The gruesome finds lying beneath Sydney’s Central station which now sits on a former cemetery:
Laing O’Rourke, the company that is building the Metro station at Central, estimates they have now uncovered as many as eight skeletons. They lie in the soil; the cheap wooden coffins that surrounded them have long since rotted away and many of the bones have dissolved to dust.
Princes and paupers were buried within its walls, from street children who succumbed to disease to David Jones, the merchant whose business became the department store we know today.In 1820, Sydney was still in its infancy. Governor Macquarie ordered a cemetery be built on an undulating patch of land to the city’s south in what is now Surry Hills.
“We have a letter which talks about the noxious gases and bad smells that were emanating from the cemetery.” “I don’t know about body snatching but there were many escapades taking place. Prostitution was also happening at the graveyard.” Ms Gooseberry was never seen without her clay pipe and headscarf and would demonstrate her boomerang throwing skills down at the Harbour as well as taking people on tours of Aboriginal rock paintings.
The railway was the graveyard’s downfall. Its location meant it was blocking the railway’s progress further into Sydney CBD. In 1900, the Government ordered the bodies to be removed and the ground levelled for a tangle of railway tracks and platforms. It took just six years to clear the graves, level the ground, and build Central Station, the vast majority of which survives. The tombstones were entirely replaced by trains.Devonshire St, the boundary between the suburbs and the cemetery, became a busy tunnel beneath the tracks, a role it continues to play.
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