It s surrounded by trees and if you don t know it s there you can quite easily drive past none the wiser.
It s a private cemetery and many of the 450 graves lie with cracked, weather-beaten headstones, shrouded in weeds and with illegible writing that provides little testimony to those who lay there.
In the heat of late summer, with hundreds of loud cicadas buzzing in the trees, I spoke to Adrienne Miller. She is part of the community here in Matakana and every month she comes up to the cemetery to clean and tidy the graves.
“Eliza Morgan is the very first one I did and the reason was it s right here by where the water and the little shelter is, she says.