Where the bodies are buried.

A few weeks ago I visited the Dead Central exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales. Billed as an exhibition ‘In Memory of a Lost Cemetery’, it tells the story of one of Sydney’s oldest burial grounds, the Devonshire Street Cemetery, which in 1901 was partly moved and partly overbuilt to create Central Railway Station.

Cemeteries fascinate me, especially if they’re old. I think they can be among the most interesting landmarks to visit in any location, whether at home or away. Highgate Cemetery in London, Père Lachaise in Paris, the ancient Jewish burial ground in Prague, the Protestant Cemetery in Rome and the community graveyard on Norfolk Island (Australia) have provided some of my most memorable travel experiences. Cemeteries can tell you so much about a society and its history, as well as being full of individual stories that are often gripping, tragic or just strange. 

I first learnt of the existence of the Devonshire Street burial ground when I reviewed Lisa Murray’s Sydney Cemeteries: A Field Guide for the Sydney Review of Books. Before that I had no idea that the bones of thousands of Sydney’s nineteenth-century citizens once lay beneath the concourses of Central Station, or that even older bones remain in the earth on which Sydney Town Hall stands, the site of the city’s original Burial Ground (used from 1792-1820). I wonder how many people do know that our city is literally built on the graves of our ancestors?

Dead Central aims to bring this knowledge, which has been forgotten or repressed, to light, and it does it very well. This is a beautifully curated exhibition, well supported by technology. There’s an app, which visitors download to their own devices and through which they can listen to a 35-minute audio recording that adds a lot of emotion and personality to the visual exhibits. If after this you still want to find out more, the library has produced a six-episode podcast called The Burial Files, which delves further into the interlocking histories of the cemetery and the railway. 

The exhibits at Dead Central include a couple of names that most Sydneysiders will recognize. One is Mary Reibey, the legendary convict turned successful businesswoman, whom most of us learn about in primary school – or at least we did back in the 1970s. You’ll remember her face from the Australian $20 note. The other is First Fleeter James Squire, who established the colony’s first successful brewing business, and whose name is still stamped on craft beers we enjoy today. Both were buried in the Devonshire Street Cemetery, Squire in 1822 and the longer-lived Reibey in 1855. 

Having opened in 1820, Devonshire Street was closed to new burials in 1867; thereafter the site became increasingly rundown and neglected, and some voices called for its complete closure. It wasn’t until 1901, though, that the New South Wales parliament decided to resume the land and use it to build Central Station. The other option, apparently, was to build the new station on Hyde Park – so thank goodness they made the choice they did, rather than taking away our largest green space in the city centre!

The problem of what to do with the graves was, of course, immense. According to Lisa Murray, ‘[a]pproximately 8500 remains were claimed by descendants and removed with their associated monumentation to other cemeteries’ (Sydney Cemeteries, p.53). Around 30,000 more were exhumed and moved to Bunnerong Cemetery in the Eastern Suburbs, a grisly task according to eyewitnesses. Other human remains were inadvertently left behind, because no one really knew how many people had been buried at Devonshire Street.

The fact that we have as many records as we do of the old cemetery is thanks to the heroes of this story, a married couple named Josephine Ethel Foster and Arthur George Foster. He worked in retail at Anthony Hordern’s department store. She, as far as I can tell, wasn’t employeds outside the home, but was a keen photographer. They both loved history. The Fosters decided that someone needed to record as much information as possible about the Devonshire Street graves before they were moved or destroyed. 

With this aim, they spent every weekend for two years at the derelict site. She photographed the headstones and memorials, while he transcribed the epitaphs. Unpaid, working on their own initiative, these two private citizens performed an invaluable service to the city they loved and to the cause of history in general. They went on to become very active founding members of the Royal Australian Historical Society.

So, what remains of the Devonshire Street Cemetery? 746 headstones and memorials – those that remained in reasonably good condition – were moved from Bunnerong Cemetery in the 1970s to the Botany Pioneer Memorial Park at Matraville, where they can be visited today. For the rest, we have only the Fosters’ images and texts to remind us of what once was.

Seeing this exhibition has altered my perception of Central Station. To me, it was always ‘just there’, part of my world since childhood. It’s good to have this glimpse into its hidden history and to know that, beneath its everyday surface, lies a complex human past.

Did you know?

Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market and New York’s Central Park are two other examples of prominent urban landmarks that were established over the top of disused burial grounds.