As a child growing up in Sunny Grove during the 1960s and 70s, I often played in the Sinclair Cemetery, which at that time was covered in bush.
It wasn’t public knowledge at the time that this was the site of the Sinclair family cemetery. To us kids, it was simply a place to play our favourite game of cowboys and Indians, with fallen branches and sticks easily fashioned into weapons. The site lay directly behind the house where I grew up, and one day while hiding there I crouched in a corner and noticed something unusual. Behind me stood a line of trees, and if you followed that line it turned sharply at a right angle, forming another straight row of the same species. I had never noticed it before, as the area was thick with bush and the pattern was hidden from plain sight. Anyway, it transpired years later in 1981 to be precise, that the site was actually the grave site for the Sinclair family, an early family of settlers to Wainuiomata. A memorial plaque was placed in 1984 to commemorate the site.
Back to the 1970s, one of the holly trees that faced out to The Meadow, had a horizontal branch that grew out over the grass and was low enough to climb on. We (myself and another brother) use to get our youngest brother to climb on this branch and tell him to hold on tight. We would then pull the branch either left or right and let go and he had to try and hold on while in a lying down position without being flung off. The branch would zip one way then the other till it slowed down enough so he could get off. A little bit like a rodeo. He loved it and volunteered multiple times when we happened to be close by.
We also built forts in the macrocarpa trees at the site in the 1970s. Some wood from a fort can be seen in the image to the right, which was taken many years later in 1989. Anyway, it never crossed my mind when I lived next to this site that those macrocarpa trees formed a rough square shape.
Another memory of that site was when we discovered some poison / bait out in the open on a short track that connected this site with the firebreak behind it. We told our mother what we saw and she made a phone call or two and someone was sent there to remove the bait. My mother told me that they (whoever that was) were not aware that children played in the area.
Lastly, this memory of the site was unforgettable. A few of us kids erected a rope swing over the bank that formed the boundary between the cemetery and 5-7 Sunny Grove. In those days, we could scale up to the site from there as the bank wasn’t as steep as it is today. In fact, this may have been part of an original entrance to the cemetery as this 1880s photo appears to show something coming out from the fence line. Anyway, one day we took turns to swing on the rope and early the very next morning before my parents had woken up, I decided to go to the rope swing by myself while still in my pyjamas. I swung and the rope snapped and I fell awkwardly on my back upon a rock that was sticking out of the ground below. I was winded and stumbled through the bush trying to breath, but I couldn’t. I eventually passed out. When I came too, I had initially lost my memory of the incident and couldn’t understand why I woke up in the middle of the bush. I was totally bamboozled, but my memory of the incident came back to me soon after.
