Purewa Cemetery
cemetery in Auckland, New Zealand
Purewa Cemetery is a privately run cemetery located in Auckland, New Zealand, on the southern banks of the Pourewa Creek. Established on part of the grounds of the St John's Theological College in 1889, the Purewa is one of the few privately run cemeteries in Auckland. It occupies a site of 45 ha (110 acres) and contains two chapels and a crematorium. Notable burials at the cemetery include Prime Minister Robert Muldoon and actor Kevin Smith, and figures including Sir Edmund Hillary and broadcaster Paul Holmes have been cremated at the cemetery.
Geography and biodiversity
Purewa Cemetery is described as being either in the suburb of Meadowbank or St Johns, in Auckland, New Zealand. It is located on the southern banks of the Pourewa Creek on northeastern Auckland isthmus. It is bordered to the north by mangroves growing in the creek. The name 'Purewa' is a corruption of Pourewa, the traditional Tāmaki Māori name for the valley. The name means "raised platform", and refers to a lookout post located at a high point on the north side of the valley. Across the Pourewa Creek valley is the Kepa Bush Reserve, a nature reserve and native bush remnant.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Purewa Cemetery” as cemetery in Auckland, New Zealand. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as cemetery in Auckland, New Zealand. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q64437432. Authority coordinates are -36.868, 174.828. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1889.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Purewa Cemetery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.