What lies beneath the picnickers at Camperdown Rest Park?
With the annual Newtown Festival kicking off on November 8, Camperdown Memorial Rest Park will be teeming with visitors browsing garage stalls, sampling ‘Newtown spins’ on classic fairground food or watching the famous dog show unfold throughout the day. What the crowds might be unaware of, however, is that several feet beneath the well-tended lawn lie the remains of those buried in what used to be Camperdown Cemetery. About 18 000 people rest in the cemetery’s grounds.[1]
Victims of the wreck of the Dunbar, broken to pieces on the rocks of The Gap (north of Sydney harbour) on August 20th 1857, are among those buried in the cemetery.[2] With all but one of the 122 passengers travelling on board killed in the wreckage, it constituted a staggering loss of life in the country’s maritime history.[3] The incident thus unsurprisingly attracted a great deal of public interest, and expressions of mourning for those lost on their journey from England, such as that captured in the following poem written for the Australian Band of Hope Journal, peppered Australian newspapers. A large crowd (estimated at twenty thousand) gathered on George Street on August 24 for the funeral procession of the passengers who had perished.[4]
Author unattributed, “Scene of the wreck of the Dunbar, Sydney”, ca. 1855-1910. State Library Victoria (b53662)
Thomas Glaister, “James Johnson, survivor of the wreck of the Dunbar”, hand coloured ambrotype. State Library of New South Wales (a128698).
Consecrated in 1849, Camperdown Cemetery originally covered 12 acres of land, stretching between Federation, Lennox, Church and Australia streets. It was established by the Sydney Church of England Cemetery Company as the need to create new burial spaces became increasingly apparent: the Sydney Burial Ground (located on the site of the present-day Central Train Station) was fast reaching capacity.[5]
Visiting the remaining four-acre portion of Camperdown Cemetery today, you can see the sexton’s lodge, shaded by a large fig tree at its entrance, both which date from 1848.[6] There too stands St Stephen’s Church, designed in the Gothic Revival style by Edmund Blacket and opened in 1874.
In 1948, in response to complaints about its unkempt state, eight acres of the cemetery were cordoned off and converted into the public park we see today. The murder of an eleven year old girl in 1946, Joan Norma Ginn, whose body was discovered in the cemetery’s grounds, likely bolstered requests to reclaim the space for safe public use.[7] Tombstones in the grounds allocated to the development of the park were removed and relocated and walled-off in the portion of the cemetery containing the sexton’s lodge and St Stephen’s Church (the spire of which can be seen in the background of the images below). The bodies, however, remained undisturbed.
Unattributed, “Old Historic Camperdown Cemetery”, ca. 1914 – 1941. State Library Victoria, http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/pictoria/gid/slv-pic-aab47760.
Photo taken on October 24 by the author.
Notes:
[1]Megan Martin, “Camperdown Cemetery”, in The Society of Genealogists’ Primary Records Guide (2008), http://www.sag.org.au/downloads/CamperdownCemetery.pdf.
[2] Ibid.
[3] ABC website, “Shipwrecks”. Accessed October 31, 2015. http://www.abc.net.au/backyard/shipwrecks/nsw/dunbar.htm.
[4] Dictionary of Sydney, “Dunbar Shipwreck”. Accessed October 31, 2015. http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/dunbar_shipwreck.
[5] Martin, “Camperdown Cemetery”.
[6] The City of Sydney, “Gritty Newtown Historical Walking Tour”, 5. Accessed October 24, 2015. http://www.newtownproject.com.au/local-area/walking-tour/.
[7] W. P. Thornton, “Camperdown Cemetery”, The Sydney Morning Herald, July 13, 1946, 7. Accessed October 31, 2015. http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/17982448.
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