The Westport Times. THURSDAY, MARCH 25, 1869.

Westport Times, Volume III, Issue 482, 25 March 1869, Page 2

The Westport Times. THURSDAY, MARCH 25, 1869.

How much aesthetics have been ignored in the selection of the present location of the Westport cemetery must be palpable to anyone having the sense of sight or smell. Situated on a bare, barren sandspit, and surrounded by slaughter-houses and pig - styes, it forms a miserable monument of the public contempt for the " science of taste," and, in connection with the memory of the dead whose bones it encloses, is suggestive only of indignity and dishonor. Even in a sanitary point of view the situation is bad, and its evils, both in that respect and in others, must be aggravated as population increases and the limits of the town extend. It has the further disadvantage of being liable to the encroachments of both the river and the surf—the river especially threatening to so deviate from its course as to sluice the entire sand-spit into the sea. Already human bodies buried outside of the recognised limits of the cemetery have had to be disinterred, and it is obvious that the change in the contour of the river-banks and the beach will continue until it has effected more destruction to the dwellings of the living, and further disturbance of the resting places of the dead. To close the present cemetery, (as, from mere courtesy, we may continue to call it), and to render available the cemetery reserve which exists in some unknown direction "up the river/' would certainly deserve to be one of the first works which a Municipal Council would undertake, did we possess sueh a body. Having no such body, we must inevitably, and do instinctively, look to its nominal representative—the Progress Committee —to interest itself in the matter. It is true that notice of a motion on the subject was recently given by one of its members, but beyond that stage the matter never advanced ; and, as it was, the motion only went so far as to declare that it was desirable to procure what, in fact, already existed—namely, a suitable cemetery reserve. At least, we take it for granted that any reserve made would be more suitable than the site at present in use. How suitable it absolutely is, and how soon or easily it may be made available for its purpose, are the two questions which it rests with the Progress Committee yet to pursue; and, we should imagine, they may be pursued by two simple suggestions to the Government. First let the ground be surveyed, for without a survey it might as well never have been reserved. And then let it and its approaches form a field of labor for those hard-labor prisoners who, by constant practice in that not unpleasing form of industry, must have acquired superior skill in felling trees and whittling wood. Most visitors to Hokitika must be aware how much has been done by prison labor in both useful and ornamental works, and especially in connection with the cemetery ; and how much more lasting as a memento of the devoted services of the prisoners of Westport would be a wellordered cemetery reserve than those fleeting monuments of their labor—those magnificent piles of firewood upon the production of which they are eternally employed. Merely suggesting the subject, we leave it to the Progress Committee to be dealt with, and we trust that, by their exertions, the present repulsive place of interment will soon cease to be used, and that there will be provided another and a better, where the dead may rest in peace and where the sentiments of the living may not be shocked by unseemingly and unsavoury surroundings.