TRAILER: The Burial Files
Thousands of people travel through Sydney’s Central Station every day, but how many know what once lay beneath it? This nine-part series will take you on a journey back to 19th century Sydney, to rediscover a place you thought you knew.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) License by the State Library of New South Wales, 2020.
PHOTO CREDIT
Man wearing mask from influenza epidemic 1919, c 1930s (detail), by Sam Hood, State Library of NSW
Contemporary image sourced from Freepik.com. E&D-5438-8-20
Transcript
NEWSREADER: The workers have found human remains under the Metro platform they're building here.
(MUSIC)
WOMAN: To exhume a whole cemetery, it must have been such a... bureaucratic undertaking.
WOMAN: Is the dust of men who, in their day, worked hard to build up this city, to be scattered to the winds?
WOMAN: I think looking at the way people died tells us a lot about how they lived.
SLNSW STAFF: This is the Burial Files.
MAN: The smell of putrefaction, of bodies rotting under the ground.
SLNSW STAFF: A podcast about love, loss, and the layers of history that lie beneath our feet.
WOMAN: You have the crime narrative there on the gravestone.
WOMAN: It's about rediscovering the places we think we know. What we see in the Devonshire Street Cemetery is the uncensored version of death in Sydney.
WOMAN: I can't believe even though we're surrounded by railway platforms, the cemetery is still here and we're standing in it.
SLNSW STAFF: The Burial Files. Available now on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.