It took me four years to write this story.
That is, one month to look for a contact, and four years to track its location and look for background information, and some delays in between.
After virtually hitting a roundabout every time I tried to get historic details, I decided to write a piece anyway, purely based on my brief experience of what I believe is the most exotic location for a graveyard.
When you stand at a place where you can feel the wind on your face, let the sun kiss you and embrace the abundance of nature around you, from sparkling dunes and aquamarine seas, then you have to be in paradise. Period!
And paradise is not the kind of place you’d like to equate with a tract of land used as a burial ground.
We often link the grave to death and decay, the vulnerability of mankind, and a place that is never satisfied; always greedy and ready to swallow more dead bodies.
But the graveyard for the descendants of the first European (and part European) families to settle in Sigatoka is more than meets the eye. It enjoys one of the best vantage points that the senses can behold.
I first heard about the site in 2020, during an interview with iconic hotelier Bob Kennedy
During a sit down with the hospitality guru he shared insightful stories about the many places he had been to and the many hats he worn in his lifetime. Then he mentioned the graveyard, perhaps unexpectedly.
“If you go up the Sigatoka River mouth, you’ll discover graves,” he revealed.
Well versed with the history of tourism’s humble beginnings along the Coral Coast-Nadi corridor, he talked about the resting place of the first white families to settle in the rugby-mad province of Nadroga.
“They mostly face the West. It’s a lovely area, if you go there, you’ll see graves 20-30 feet above the river.”
Those graves are well tended to and remain virtually unknown today, perhaps because of its secluded location at the estuary of the country’s longest river.
I came out of that interview at the Kennedys’ Sandy Point Beach Cottages thinking about the possibility of visiting the graveyard and doing a story. It would take me four years to eventually put things in writing.
As I was drafting this piece, I couldn’t help feeling I had been gravitating towards grave stories lately. Perhaps it is an omen of my own impending journey to the afterlife.
Just this year, I scaled one side of Ovalau’s historic cemetery at Draiba, situated a few kilometres outside the port town of Levuka.
With a bit of research, I learned the backstory of some of the deceased who had been residents of Draiba since the 1800s.
One of them was particularly interesting to me – Philip Stolz (1887-1948). Research showed that one of his six children was Edward Henry Stolz who married my paternal grandfather’s eldest sister Alice Mitchell.
At Draiba cemetery I grappled with the sad possibility of being forgotten after death and disappearing into nothingness one day; that you only really matter when you are alive and beyond death you’d be only remembered if you are either legendary like Mother Theresa or unfavourably notorious like Udreudre.
Efforts to make arrangements to meet the family that looks after the Sigatoka River mouth cemetery failed many times. The only contact I had was to Angie Steele, a lady I spoke to a number of times on the phone.
So I decided to go on a wild goose chase to the elusive cemetery. From Farmers Store near Olosara’s main road, I went through a maze of dusty cane fields, before ending up at an outcrop of coastal land which hugged the coastline and jetted sharply into the sea, an area known as Muasara Point.
At first, the graves here looked eerie in the mid-afternoon sun.
But as I inched closer, the natural world, in all its magnificence and splendour, unfolded beautifully before my eyes.
A line of trembling coastal conifers, the type that looked weather-beaten and salt-resistant, towered over the hallowed graves with submissive reverence. In a distance, undulating sand dunes sparkled in the scotching sun.
The winds blew strong from the south making swishing tunes with the rustling movement of evergreen needles.
For thousands of years, these gusts from the sea have blasted and shaped the dunes on the opposite end of Muasara and somewhat influenced how people lived their lives at their foothills, an area called Kulukulu, where surviving relatives of the dead live.
I tried my best to inspect the graves and note all peculiar features I could spot on them, from rusting metal structures to algae-covered engravements.
I also took time to consider the great lengths relatives had gone to erect the best resting place they could offer their deceased loved ones.
One grave shouted out the name “Michael William Arthur Marshall”. He was born in October 1966 and his headstone depicted the picture of an aeroplane.
He must have been a pilot, I told myself. There was a prominently displayed housed grave belonging to Verenaisi Ulalea Work (born 1883), one that had a majestic angel in a praying position, others that were marked by coral boulders and line of new ones garlanded with fluttering pieces of material.
The few graves I inspected had tombstones that bore the surnames King, Work, Steele, Rounds, Byrne, Ah Tong and Marshall. The varitiety showed me the rich mix of families that have been married into the original settler’s own family since the mid-1800s.
According to records in The Fiji Times, one of the first white men to make Nadroga his home was Moses Ezra Work. He was a middle-class American whose supposed sense of adventure might have inspired him to leave home on Rhode Island, New York in the United States to settle in the South Seas.
The son of Joshua Hills Work and Martha Blanding Walker, historical accounts note that Ezra was born on September 8, 1833 in Attleboro, Massachusetts in the US.
He was one of nine children born to the couple between 1832 and 1850. The family’s address was 124 Somerset St in Providence, Rhode Island.
Joshua was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1808 and aside from Ezra’s mother Martha, he had also taken another wife in Emily Davis.
This migratory streak passed down to Ezra, who was estimated to have arrived in Fiji around 1850.
Ezra was believed to have come down to Fiji most likely in a whaling ship with the intentions to do business, make money and go back and forth to the US but he never returned to the US.
He eventually married Adi Vani Wainiqiyama, a noblewoman from Yavitu in Kadavu, and later as his business grew, he acquired pockets of land between the Suva Peninsula and Sigatoka.
He also bought land at Sovi Bay (no longer in the Work family) and at Muasara and Kulukulu. After Adi Vani died at Naqara, Ezra relocated his family to Kulukulu, where most of his descendants now live.
It was in Kulukulu where his children, Ezra Walker (also known as Moses Junior), Christopher Blunding Work, Willis Waterman Work, Caroline Knowles (nee Work), and Joshua Hills Work became the five original estate owners of the family’s property there.
As mother nature continues its inherent role of taking care of Muasara’s sleeping residents, blessing them with beauty and unobstructed views of sunrises and sunsets, the ebbing waves of climate change are slowly eating into this slice of paradise.
Many coastal grave sites around Fiji have already fallen victim to rising sea levels. Some have completely gone under ruthless waves while others are currently at risk of being eroded.
Only time will tell what will happen at Muasara Point in the future. But regardless of how that will turn out, for now, it will go down in my books as Fiji’s most exotic graveyard and certainly the kind of paradise where I’d like to sleep one day.
