Southern Memorial Park is planned to be a world-leading bush cemetery located in a bushland park setting south of Canberra. The project aims to deliver 50,000 traditional and natural burial plots, gardens for ashes memorialisation, and supporting facilities in four stages over 100 years to meet ongoing changing community needs and environmental conditions.

PLACE Lab’s Masterplan and Stage 1 Preliminary Sketch Plans demonstrates how landscape setting prescriptions and sustainability principles can be creatively applied to the reimagining of traditional cemetery design to show how a cemetery can be a catalyst in the process of healing a degraded landscape. The internment precincts have been configured with the aim that the life-giving landscape provides an immersive setting for internment and bereavement.  In death there is new life.

The project acknowledges the traditional custodians through preservation of cultural heritage and recognition of their spiritual connections to the land and the opportunities presented by the landscape to address the area’s ecological issues and provide a setting that delivers wider benefits to both the community and the host landscape itself.

AWARDS

2022 AILA ACT Award of Excellence Category: Landscape Planning