A tour of Newtown and Camperdown Cemetery

My good friend Susan from work (AKA, Luna Park photographer-extraordinaire) invited me to join her for an afternoon in Newtown on Sunday. She used to live quite close to Newtown, so she took me around to all her favorite (and best!) haunts. We also went on a tour of Camperdown Cemetery, which turned out to be one of the highlights of the day!

Fueling up

Of course, most important before a big day of walking around is fueling up properly. We did it up right at Black Star Pastry. This was a tucked-away but obviously neighborhood-favorite coffee shop. 

Their treats are to be taken seriously! Everything in the case looked amazing!

And they had a quiche named after my grandmother. 

Susan and I shared a piece of the strawberry watermelon cake and the red wine pear, cherry, & ricotta tart. I was dubious of the cake with watermelon in it - I shouldn't have been. They were both A-mazing!

Street art

Newtown is a pretty quirky little 'burb. One thing that's unique about it is that it doesn't really discourage people from using public areas as canvasses. There is all kinds of graffiti and street art to be seen, and of course my tour guide knew all the streets to check out!

Some of the art was really good!

Some of it was surprisingly non-Australian in theme. 

And some of it was just more weird than anything. 

One of my favorite aspects of the artsy-side of Newtown was that art is just tucked in everywhere! In the sidewalks...

This sidewalk had trivia about Newtown embedded in strips between the pavers

And this one had mosaics embedded in it

On steps...

And pretty much any place there was room!

Newtown shops

Of course, a girls' afternoon out wouldn't be complete without poking into a few shops.

There are tons of quirky stores. We stopped in a couple bookshops. 

And one of Susan's favorites, Yoshi Jones: a designer store that specializes in making new pieces from vintage kimonos. 

Camperdown Cemetery

Our main activity of the day was a tour of the Camperdown Cemetery. A local archaeologist and a member of the Anglican Church next to the cemetery run the tours on Sundays after the services. A bonus of this was that we got to poke around in the church for a few minutes before the tour started. 

The church was built in the early 1840s out of Sydney sandstone. It was incredibly beautiful. 

We learned on our tour that the cemetery actually existed first, so when the church was built, it was uniquely designed to fit into a space without disturbing headstones that were already there. That means some of the headstones are right up against the building. 

Sidenote: the way the tour guide said "cemetery" sounded like "symmetry." I'm still getting thrown off by Australian accents, apparently. =)

The cemetery is a little wild and overgrown since there are so many historical markers there. But that adds to the overall ambiance of the place. 

Another interesting thing about the layout of the cemetery is that it used to much larger. Newtown wanted to use some of the space as a park, so they put up a wall around a smaller section of the cemetery and moved all the headstones to be within the walls. Now there's an eery headstone wall around the cemetery. 

There are some famous headstones in the cemetery and some fascinating stories about some of the people buried there. One of those is a lady who people believe was Charles Dickens' inspiration for his Miss Havisham character. She was supposed to be married to a local Sydney bloke who never came for her on the morning of their wedding. 

There is also a monument to the Dunbar shipwreck victims. The Dunbar shipwreck happened in 1857, and there was only one survivor. Until the Black Sunday fires in 2009, the Dunbar was the largest peacetime loss of Australian life. They still have memorial services for the victims. 

We finished our fun Newtown day with a bite of lunch and some more poking around. It was a really fun afternoon, and I'm lucky to have had a personal tour guide make it so great!