St David's Park, where Madam had been snapping away, has a story of its own. It was the city's first cemetery and dates back to 1804 and the beginning of settlement, namedSt David's Cemetery as a mark of respect Colony's founding Lieutenant Governor, Lieutenant Colonel David Collins, who marked out the site with the Reverend Robert Knopwood in April 1804 and was later buried there with nine hundred other people.
There’s a story that goes with the Collins burial. He had died suddenly on 24 March 1810 and was interred in a casket of Huon pine with full military honours on the spot intended for Knopwood’s church, which was constructed with its altar directly above his grave about a year afterwards. The wooden building was blown down in a storm within a few months. Later, in 1838, Lieutenant-Governor John Franklin arranged for his resting place to be honored with a sandstone monument.
By the 1830s it had become neglected, and as the settlement at Hobart spread around the old burial ground there were concerns about health risks with burials in such a densely populated area. Opening the Cornelian Bay cemetery in 1872 allowed the other burial grounds within the city to be closed, and by then it had become 'an odious wilderness' of defaced and toppled headstones.