The fifth oldest Anglican Church in South Australia, the cemetery has become very overgrown in places. There are about 20 headstones that are now unreadable or totally overgrown with creepers.

A book about the church containing detailed lists of all Baptisms, Marriages and Burials is available from

The Parish Office 08 8398 2517

or Ian Newman 08 8398 2636

The ten acres of the Church, Cemetery and Rectory of Section 4430 Hundred of Macclesfield land was bought by George Morphett and Samuel Stocks from McFarlane in 1843 and was given for the building of the church in May 1846.  Sentence of consecration was pronounced and the Church with portion of the land on the east side thereof consecrated by the Lord Bishop of Adelaide on the 28th day of April 1848.

The village of Blakiston is about a mile and a half from Mount Barker township and is pleasantly situated in a valley surrounded by woody hills.

There are five burial books, five lease receipt books and two lease registers. Prior to 1849 there may have been burials - page 374 of Book 1 has two entries written in (apparently much later and initialled by John Gower) that of John Doney and Henry Seymour.  Diary entries have Wednesday June 3 1946 "Heard that Henry Seymour had shot himself accidentally" and on Wed Sept 16 1846 "On Monday last the first burial took place at Blakiston churchyard - a child named (a space left but not name was entered)".

There were 41 burials in 1849-1851. With over 1000 burials in St James Cemetery, not all were Anglicans.  200 of these we do not have any record of where they were buried - sometimes family graves, and headstones help to place the burial plot.  The number of leases is 392 - this covers families, and thus more than one plot in a lease.

There have been 3 exhumations - all between 1900 and 1920. A child re-interred with his father, a re-interment at North Road Cemetery, and the third in the wrong position in a plot and re-interred in the correct lease. The original plat (on linen and peeling badly), the plan in the vestry (on thin brown tracing paper, the original writing fading badly and not all entries from the first map included), and an extension plan of the cemetery in 1948 - all plans are exactly the same.  So over the years the basic plan of the cemetery has not been altered.  All rows are alphabetically named, and each row has numbered plots.