Active since 2006, this small team of local residents aim to preserve and record the heritage of the small township of Hynam in South Australia’s south east. Their main project for the past decade has been the restoration of the historic Hynam cemetery.
Originally established in 1845, the cemetery holds the remains of Hynam’s first pioneers, Adam and Jane Smith and William Brown, as well as members of the Hope family. In 2017, with the assistance of a geophysicist and ground penetrating radar equipment, the group were able to locate four more graves, the children of James Norris of Casterton in Victoria, who had been employed to split timber for Adam Smith at Hynam House. The children had died tragically in 1861 after eating poisoned mushrooms and the Hynam Heritage group spent four years searching for the graves on behalf of a Norris descendant.
Hynam was originally a sheep station and known as Broadmeadows Estate, and the cemetery was the Smith family’s private cemetery. Now owned by the Naracoorte Lucindale Council, the cemetery is located in a field between the town of Hynam, (gazetted much later in 1909), the Hynam House and the 1850s limestone woolshed. It is accessible from Hynam Caves Road.