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Sydney's North Head cemetery: Archaeologists unearth hidden graves and last resting place of bubonic plague victims.

Archaeologists are discovering scores of hidden graves at the cemetery that is the final resting place of the first person to die of the bubonic plague in Australia.

The scientists are using ground-penetrating radar to survey the Third Quarantine Cemetery at North Head in Sydney.

The quarantine station was in operation between the 1830s and 1984, and the cemetery opened in 1881.

Sydney Harbour Foundation Trust heritage architect Libby Bennett said people buried at the site included Sydney residents.

“There are people that lived in Pyrmont and The Rocks that are buried here,” Ms Bennett said.

It is also the final resting place for at least 241 people, who were buried after they died from diseases including influenza, the bubonic plague and smallpox.

Early results suggested the true number of people buried there was much higher.

Among the now unmarked graves is Thomas Riley Dudley — the first person to die from the plague in Australia, in February 1910.

However, the wooden post that once marked his grave is long gone.

Harbour Trust and North Head Sanctuary Foundation founder Jenny Wilson said it was interesting to know the stories of the people buried at the site.

“The first person in the graveyard died from smallpox in 1881,” Ms Wilson said.

“The second person was an Aboriginal guy — he died of smallpox too.”

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The project was designed to protect headstones like the one belonging two-year-old Iole Lakeman.

She was the daughter of the local Manly member of parliament, Allan Lakeman, and died from smallpox in 1888 — five days after being admitted to the quarantine station.

More hidden graves being discovered

The ground-penetrating radar the group are using has revealed disturbances in the soil that look like unmarked graves.

Louise Steding, an archaeologist from Swinburne Online, said they could see a lot of them.

“But we believe that there are many more and we want to know how many,” she said.

“We also believe the number will exceed the number of written records.”

Dr Steding said there could be as many as 100 unidentified remains in the cemetery.

She said the question was where they came from.

“They had another cemetery here and people feel that it was abandoned, but really we believe that it was probably exhumed and that they moved the people up here,” she said.

The project has received more than a $100,000 in a grant from the Federal Department of the Environment’s Protecting National Historic Sites program.

Underground mapping and thermal imaging will continue this year, before conservation work begins to repair damaged graves.

This post originally appeared on ABC News

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