When Governor Phillip and the Reverend Richard Johnson chose a quiet spot on the outskirts of town for a burial ground in September 1792, the first person laid to rest there is believed to have been a convict named Michael Dunn. The site, later known as the Old Sydney Burial Ground or the George Street Burial Ground, now lies beneath Sydney Town Hall.
For 27 years the cemetery operated with almost no formal oversight: it was never gazetted, no trustees were appointed and no burial register or plan was kept. The Reverend William Cowper later admitted that “the dead of all communions were interred indiscriminately”, though social distinctions persisted among the military, with non-commissioned officers of different regiments buried in separate corners of the ground.
Once the cemetery closed in 1820 and burials moved to Brickfield Hill, now the site of Central railway station, the old ground fell into grim disrepair. Headstones were vandalised, pigs, goats and horses wandered among open graves, and grave robbers were blamed for prising up leaden coffins. A committee report even noted men using the abandoned cemetery to relieve themselves, and in hot weather the stench became unbearable.
Despite public opposition to disturbing the dead, the City of Sydney eventually cleared the site to build its Town Hall, ending nearly a century of neglect over the city’s first burial ground.
