The job came with a home. “I lived in a council house just down the road past the cemetery. There were two council houses there and me and my wife moved in there.”
There is a touching family connection to the cemetery. He and his wife Patricia lost two infants to cot death in 1978 and 1981. “They’re up there,” he says pointing towards the children’s section. “My mum and dad are here, my sister’s here, I can visit them any time I want. The kiddies’ area is my favourite. The holes are dug by hand up there still – it takes a special type of care.”
The couple now has two adult children and three grandkids.
It takes a certain resilience to work in a cemetery. “It can be emotionally stressful if you let it get to you.”
He’s seen some challenging things over the years, including disinterments (lifting a body out of the ground). He’s experienced people reaching their natural end of life, as well as families coping with trauma.
“It doesn’t affect me now, but in the early days it was pretty tough. I don’t take work home. There’s counselling for us if we want it and Emmett is good at looking out for us.”
Digging graves is more complicated than putting a hole in the ground. “You’ve only got 7 feet long and 30 inches wide, because there’s another one next door, so you have to be quite precise.”
He clocks in by 7am each day and leaves when the job is finished – sometimes well past the usual knock-off time. “We average 500-600 cremations a year, roughly 200 burials and roughly 200 ashes services.”
While not a bloke to blow his own trumpet, Carter holds some strong institutional and professional knowledge about the crematorium. The city’s Major brand electronic furnace was installed in the early 2000s, replacing two natural gas-converted cremators. “You need to know a few things about thermocouples and all that. You have to be certified to use it and be first-aid and defibrillator trained.”
Carter was gifted a coffin by the city’s funeral directors to mark his 40 years at the council.
“They didn’t actually ‘give’ me the coffin.” But it is sitting at their premises earmarked for him. “Yeah, it’s mine!”
Carter has been a member of the New Zealand Deerstalkers Association Manawatū Branch for 45 years. “I’m a life member and I’ve been branch president for 20 years.”
It’s probably no surprise then that years back he would stalk the grounds of Kelvin Grove and Terrace End cemeteries at 2am shooting rabbits and possums. “It doesn’t worry me being in the cemetery at night.”
More surprising is that Carter has a private museum in his garage, with more than 750 hunting books, around 20 mounted deer heads, 12 mounted birds, ducks and pheasants, and then there are the “little creatures”, stoats, weasels and ferrets.
What does his wife think? “I’m not allowed them inside.”
