Thousands of Australians turned out yesterday for a macabre viewing of the remains of a colonial graveyard for convicts, soldiers and free settlers beneath Sydney's city hall.
Officials said they had expected about 150 people to accept an open public invitation to visit the ancient cemetery during renovation work on the stately sandstone structure on Sydney's main thoroughfare, George Street.
Instead, more than 2,000 people, many of them office workers on their lunch break, were estimated to have joined a line that stretched around the building in the heart of the bustling modern city.
"I think it's true to say we've got more than we anticipated," City of Sydney media officer Josh MacKenzie said.
Inside the building, the crowds watched archaeologists at work in a shallow pit under the Peace Hall as they try to find any last shards of bone in the moist clay of the 53 graves of adults and children unearthed last year.
Archeologist Tony Lowe said the graves in the Old Sydney Burial Ground were cleared in the 1880s when the last of the Town Hall was built, but the excavation aimed to find any overlooked remains.
"All the graves have been exhumed so we are finding remnants. All the head stones are removed," Lowe said. "The coffins have completely decayed, just leaving gaps or black dust. Also the bones are in poor condition mostly because they've been disturbed or damaged."
He said anything that was found would be fragmentary but all human remains would be sent to an anatomy museum at Sydney University and possibly later reinterred at Sydney's Rookwood cemetery.
City historian Shirley Fitzgerald said that thousands of those buried at the Old Sydney Burial Ground, and later exhumed and reburied when the Town Hall was constructed, had already been identified using records from an adjoining church.
The cemetery, which was full within 30 years of Sydney's settlement by the British in 1788, was the final home for all levels of colonial society.
"But the reason we keep finding bodies is because of the convicts. A lot of the convicts were just put in the ground which means they [their bodies] moved around all over the place," she said.
Officially exhumed in 1869, additional coffins, skulls, headstones, vaults and other remains were still being found well into the 20th century as the Town Hall and its surroundings underwent maintenance work.
Fitzgerald said while the site was originally chosen as a graveyard because it was considered "way, way out of town" at 1,500m from early settlements, it was then built over because it was "good real estate."
"We imagine ... that people treated the dead with respect. We didn't. We trampled all over them. It was a good bit of real estate. This was the commercial heartland of Sydney," she said.
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