The cemetery covers an area of some, and is one of the most important nineteenth-century cemeteries in New Zealand. It is sited on a steeply sloping site on a spur at the southern end of the central city, overlooking "The Flat", the area of coastal plain on which the suburbs of South Dunedin and Saint Kilda are located. It is divided into separate sections set aside for Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Roman catholics, as well as a Jewish section. The cemetery was opened in early 1858, with the earliest recorded interment being that of John MacGibbon in March 1858. In all, some 23,000 burials were recorded at the Southern Cemetery. Much of the cemetery is in a poor state of maintenance, though there are plans to repair some of its more damaged areas. There are 21 graves of service personnel registered and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 20 from World War I and one from World War II. The cemetery is listed on the New Zealand Historic Places Trust Register as a Historic Place - Category I. The cemetery includes, at its city end, a historic mortuary building, which was used from 1903 to 1949. The Northern Cemetery, at the other end of the city's main urban area, was opened in 1872. Neither of these cemeteries are still used for new burials ; Dunedin's main cemetery is at Andersons Bay in the south of the city.
Jewish section
The Jewish portion of the cemetery is located close to South Road in the lower part of the cemetery, and contains around 180 burials, with the earliest being from 1863. A large proportion of New Zealand's early Jewish immigrants are buried in the cemetery's Jewish section, with members of many of New Zealand's more notable Jewish families — including the Hallensteins, Theomins, Joels, and De Beers — among those interred.
The 1860s saw a major influx of people into the city due to the Central Otago Gold Rush, including a large number of Chinese from Guangdong; a separate Chinese section to the cemetery was added in the years that followed. The section was designated separate not on ethnic grounds, but due to religious affiliation, as with the other sections of the cemetery, and has some features which are built according to feng shui practice. Up to 200 Chinese burials are thought to have taken place between 1877 and 1921, of which 114 have been identified, with the majority of those interred having originally come from around the Pearl River Delta. Other interments, including several from the Panyu District, were exhumed in the 1880s and early 1900s at the behest of the Poon Fah Association, in order to return the dead to their ancestral soil in China.
