Dead Central Review

Until my twenties I had no idea that the Devonshire Street cemetery had even existed until I first heard about it in a radio program about Ruth Park’s Sydney. So, I was very keen to pay a visit to the Dead Central exhibition at the NSW State Library to find out more.

It’s hard to imagine now how this long-vanished part of the city’s history could have existed without leaving a trace, but the artefacts, photographs, maps and video displays of the exhibition help bring Sydney’s past back to life.

A pathway of tombstone quotes leads to a cemetery gate stencilled onto glass sliding doors. The gate glides open onto black and white video footage of people at Central station riding escalators, walking through tunnels, unaware of the dead once buried there.

A map of Sydney’s colonial streets provides evidence of the Aboriginal presence in Sydney. I’m particularly intrigued by number 15. Ceremonial Contest Ground in Hyde Park South, but there’s no further explanation.

Joseph Lycett’s painting Sydney from Surry Hills, 1819 depicts Sydney as a landscape of mostly bare hillocks and sand dunes with a white spine of the town in the distance. In the left-hand bottom corner are three small Aboriginal figures, strangely out of perspective, the only humans visible in the landscape.

The exhibition explains that the cemetery on George Street in the middle of the city quickly filled up, and in 1820 the sand hills on the outskirts of the city were chosen as a new location for the dead. By 1866 this cemetery was also full to capacity with coffins piled on coffins, some buried only 2ft deep. The burial ground was seen as a health hazard of pestilence and noxious fumes and it was officially closed.

Photos of Hyde Park from 1872 show a bare park cut through with diagonal paths lined with Lilliputian trees. In 1896 the ‘health giving’ Hyde Park was proposed as a possible location for a new railway terminus, but this area was vetoed due to the destruction of the park and valuable buildings, and the Devonshire Street cemetery site was chosen. Coffins were to be exhumed and reburied in other cemeteries.

Before the cemetery’s demise, it became a tourist attraction where visitors held picnics. The married couple, Arthur and Josephine Foster, created an archive of photos of tombstones and inscriptions, many of them moving.

The new railway terminus, Central station, was opened on 4 August 1906. It was claimed Sydney would end up surpassing Paris for its beauty and picturesqueness. It’s possible unfound coffins are still buried at the station.

One exhibition room features a video screening on an entire wall of a lost train platform at Central station for a never-built railway line to the Northern Beaches. The soundtrack is a submarine rumbling of trains. The platform is well-lit but still ghostly with its abandoned chairs as if awaiting railway workers taking breaks, a shopping trolley full of rubbish, coils of plastic-sheathed cables and graffiti scrawls. It’s an eerie journey to nowhere as the footage terminates on a closed-off tunnel. Railway staff have apparently heard children’s voices here.

I leave the exhibition, still trying to picture a vanished Sydney and the possibilities of a Sydney that never existed. When I head through Hyde Park South, now leafy and green from mature fig trees, I come across a historical notice beside a path near the War Memorial. It’s dedicated to the Aboriginal ceremonial contest grounds I read about at the exhibition. I can’t remember seeing it before. It explains that this area was a gathering place for Aboriginal people from different tribes from greater Sydney to engage in combat to settle disputes and breaches of Aboriginal law.

I’ve gained more knowledge about Sydney, but engaging with the city is still often an act of imagination.