HISTORIC CEMETERY

Sydney Town Hall
From graveyard to civic centre.

By Artemis Gouros

When the First Fleet arrived in Sydney they had a colony to establish and a large part of any society includes disposing of the dead. It was not until 1792 however, that an actual cemetery was established. The burials of those first four years occurred in Sydney Cove and Parramatta although the actual locations do not appear in any records.

In a letter to Archdeacon Scott in 1827, Reverend Samuel Marsden wrote that; “At the establishment of the colony for a long time no piece of ground was set apart for a burial place. Persons buried their dead in one place and some in another…Prisoners who had no friends were buried without coffins…” The second fleet reached Sydney in 1790 and the many deaths that followed its arrival made establishing a burial ground located away from the settlement a top priority.

There was a burial ground which was in use until 1792 in what is now Clarence Street in Sydney City. However 19th century maps do not show the exact location of the cemetery and the headstones were removed by the year 1845.

A map dated 1836 represents Sydney’s public cemetery as being located at Cathedral Close, adjacent to St Andrews and fronting George Street, the site of the current Town Hall. The site was apparently used from 1793 and existed until 1820 when it was officially closed in line with public works projects. According to Governor Macquarie the cemetery was not only too small but also “offensively situated in the centre of the Town of Sydney” and it was “necessary to the health of the inhabitants to remove it altogether”. By 1822 Governor Macquarie had completed a new cemetery and enclosed the now defunct burial ground with a brick wall in order to preserve the graves.

The discarded cemetery remained where it was and in 1868 a Town Hall was erected on the site. The Town Hall was completed in 1889 and in 1926 excavations for the city’s railway uncovered some human remains below George Street. In 1974 during work on Sydney Square, a bulldozer exposed an underground vaulted chamber containing the remains of a wooden coffin. In 1991 restoration work on the Town Hall revealed four coffins and a headstone and just recently skeletons were apparently discovered during work under the Town Hall.

Another cemetery was created at the Brickfields on the site of what is now Central Railway Station. This cemetery lasted until the 1840s when it became evident that it was no longer large enough. It was not until 1862 that land was bought for a cemetery at what is now the Rookwood Necropolis.