Some were laid to rest in unmarked paupers’ graves. Some were cremated, their ashes scattered over the hospital rose garden. 

Others were wrapped in a sheet and taken on a cart to be buried in the paddock below the woolshed. 

These were some of the fates of thousands of people who died in institutional care and now have no marked final resting place. 

The Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry, which released its 3000-page report this week, said it received information about unmarked graves at, or associated with, several hospitals and institutions operated in the past century.  

It listed Tokanui Psychiatric Hospital near Te Awamutu, Sunnyside Hospital in Christchurch, Cherry Farm near Dunedin, Seacliff near Dunedin, Seaview Hospital at Hokitika, and Porirua Hospital. 

It separately mentioned Kimberley Hospital near Levin, later known as the Kimberley Centre, where the ashes of dead residents were placed in the rose garden. 

When Kimberley finally closed, in 2006, some of the soil was symbolically removed and taken to be reburied at a nearby cemetery. 

The royal commission has recommended the Government appoint and fund an independent advisory group to investigate potential unmarked graves and urupa at the sites of psychiatric and psychopaedic hospitals and social welfare institutions. 

One site deserving of attention is perhaps the saddest – the cemetery at the former Tokanui Hospital near Te Awamutu, the place known to hospital residents as “the paddock below the woolshed”. 

The paddock was originally intended to be a public cemetery and was planned with burial sites separated into groups by religious denomination. 

But it became the place where patients from the hospital – many of whom were elderly or infirm – were taken, in a sheet and not a coffin, to be unceremoniously disposed of when they died. 

There are about 500 people buried there and only one grave marker – that of Irish-born Bridget Nolan, who died in 1939 at the age of 75. 

She was commemorated because her family cared enough to provide a marker. 

“In Loving Memory of our grandmother Bridget Nolan, 1866 - 1939, wife of William Nolan, Mataura. RIP,” it read. 

Until eight years ago, the hundreds of people in the cemetery were remembered only by a single tarnished metal plaque, which read, “May the 500 plus people buried here rest in peace”. 

Then, in 2016, a volunteers’ group, the Tokanui Hospital Cemetery Restoration Project, unveiled a memorial wall onto which the names of those known to be buried in the field were inscribed. 

However, it is unclear exactly how many people are in the cemetery. The commission suggests 469. 

Researcher Anna Purgar, whose efforts are acknowledged in the commission’s report, says she has put names to 456, working with patchy access to institutional records and with “a list of a list of a list”. 

Researcher Anna Purgar has been identifying the people buried in the Tokanui cemetery. Photo / supplied 

In addition to contributing to the memorial wall, Purgar maintains what is essentially a virtual cemetery online, on the international genealogical website FindaGrave. 

Here she lists the names and details of the people she has been able to identify. 

One of them was Philip Charles Buckthought, born in Wellington in 1853. 

He was a married father of four grown-up sons, a one-time candidate in local government, but whose state of mind seems to have deteriorated later in life. 

A contemporary newspaper report says that in 1911 he was charged with lunacy after hammering on a constable’s door in the middle of the night demanding to be served with a non-existent summons. 

He died at Tokanui Hospital in 1918. 

Another man buried in the cemetery was Blackburn Bracewell, who died aged 81 in 1944, possibly a Feilding grocer who also appeared before the courts in 1911, after getting into a violent brawl with a milkman. 

On Bracewell’s listing in Purgar’s online cemetery, a great-great-granddaughter has laid a virtual posie of flowers. 

Many of the people in Tokanui, which closed in 1998, were elderly, infirm, or had dementia or chronic illnesses. However, some children with disabilities were kept in a separate house. 

The unveilling of the Tokanui Hospital Cemetery memorial wall in 2016. Photo / NZME 

The unmarked graves were dug at a time when New Zealanders usually carefully commemorated loved ones who had died, particularly their war casualties who are exhaustively listed on public memorials. 

Ironically, some of those in Tokanui, and its cemetery, were war veterans who had returned home broken and taken to drink or fell foul of the law. 

But people in institutions were treated differently, Purgar said. 

“Some ... women from the South Island, their family didn’t even know that [authorities] had moved them, had transferred them to another hospital,” Purgar said. 

One woman from near Queenstown tracked her mother to Tokanui after being told wrongly that she had died in a fire tragedy at Seacliff Hospital in 1942. 

Thirty-seven of 39 women on a ward at Seacliff Hospital died in the fire when they could not escape their locked rooms. 

No funeral service was conducted for them. Their remains were also interred in unmarked graves. 

The commission of inquiry said a local historian had identified 172 unmarked graves at Waitati Cemetery, Otago, many dating from the 1930s and 1940s but with the last of them dug in 1983. 

Most of these contained people from Seacliff or another Dunedin institution, Cherry Farm. 

Thirty-seven women died in a fire tragedy in Seacliff Hospital 1942. Their remains were interred in unmarked graves. 

North of Wellington, Porirua Hospital opened in 1887. Most of its patients were discharged into the community in the 1980s. 

The inquiry said 1840 unmarked graves at the public Porirua Cemetery were those of Porirua patients. 

Porirua City Council also identified 847 unmarked graves at its Whenua Tapu cemetery, and 25 at the Pauatahunui Burial Grounds. 

Research provided to the commission indicated there could be more than 1000 Sunnyside patients at Sydenham Cemetery in Christchurch, most of them in unmarked graves. 

So far, 765 have been identified. The hospital operated from 1863 to 1999. 

Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay.