Saturday. There are no trains to Canberra or Brisbane from Central. It's 3:26 and the first train leaves in two minutes for Bomaderry. Sydney is building its subway, which the authorities say will be ready in 2024. The subway works have interrupted connections, replaced by convoys from other stations or the bus. There aren't many people, some homeless people and a bunch of engineers on the platforms, but you're walking on what was the first resting place of James Squire, who arrived in 1788 as a convict and was the first New South Wales brewer to get a hop harvest in 1805. “The last of Kissing Point” died a Catholic at the age of 67: “He lived in respect and perished in regret”, although many do not know that his tombstone was here when they drink their beer.
In the 19th century Devonshire Street Cemetery, where Central Station is today, was the main place to dig and bury the dead. There were seven divided sections, each with its entrance. The Anglican Church and Catholics divided up the largest spaces, and then Jews, Presbyterians, Weslyan Methodists, Congregationalists and Quakers – who had the cheapest burial rates – divided up smaller pieces. The place was opened in 1820 and officially closed in 1867, although many brought their loved ones here after it closed.
During the early years of the colony the infant mortality rate was "unacceptably high" and overall mortality was higher in 1854 than in London during the cholera epidemic. “Life was brutal if you were working class,” says Elise Edmons, curator of the NSW State Library, “Family graves were a string of infants buried one on top of the other: babies, mothers and children who died in childbirth, but also by infectious diseases such as measles or scarlet fever. Alice Cooke was 18 years old when she drowned on a fishing trip. Her family inscribed on her tombstone from 1842: “We cannot tell who will be next to fall […]. Someone has to be first, but leave the rest of us/prepare to meet our God.” In 1848 they added an inscription for her brother Richard, who died at two years and six months.
Edmonds made in 2019 The Burial Files, a podcast where he traced the history of the Devonshire Street cemetery through his epitaphs, which, for most, was his biography, since no one wrote anything else about those people. "There was a 12-year-old boy who fell on him from a wall," he recalls, "or [William Yardley] who lost his life because of a snake bite." Others were passing through, like the sailor William Bleksley who was traveling on the HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin. Even early settlers like Cora Gooseberry, an Aboriginal woman known for leading settlers around North Head. Her white friends paid for the funeral.
Many headstones do not survive, for when the government announced in 1901 that the cemetery would be swept, only 8,000 of the more than 35,000 people estimated to have been buried there were claimed by their descendants. Thanks to the drawings of Arthur Foster and the photographs of his wife Josephine, “two amateur historians”, some graphic records remained. The destination of the graves was the new cemeteries of Rookwood, Waverley or Botany, where today you can see some of the tombstones that nobody claimed in 1901.
“We have the same conversations today,” acknowledges Edmonds, “building infrastructure fifty or a hundred years from now for a growing population. The old Sydney is gone, but the discussions are the same." It is estimated that in ten years the cemeteries of New South Wales will run out of available space. Although today seven out of ten coffins in Australia are cremated, it is a problem where to locate the dead, especially in states such as neighboring Victoria, Queensland or the Northern Territory, where the law only allows burials in perpetuity. Approximately 170,000 bodies are buried each year in Australia and the trend is to double that figure by 2070. The question is the same as in 1901: Where do we put the dead?
