Organise your final resting place…this is an active cemetery, so you can buy yourself or a family member a plot, or a spot for ashes (including in the garden areas to be increasingly planted out). We also have a relationship with a local “Natural Burials” Funeral Director. Become a part of the history of South Australia and make your final home (or that of your loved ones) in a State Heritage (forever protected) place, the first cemetery in McLaren Vale, becoming more like a botanical garden over time via our community garden and placemaking project… There are only a small number of cemetery plots remaining, so please be in touch if this is of interest (there are many more spots for ashes across the garden).  All cemetery memorials are managed by us, so please be in touch about natural and place-sympathetic options.

View cemetery schedule

Please be in touch if you wish to make a time with the Curator to reserve a place in the cemetery or have a general enquiry. 

There are records of local Aboriginal people attending the ceremony to lay the foundation stone for this first chapel, at a Harvest Thanksgiving service. Harvest Studio is currently seeking funding for a research project with fellow Visual Artist and Cultural Geographer Gavin Malone working with local custodian Karl Telfer, to highlight Aboriginal linkages to areas nearby our site. This will result in physical elements in the cemetery as part of our overall multi-cultural / historical placemaking project.

“The 1844 House of the Lord and Pioneer Chapel (now Harvest Studio) and cemetery is the site of bi-cultural stories from the time of McLaren Vale’s settlement in 1839. The rich Aboriginal story and early intercultural relationships have largely been overlooked in the colonising narrative for the region. While snippets are known, a focused research and writing project, known as cultural mapping, is required to further research, document and then elucidate.”

Gavin Malone Co-founder CRED: Cultural Research Education Design

Lot 50-Kanyanyapilla: Bi-cultural Ecological and Cultural Regeneration

Self-guided Cemetery Audio Tour telling the story of the settling of McLaren Vale - COMING SOON.

Cemetery and Garden Curator and custodian Hope Lovelock Deane and her daughters have up to eight generations of connections to this State Heritage site, this corner of the town and the Willunga Basin area, with connections to over 30 settler families. See About

VIEW OLD CEMETERY MAP