Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size "Do not touch my resting place," urged the inscription on a tomb in the Devonshire Street Cemetery, Sydney's Evening News reported in October 1900. The plea was ignored. Six years later, more than 30,000 dead had been exhumed – skeletons crammed 10 to a coffin – and relocated to other cemeteries across Sydney to make way for the new Central Station. Beneath every Sydney landmark lies a story, said Elise Edmonds, a senior curator at the State Library of NSW. Dead Central, a new exhibition that opens on Saturday, pays tribute to the lives of those buried at the cemetery between its opening in 1820 and closure in 1867. Elise Edmonds, State Library of NSW senior curator, standing in one of the installations included in the new exhibition, Dead Central. Credit:Louise Kennerley The first to be buried was quartermaster Hugh McDonald, whose headstone said that a "brother of the mystic here gives this tribute to his memory". He was followed by first fleeter James Squire, who started Sydney's first hop plant and brewery. He was recognised for his "vital service to the community" because his beer was considered harmless compared with "injurious spirits".


Others included Mary Reiby, a businesswoman who died in 1855, cricketer Richard Murray, who died in 1861, and William Lewin, coroner, artist and naturalist, who died 1819. The size of about five football fields, the cemetery stretched under the current station and railway lines from Elizabeth Street in the east to Pitt Street in the west, ending under the feet of those who today use the Devonshire Street pedestrian tunnel. The Fosters take photographs at the former Devonshire Street Cemetery. Credit:State Library of NSW It had become so crowded that The Daily Telegraph reported in 1901 that at least 5000 bodies couldn't be located. Bodies were discovered beneath paths. Remains were found buried close to the surface. Noxious and fetid smells were reported by those living near, Ms Edmonds said. To find every grave, the government directed that the soil in "every portion of the cemetery" was to be turned over. Despite that, nobody knows how many remains are there today. Record keeping was sloppy, and some remains were uncovered during recent construction works, Ms Edmonds said. After the government announced its decision in January 1901 to exhume the bodies, descendants were given two months to decide where remains should be reinterred.


As families scurried to make arrangements, Surry Hills couple Josephine Foster and her husband Arthur George Foster – inaugural members of the Royal Australian Historical Society – undertook to photograph and record hundreds of headstones before they were lost to time. "We all realise how rapidly the old is giving place to the new, and only by means of pictures will those who come after us know what Sydney was like once upon a time," Mrs Foster explained some years later. Labourers prepare the ground for the train station. Credit:State library of NSW Her photos, which are included in the exhibition, provide "a window into old Sydney", Ms Edmonds said. The exhibition is accompanied by a spooky audio guide, in which actors read the headstones as a "ghost train" rushes in and out of the unused platform under Central. Ms Edmonds said she wanted visitors to hear the "evocative and beautiful language". "There is a lot of poetry, a lot of biblical quotes, also these stark details, such as 'after a lingering illness, which she bore with Christian fortitude'."


The records include Harriet Mary Sheba, "the only daughter of Joseph Hyde Potts, who ceased to breath, on the 5th day of December 1838", and William Oliver, "who was accidentally killed by a bullock cart", April 2nd, 1821, aged 34 years. John Charles Tremayne, the only son of Joseph Hyde Potts of the Bank of New South Wales, resigned his spirit on November 9, 1838. As workmen started moving the bodies, newspapers reported "strange finds". The Fosters' photos provide "a window into old Sydney", said Ms Edmonds. Credit:State Library of NSW "In one grave three bodies had been buried one on top of the other ... In another grave were a beautiful pair of Chinese slippers with bones of a woman's feet inside them. The grave was opened on Saturday and on Monday morning when the men went back to work they found small candles tied in bamboo burning over the open grave.’ By the time exhumations began, the cemetery was abandoned and overgrown, more like a rubbish tip than a graveyard, one commentator wrote. "I walk along the row of graves I see here a clump of old boots, some rags .. cracked jugs, old skins, stale meat .... dead rats, broken traps, yards of wire-netting, evil smelling things." In the Catholic section, there were "yawing holes beside dismantled stones suggest dark, dampness, and mouldering bones, and grim death".