Webb had been joined by Kath Kingswood and several of her fellow members of the group Friends of Waikumete to show me around the park, which sprawls across 108ha in Glen Eden, West Auckland. A recent report to the council predicts that Waikumete and North Shore Memorial Park will run out of burial space before the end of the decade, and I wanted to see for myself.
The dead come to life in a cemetery, not in a grisly, horror-movie way, but in the sense that you can see their lives written in their places of burial. The words on headstones tell of love and tragic loss, but more subtle stories are inscribed in the topography.
On the bend in Glenview Rd, which runs down the cemetery's eastern side, an unremarkable vestige of concrete wall marks the place where coffins once arrived. They were dragged by horse and cart from the nearby railway station (now Glen Eden, it was called Waikomiti then, using the same misspelling as the cemetery) and offloaded.
From there it is only a few paces to what is now the improbably pretty Chapel of Faith in the Oaks but was the original mortuary chapel when the place opened in 1886.
We pause by the 110-year-old grave of Elizabeth Wallis, one of the Friends of Waikumete's recent successful projects. Elizabeth's bereaved husband, James, a Presbyterian minister, placed a three-tonne angel in Italian marble to watch over "one of the best and noblest Christian women and friends of man", but she was slowly sinking, toppling sideways into the dry clay and the group raised money to pay for her to be righted.
To the west of the cemetery's oldest part, Magnolia Way snakes up a hillside with impressive views. This area, affectionately known as Dally Alley, is lined with substantial family mausoleums bearing some of Auckland's great Dalmatian names, many " such as Mazuran and Nobilo " indelibly associated with winemaking in the days when only foreigners drank wine.
In a cemetery with a space crisis, such extravagance might seem land-hungry, but Webb points out that, just as with accommodation for the living, building upwards rather than spreading outwards is space-saving.
Other roads pass a Hindu shrine, a Muslim section where occupants all lie facing Mecca, two Jewish cemeteries (orthodox and "progressive"), one containing an imposing Holocaust memorial. There is even a public urupa, administered by its own committee, which provides a burial place for urban Maori who have lost connection with their home marae.
Elsewhere, in the military areas, modest white headstones stand to attention in precise rows and the grass is clipped as close as a new recruit's hair.
There are 70,000 life stories lying in Waikumete, some 11,000 of them of ex-servicemen and women, including one who took part in the fabled Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea in 1854.
It's not hard to believe that 130 years of funerals would have filled the place up. A section called Waitakere View in the southwestern corner is all that remains unused. It has room for the mortal remains of 500; we are dying to get in at the rate of around 350 a year.
The council has begun the planning process for the development of 18 of the 48ha in the northwest. Bush will have to be cleared, which will doubtless raise opposition. It's no simple matter to manage the tension between the past and the future.
Friends of Waikumete run cemetery walks during the summer months. The next, on Sunday, March 22, at 3.30pm, will take in the Corban family mausoleum and the grave of the famous exotic dancer, Freda Stark. Facebook: friendsofwaikumete
