When gold was struck on the Palmer River in 1873, Cooktown exploded into being almost overnight as the Endeavour River port serving the diggings. People poured in from everywhere, and they died here too. The cemetery has been in continuous use since soon after the town was founded in October 1873; the oldest marked grave belongs to the Reverend Francis Tripp, who died on 20 May 1874. A granite outcrop two-thirds of the way into the reserve pushed the graves toward the southern and eastern slopes, where roughly three hundred sandstone and marble memorials still stand among self-sown trees, frangipani, and coconut palms. Most of those stones were cut in Brisbane, Townsville, or Cairns and shipped north at a cost few could afford. The merchants and magistrates got monuments. The labourers, carriers, dressmakers, and market gardeners who did the actual work of the rush mostly lie unmarked, their names gone into the grass.

Of the thousands who came for Palmer gold, roughly one in six were Chinese, most of them gardeners, miners, labourers, and storekeepers. About three hundred were buried here between 1873 and 1920. In 1887 the Chinese community of Cooktown built a shrine to honour their dead: a concrete platform with an upright tablet whose large characters read, in essence, "respect the dead as if they are present." A low altar held food offerings, and two brick fire-boxes nearby let mourners burn paper prayers and ceremonial money to speed the spirits onward. It is the only known Queensland cemetery with a Chinese shrine inside the reserve itself. Many of these graves were never meant to be final. Men who feared dying far from the land of their ancestors arranged to be exhumed and shipped home, so that the shrine commemorates not only the buried but the departed who were carried back to China across the same sea that had brought them.

One grave draws visitors who know nothing of the gold rush. Mary Watson was twenty-one, a Cornish-born woman keeping a beche-de-mer station on Lizard Island in 1881 while her husband was away. After a violent clash with Aboriginal people on the island, she fled the only way she could, climbing into a square iron tank used for boiling sea cucumber, with her infant son Ferrier and a Chinese worker named Ah Sam. The three drifted at sea for days under the tropical sun. They came ashore on a waterless island roughly sixty-five kilometres from where they had set out, and there, the water gone, they died of thirst. Cooktown buried all three together in January 1882; some six hundred and fifty people followed the coffins. Her diary, recovered with the tank, recorded the slow approach of death in a few flat lines. The conflict that drove her into that tank belonged to a frontier in which Aboriginal people were losing their country, and both the woman in the tank and the people on the shore were caught in it.

The denominational paths divide the ground into Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Church of England, and Methodist sections, with Jewish, Buddhist, Islamic, Aboriginal, and other groupings besides. The Aboriginal graves to the west were marked simply, with a sapling branch set at each corner. The names cut into the stone read like a frontier census: Mother Mary de Sales Meagher, who founded the Sisters of Mercy convent in town; Bishop John Hutchinson, first Roman Catholic bishop of the vicariate of Cooktown; Elizabeth Jardine, whose family pushed cattle to the very tip of Cape York; and Albert Ross Hovell, a mariner remembered partly for his role in "blackbirding," the coerced labour trade that shadowed the Pacific coast. The cemetery does not flatter its dead or hide them. It simply keeps them, the celebrated beside the exploited, on a tropical hillside that has become one of Far North Queensland's most visited heritage places.