Tag: history

Where the bodies are buried.

Where the bodies are buried.

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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?

Painting of Central Railway station by William Young, 1923. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

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. 

Portrait of Mary Reibey, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

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. 

A. G. Foster’s meticulous record book, in which he not only transcribed epitaphs but carefully drew the shape of each headstone.

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.

One of Josephine Ethel Foster’s photographs of the old Devonshire Street Cemetery.

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.

In Quarantine!

In Quarantine!

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The old quarantine station in Sydney

How would you feel if you found out you had to go into quarantine? 

Would you feel angry, resigned, regretful, afraid? Would concern about your health override all other feelings? Or could there be a part of you that might enjoy the enforced rest and extra time off work? 

How would you pass the days? Would you value the chance of some time out, or would you be itching to get back to the world and resume your normal responsibilities and activities? 

As the residents of Wuhan in China enter their second week of coronavirus lockdown, and foreign nationals evacuated from China face periods of up to fourteen days in isolation facilities, I thought I’d take a look at a practice that has been part of the travel experience for nearly seven centuries: quarantine.

Venice harbour, where the modern system of quarantine was first introduced. Painting by Canaletto, 18th century. Public Domain.

The word comes from the Italian quaranta– forty – because early disease-control practices in Europe mandated a forty-day period of isolation before ships coming from plague-affected areas were allowed to enter ports in ‘safe’ areas. It’s not clear exactly where the practice originated, but it was the Republic of Venice, a major trade hub during the medieval period, that in the fourteenth century created the first government-regulated quarantine. Many other Mediterranean ports copied the Venetian example, followed in time by countries all over the world.

1885 cartoon from Harper’s Weekly depicting the importance of quarantine for keeping cholera, yellow fever and smallpox out of New York.

Travellers these days do NOT expect to find themselves in quarantine, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was a routine part of the tourist experience. It wasn’t just plague but also, increasingly, cholera that countries wanted to keep out, and in the effort to do so they often subjected foreign visitors to quite arduous quarantine conditions. 

The historian John Pemble, in his book The Mediterranean Passion, notes that for travellers in the nineteenth century the ‘cumulative delay’ caused by multiple quarantines could be considerable. ‘For example, tourists visiting Egypt, the Holy Land, Turkey, and Greece in that order had a minimum of three quarantines: one at Beirut for having been at Alexandria, one at Constantinople for having been in Beirut, and one in Greece for having been in Constantinople.’  Travellers who wanted to visit ‘the East’ or move around the Mediterranean were resigned to spending lengthy periods in detention along the way.

Malta, View of the Quarantine Area. Etching by M-A Benoist, c.1770. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

Quarantine was such an accepted part of tourism that guidebooks included information on the different quarantine stations or ‘lazzarettos’, as they were also called. Pemble quotes the 1884 edition of Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Greece, which rated Corfu, Piraeus and Malta as having the best quarantine facilities, with Malta being ‘the least inconvenient and best regulated purgatory of them all’. 

Several famous British writers were ‘guests’ of this particular quarantine station during the early to mid-nineteenth century. Poet Lord Byron, theologian (and later saint) John Henry Newman, and novelists Walter Scott and William Makepeace Thackeray were all detained there. For each of them, the great question was how to pass the time while waiting to be released. 

The poet, Lord Byron

Let’s just say that Byron didn’t handle it very well when he was quarantined at Malta for 18 days in the spring of 1811. Having too much time and no pleasant distractions, his thoughts turned inwards, and not in a good way. He obsessed about all the things that were wrong with his life – health, finances, relationships – and wrote a list of negative thoughts in his diary. Like prisoners from time immemorial, he carved his name on one of the walls. He decided that his career as an author was just ‘vanity’ and not worth pursuing. He came to believe that his confinement was making him ill. Afterwards, he wrote the poem ‘Farewell to Malta’, which contained the lines: ‘Adieu, thou damned’st quarantine, / That gave me fever, and the spleen [bad temper].’ Not his finest poetic hour, but you get the picture.

The harbour at Valetta, Malta, where many 19th century travellers underwent quarantine.

In contrast, when John Henry Newman was confined at the quarantine station at Malta in 1833, he knew he had to be careful not to become depressed. As he wrote home, ‘to one who has been employing his mind actively for years, nothing is so wearisome as idleness’. So he and his travelling companions decided to keep busy and use the time of enforced leisure to their advantage. He wrote to his family:

I assure you we make ourselves very comfortable. We feed well from an hotel across the water. The Froudes draw and paint. I have hired a violin, and, bad as it is, it sounds grand in such spacious halls. I write verses, and get up some Italian, and walk up and down the rooms about an hour and a half daily; and we have a boat, and are allowed to go about the harbour.

With meals brought in from a local hotel and a boat for skimming about the harbour, no wonder Murray’s Handbook rated this the best quarantine station in Europe! But my point is, Newman turned his imprisonment to his advantage, and did everything he could to dispel tedium and keep his spirits up.

John Henry Newman

Talking of spirits – bad pun – Newman was convinced that the lazaretto was haunted by the souls of previous occupants. He wrote home about the ‘mysterious night visitants’ he heard prowling about his room and the stairs outside, and said that other travellers detained there corroborated his reports.

Quarantine burial ground, Port Jackson. Engraving after A. William. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

There seems to be a thing about quarantine and ghosts. Q Station Sydney, a unique accommodation and conference venue located on the site of the old quarantine station at North Head on the edge of Sydney Harbour, offers nightly ghost tours of ‘what is reputed to be one of Australia’s most haunted sites’. From the 1830s to the 1980s, migrants and overseas visitors suspected of carrying disease had to undergo quarantine here before they could enter the city or its hinterland. Some of those who succumbed to illness and were buried here still haunt the grounds and buildings, creating paranormal phenomena … or so the story goes.

Accommodation at Q Station, Sydney.

But not all who were detained here were restless, unhappy or doomed. One passenger who sailed to Australia in 1935 on a ship carrying smallpox left a charming record of an unexpected summer holiday in one of Sydney’s most picturesque locations. Her poem is now displayed at the Q Station entrance and makes a good case for the upside of enforced medical isolation– as long as the location is right!

I wonder what the people going into quarantine this month on Christmas Island will make of their stay there. The political irony of Australians being placed in mandatory offshore detention is pretty striking, and perhaps foreshadows a future in which we’re all liable to become refugees of one sort or another. In the mean time, will the individuals sent to Christmas Island be Byrons, sinking into depression, or Newmans, keeping busy and finding interest in their situation? Time – and, presumably, those emerging from quarantine – will tell.