berwick man Trevor Thompson 11 years ago that he would soon be managing a cemetery, he would have laughed you out of the room.
However, 11 years later, Mr Thompson has stepped down as manager of the Berwick-Harkaway Cemeteries Trust after revitalising the memorial parks in many ways.
Mr Thompson retired from working with the National Australia Bank in 2002 after a 30-year of career working in various financial roles.
A numbers man, Mr Thompson specialised in international trade and business finance across domestic and international markets.
“I was working mainly in financial international trade transactions and import and export trade with the bank,” he said.
“I retired in 2002, and I ran my own business of domestic and commercial property maintenance and consulting,”
In 2005, Mr Thompson came home to discover his wife had found an advertisement in the newspaper for the Berwick Cemetery seeking a manager to assist with their affairs.
“She probably suggested it to get me out from under her feet,” Mr Thompson said.
“But, if you had said, 12 years ago that I’d be retiring from NAB and getting involved in the cemetery industry, I would have said it just couldn’t be right.”
Mr Thompson became the manager of the Berwick Cemetery in January 2005 and assumed the responsibility of running the day-to-day operations.
“I was also the public face of the place,” Mr Thompson said.
“We had six trust members and they reported to department of health as well as some volunteers, but the trust paid for my managerial and secretarial services.”
Mr Thompson set up the office for the cemetery at his home and was paid a small retainer by the cemetery trust to manage their business.
“I was paid a small retainer, but it was more community service than a job,” he said.
“It was a very community service focused role and something different from corporate life where I could give back some of the skills I had.”
Mr Thompson quickly became the backbone of the Berwick cemetery, answering phone calls to the cemetery, all the emails (which were not instigated until around 2008), taking bookings for funerals and interments, orders for plaques, liaising with stone masons, all the returns of record keeping to the department of health and human services, as well as any projects.
It was through his responsibility to manage projects that Mr Thompson, along with members of Berwick Rotary, established a new garden and rotunda at the Berwick Cemetery.
“If we step back a bit, in 2006 we didn’t have any memorial rocks for cremated remains left,” Mr Thompson said.
“We thought about how we could manage this and decided to put some standard roses for a rose garden in.
“We got together, drew up a plan, and Lloyd from Rankins Nursery and his team helped in with the colour scheme.”
At the first rose garden near the original rotunda, 71 standard roses were planted and of the 568 spaces created, there were quickly only two spaces left.
The Rotary Club of Berwick approached Mr Thompson on the 49th year of them volunteering for the cemetery, wanting to do something special for their 50th year.
It was then the Rotary Club and Mr Thompson decided to establish a new rotunda for people to use with a surrounding rose garden for internment of cremated remains.
“I said to the Rotary Club that we’ve got a small area towards Ingliss Road where the lawn section is that would be a nice place to sit and reflect,” he said.
“They took it back to their meeting, the cemetery trust agreed and the idea was away.”
A small working committee was established, and the group decided on a type of rotunda, bought a kit and had working bees, to paint all the pieces, construct the rotunda and plant the rose garden.
Many members of the community were happy to lend their time to improve their town’s cemetery with the contractor who digs the graves even volunteering to do the site cut for the rotunda.
“Once we had the building up and site cut, I designed a garden and donated my time to landscape the new garden and put in a rock wall, bollards, edging, retaining walls, and so on,” Mr Thompson said.
“I put in about 350 hours personally, but it wasn’t just me; Rotary had a team of people through the stages of planning and building.”
After impressing everyone with his hard work and dedication to the Berwick Cemetery, the State Government approached Mr Thompson about a job at a bigger cemetery.
The Bunurong Memorial Park in Dandenong South was undergoing significant development at the time and the department wanted a manager they could trust.
“In 2008, the government contacted me and asked if I wanted to be operations manager at Bunurong,” he said.
“I came back to the board at Berwick and told them what I’ve been asked to do and told them I would still do all the records and bookkeeping at Berwick.
“They all agreed I could do that, so I went to Bunurong as operations manager and it was absolutely brilliant. It makes you proud to have been involved,.”
For four years, Mr Thompsons managed the roughly 250-acre site as well as Berwick for seven day a week.
“It was a paying job, but I decided I had had enough by 2012, and I said I’ve had enough,” Mr Thompson said.
Mr Thompson returned his attention to just managing the Berwick Cemetery but that peaceful existence wouldn’t last long either.
“From 2006 I got to know the guys at Harkaway Cemetery, and I was a bit like mentor, giving them a hand with correspondence and fees and technical issues,” Mr Thompson said.
On 30 October 2014, the Berwick Cemetery Trust combined with the Harkaway Cemetery Trust, and Mr Thompson found he had double the area to manage.
Despite the ups and downs and a lot of hard work during what was supposed to be a retirement, Mr Thompson said he wouldn’t have changed his time at the cemeteries at all.
“I’m very proud of what I have done and what the trust has done in supporting their ideas and being on same wavelength,” he said.
“It was just a cemetery and bit tired, and maintenance wasn’t the order of the day when I took over.”
“The thing that makes me proudest is I can look around and see, as a person is being placed to rest, that as we backfill and reinstate, you can think ‘If I had to be buried or cremated and placed there, I would be happy if they looked after it.’”
Mr Thompson said working as hard as he has over the years to make the cemetery something the community can be proud of was one of his main motivators.
“I have a great deal of pride of satisfaction, but it’s not just about me,” he said.
“It’s the trust, it’s Rotary, it’s the others who were involved.
“We have got a very community-minded and passionate group of people who get on well with the people that I’ve met through this work.”
Mr Thompson officially retired as manager of the Berwick and Harkaway Cemeteries on 1 November 2016, but that’s not where his cemetery story ends.
“I will be the honorary mentor going forward for the next few months and honorary consultant.”
“I have also made an application to be a trust member, and if the trust supports the application and the recommendation is approved by the department, by early in the New Year I will be a trust member.”
