Discovery and Acknowledgment of Stillborn Baby Graves

Share this @internewscast.com

When a woman knocked on Geoffrey Horlock’s door and told him that her baby brother had been buried in the same grave plot as his own brother, he was more than a little surprised.

“I was not sure what to say at first,” Horlock says.

His brother Andrew had been stillborn in 1960. Horlock was around nine at the time.

He recalls his mother telling him about how his brother was taken out of the delivery room in a white sheet and buried in the local cemetery while she was still recovering in hospital.

This is how infant loss was often dealt with in the 1960s.

“Mum never got over it,” Horlock says.

Right until the day she died, she always used to say: ‘I wonder which side of the family he looked like.’

The family was issued a birth certificate and told about the burial site.

But this was not always the case.

For the Harding family, whose baby died less than three weeks after the Horlocks’ in the same regional Western Australian town, no birth certificate was issued.

Unlike baby Horlock, baby Harding was live-born but arrived prematurely and tragically did not survive.

Unbeknownst to both families, he was buried alongside baby Horlock in the lower part of his grave plot in August 1960.

It wasn’t until baby Harding’s older sister, Susan Mead, showed up on Geoffrey Horlock’s doorstep some 65 years later that the connection was finally made.

An older woman wearing a floral top, standing in front of hedges.

Susan Mead tracked down one of the siblings of Andrew Horlock, whose grave her baby brother shares, to another small town near where she lives. Source: Supplied

She had come to ask whether she could place a marking on the grave to recognise her brother.

Horlock says once the initial shock passed, he realised there was only one answer.

Finding Baby Harding

Mead lives on a property in the south-west of WA, about 65km east of the small town of Bridgetown where her mother gave birth to baby Harding. Mead and her siblings had spent decades hoping to find their baby brother’s resting place.

But without formal documentation, such as a birth or death certificate, their efforts to find him were continually stymied.

Finally, in March, they reached a turning point.

Mead’s sister-in-law spotted a Facebook post from the Shire of Bridgetown-Greenbushes, about records for the nearby Bridgetown Cemetery having been uploaded to its website.

Looking over the shire’s list of people buried there, Mead came across a mention of a ‘Baby Harding’. That name had not been included in previous searchable listings for the cemetery.

It identified the exact location of the grave, too, but when family members went to visit, they found a gravestone for baby Horlock instead.

Confused, the family contacted Bridgetown-Greenbushes Shire, which manages the cemetery. They confirmed that baby Harding is also buried in the plot, which, according to records, had been divided in two — a practice that the local government has since ceased.

In a statement to SBS News, a spokesperson for the shire acknowledged the challenges with historical burial records for stillbirths and neonatal deaths, noting it is “currently completing an audit and correlation of hardcopy documents, current headstones and electronic records” to ensure it has a fully digitised and accurate record of all listings.

The spokesperson says the shire is aware of one other case in which two unrelated babies were buried in the same plot, dating back to 1954. In that case, two stillborn babies were buried in the same plot eight weeks apart, despite records showing it was not listed as a ‘half plot’.

“The Shire is committed to ensuring this information is researched and updated so that descendant family members can search for and locate loved ones,” the spokesperson says.

A taboo subject

Many families who lost babies as a result of stillbirth or neonatal death before the 1980s in Australia remain in the dark about their loved one’s final resting place.

Joan Noonan is a volunteer co-leader with a group set up by Red Nose Australia, which seeks to prevent the sudden and unexpected death of babies and young children and gives bereavement support for those affected by death of a baby or young child. Its ‘Older Loss Group’ supports mothers who are still processing the grief of stillbirth years after losing a child.

One of the key aims of the group, which is based in Victoria, is to help families in tracking down burial sites.

Noonan says many families search for the final resting place of their stillborn family members in the hope of finding some peace.

The 78-year-old became part of the Older Loss Group about 30 years ago, having lost two infant daughters of her own in the 1970s.

Fiver older women standing together, Joan Noonan on the right holds a document folder and another woman on the left holds flowers.

Joan Noonan, (pictured far right) has helped many women, including Lee (second from left), to find their baby’s burial site, years after their loss. Source: Supplied / Red Nose Australia

“In most cases, you weren’t given a chance to have a funeral,” she says.

“The hospital staff would say they were ‘looking after these babies’, and the hospital would arrange burial and families weren’t even told where they were buried.”

Noonan says at that time, it was not the “done thing” to question the process. Stillbirth was treated as taboo.

Nobody talked about the death of a baby.

“In the majority of cases, they were buried in communal graves, they often waited for about 10 babies at a time and there’s some places in Melbourne where there’s hundreds of babies buried in mass graves.”

Noonan’s volunteer co-lead, Fotini Koklas, says given most babies they have located via the Older Loss Group are in mass graves, the situation involving the Hardings and the Horlocks appears to be “extremely rare”.

Koklas has come across one similar case in which a baby was buried in a grave with an unrelated adult, with no clear explanation as to why this happened.

“It’s possible that it was a space issue, or perhaps the cemetery simply didn’t know where to place the baby,” she says.

A woman wearing a long black sleeveless dress sits on a balcony in a wicker chair

Co-leader of Red Nose Australia’s Older Loss Group, Fotini Koklas, says while the process of finding a baby’s final resting place should be a healing journey, unnecessary obstacles can make it more emotionally draining than it should be. Source: Supplied

In search of lost babies

Until this year, baby Harding’s name would have only have been traceable via handwritten records stored in a very specific location by the Bridgetown-Greenbushes shire.

Koklas says because of state-based variations in laws, record systems and how stillbirths are handled, it can be incredibly challenging for families to track down accurate information.

“Every cemetery is different, and the level of detail they have in their historical records varies greatly,” she says.

