Camperdown Cemetery

This cemetery in Newtown contains three stories that would each justify a visit on their own, and almost nobody comes here.

First: the Dunbar shipwreck. In eighteen fifty-seven, the clipper ship Dunbar was approaching Sydney Harbour in a storm and smashed into the cliffs at The Gap. One hundred and twenty-one of the one hundred and twenty-two people on board died. The sole survivor, a man named James Johnson, was thrown against the cliff face and clung to a rock ledge for two days before he was spotted and rescued. Twenty-two victims of the wreck are buried here in a mass grave. The Dunbar disaster was the worst peacetime maritime disaster in Sydney's history.

Second: the real Miss Havisham. Eliza Donnithorne is buried in this cemetery, and she is widely believed to have inspired the jilted bride in Dickens' Great Expectations. The story goes that Eliza was jilted on her wedding day, and she reportedly left the wedding breakfast on the table and the front door ajar for the rest of her life, in case her fiance returned. Whether Dickens actually knew about her is debated, but her grave is here, and the story has been told in Newtown for over a hundred and fifty years.

Third: the grave of Tommy, an eleven-year-old Aboriginal boy who died in eighteen-sixteen and was the first Indigenous Australian to receive a Christian burial. A memorial obelisk was erected in nineteen forty-four.

Here is one more detail. This is the only one of Sydney's three main early cemeteries that still exists. The Devonshire Street Cemetery -- which sat where Central Station is now -- was demolished to build the railway. They dug up the graves and moved the remains. You are catching a train on top of a former graveyard every time you pass through Central.