Historically, different stakeholders that may have details that could help families were very siloed from one another.

“There’s often a breakdown in communication between cemeteries, stonemasons, and families, in some cases, critical details aren’t shared — either because of incomplete records or administrative oversights.”

Koklas says the passage of time complicates the process further.

“Over the decades, cemetery management has often changed hands, record-keeping systems have evolved, and unfortunately, some older records have been lost, damaged, or simply never kept in the first place — especially for babies born before the 1980s.”

Inconsistent records

Inaccurate and inconsistent historical records present an added hurdle for those searching for answers.

Koklas explains that naming stillborn babies was subject to variation: they could be recorded with their mother’s maiden name or married name, or referred to as names such as: “Baby Smith,” “Stillborn Smith,” or “Baby of Kate Smith”.

“While families can sometimes search online for burial records, the transition from handwritten paper records to digital systems has introduced a number of issues,” she says.

“Dates are often misrecorded due to difficulties in reading old handwriting.

“In one case, a baby who passed away in April 1966 was entered into the system as April 1968.”

Noonan says despite such challenges, it’s often still possible to piece information together by cross-referencing available records, contacting multiple sources and a bit of compassionate persistence.

“We’ve developed some records now that show in Victoria what hospitals used what undertakers and then what cemeteries they used and things like that,” she says.

‘Something to be forgotten’

In years gone by, a birth may not have even been considered a birth if the baby was stillborn, so no birth or death certificate was issued. This also meant that protocols around burial fell outside of legal requirements.

A statement from New South Wales Health.

Source: SBS News

The statutory instruments and registration practices related to births and perinatal deaths — which include stillbirths and neonatal deaths — have varied between Australian states and territories over the years.

For example, in Queensland and Victoria, legislation around the registration of stillbirths came into place in 1989, while in NSW it was a 1995 Act that recognised stillbirth as a birth and therefore required formal registration.

Associate professor Fran Boyle from the University of Queensland’s Institute for Social Science Research and Stillbirth Centre of Research Excellence says it was not until the mid-1980s that social attitudes toward perinatal deaths began to change.

“This was largely due to the voices of bereaved parents,” she explains.

Parent advocacy groups under the banner of Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Society (SANDS) — now part of Red Nose — were formed.

“One of their many important achievements was the successful campaign for government to recognise stillborn babies through birth and death certificates,” Boyle says.

Today, across Australia, a stillborn baby at 20 weeks gestation or more is required to be registered, in most states and territories that will warrant a birth certificate, noting stillbirth.

A statement on behalf of the Tasmanian Justice Department.

Source: SBS News

Boyle says burial practices tend to reflect the “prevailing social norm” of the time, and before the 80s “the loss of a baby was something to be forgotten”.

“[It was] not something to be discussed or memorialised.”

Living with the trauma

Boyle says such sentiment informed the practice of withholding stillborn babies from their mothers.

Many were never given the chance to look at or hold their children.

“The widely held view was that parents needed to be protected, that seeing their baby, having contact with their baby, creating memories of any kind would be harmful, and intensify and prolong their grief,” Boyle says.

Horlock still remembers his mother returning from hospital after giving birth without his baby brother.

Close up of a man with short grey hair and wearing dark sunglasses and a grey and white check shirt standing outside with hills in the background

Geoffrey Horlock’s recalls how his mother was deeply impacted by not only the loss of her baby, but by the process around the loss in not being able to hold her baby or say goodbye. Source: Supplied

He says she spent days sitting by the wood fire stove in their kitchen, just staring at the fire.

“Mum was distressed about it and it troubled her her whole life,” he says.

Much has changed since laws recognising the births of stillborn babies were strengthened.

The national Care Around Stillbirth and Neonatal Death guidelines, updated in 2024, cover best practice for stillbirth and recommend offering all parents the opportunity to see and hold their baby immediately after birth and allowing them to interact with their baby through activities such as bathing and dressing them.

Koklas has seen the benefit of these changes firsthand. As well as being involved in helping to find baby graves, she is a bereaved mum. Her two baby boys died in 2011 and 2016.

“I am so grateful I got to hold my babies, name them and make funeral arrangements for them,” she says.

A healing process

For those who lost children in decades gone by, the hope of finding their graves remains.

Koklas says every family she has supported to locate their baby has shared a similar feeling: a deep sense of peace and closure.

“Finding a baby’s final resting place is one of the most healing and powerful experiences … it’s something that goes beyond words, like a heavy weight being lifted.

It doesn’t mean they’ve ‘moved on’ — because grief doesn’t work that way — but they feel like they can now live again, just a little bit lighter.

Similarly, Noonan attests to the importance of finding burial sites. She says while the Older Loss Group has helped to locate hundreds of babies, there are still so many more Australian families out there wishing they knew where their babies were.

She encourages anyone needing help in their search to reach out, saying: “it’s never too late”.

An investigation of historical practices associated with stillborn babies and perinatal infant loss in Australia before the 1980s has never been undertaken.

The federal attorney-general’s department did not respond to questions put by SBS News about whether the government plans to conduct a national investigation or apology into the matter.

At least for Mead and the Harding siblings, there is some long-awaited closure — and the chance to place a commemorative plaque on the plot their baby brother shares with baby Horlock.

Geoffrey Horlock says he and his siblings decided to place a headstone on the grave a number of years ago after both their parents had died as a way to honour their mother.

A headstone on a grave that reads "Horlock, in loving memory of Andrew Joseph."

Arrangements are being made to have a plaque placed on the lower part of Andrew Horlock’s grave to acknowledge it is also the grave of ‘Baby Harding.’ Source: Supplied

He says his mother would have loved for that to have happened in her lifetime.

“That finished it for us; it put some closure on Andrew. So if there’s another baby buried there, it’d only be fair that we let them do that too.”