Rob McEwan clearly remembers the day they found the bodies at the construction site.

The Hutchins School principal is pointing to his school’s master plan, to an area that was set for redevelopment in March.

His excitement was short-lived.

The discovery would kickstart nine months of meticulous excavation and identification, as archaeologists tried to piece together who lay beneath the surface.

At final count, 1,973 people’s remains have been exhumed from The Hutchins School’s old hockey field, in what is believed to be the largest single exhumation project in Australia.

How could this possibly happen and what do you do when you find hundreds of bodies without headstones?

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Location and extent of previous exhumations unclear

It’s no secret that Hutchins, a prestigious boys’ school in the Hobart suburb of Sandy Bay, was built over an old cemetery site.

Queenborough Cemetery was operated by a private company from 1873 until 1917, when the Hobart City Council took over. The last burial was in 1934.

Over those six decades, it is believed between 9,000 and 13,000 people were buried there.

In 1964, the old cemetery site was taken over by the Hutchins School, as part of a sale and land-swap deal which stipulated council would fund the exhumation of up to 1,900 human remains.

That’s where things get murky.

Members of the public have questioned how Hutchins could start digging, without knowing there were bodies beneath the hockey and soccer field.

Mr McEwan said the current school board and administration believed, perhaps naively, that the area had already been exhumed.

“We just did not have the detailed understanding of where the exhumations had taken place or what lay beneath the surface.”

Historical archaeologist Brad Williams said it’s unclear exactly how many bodies were exhumed in the 1960s.

At the state archives, there are folders full of documents and correspondence — some torn, some handwritten — relating to those exhumations.

They’re hard to make sense of.

There is a plan from 1960 that marks various “priority” areas for exhumation at the time, but Mr Williams said it’s not a huge help.

“We’re not quite sure how much of that was undertaken,” he said.

On top of the obvious flaws in record-keeping, the site isn’t heritage listed, so no red flags were raised when the school submitted its development application to council.

Bodies stacked ‘six people deep’

Mr Williams pulled together a team of archaeologists, archaeology students and contractors to exhume the remains and identify as many of them as possible.

“Off the top of my head, I thought we could be dealing with a couple of hundred [people’s remains],” he said.

Working row by row, a mechanical excavator would scrape back the earth to where the archaeologists could just see a coffin lid, and then they’d take over the work with hand tools.

Working over Hobart’s cold, dark winter, the archaeologists eventually exhumed almost 2,000 bodies.

But they had their work cut out trying to figure out who they all were, and early 20th-century gravedigging scandals didn’t help.

‘A revolting state of affairs’

In 1898, complaints began to be made about the dilapidated state of the Queenborough Cemetery, but by 1911, darker accusations were circling.

On November 18, 1911, newspapers reported an undertaker was fined five pounds for his role in an unauthorised reinterment.

One report noted a Hobart man was due to be buried in a family plot, but “when it was found that the grave was full, to enable the coffin to be placed in it, another casket was taken out and hidden”.

The report goes on to explain the older coffin was later put back in the grave, but “far too close to the surface”, causing an “offensive odour”.

The undertaker later “surreptitiously” moved the two coffins to Cornelian Bay cemetery, an act for which he was later fined.

But the bigger scandal was yet to come.

In 1913, a former Queenborough gravedigger revealed two infants’ coffins had been exhumed from a family plot and burnt, to make way for the burial of another sibling.

Newspapers reported on the “revolting state of affairs”, and the gravedigger’s claims of “the practice … to remove coffins from graves to permit fresh burials”, under instruction from the cemetery owner and manager George Luckman.

Coffins were being burnt or thrown on rubbish heaps, and in some cases, buried only two feet from the surface.

The city health officer commented that “the methods of disposing of the dead at Queenborough filled him with horror and amazement, and that they were a real danger to the public health”.

At the time, the cemetery was being run for profit, with the main source of income being the sale of plots.

As Ms Ralph and the team were excavating the old graveyard, evidence of George Luckman’s dodgy burial practices became evident.

They found burnt coffins and other coffins that had been squashed down.

“That has made [identifying people] much harder, because we knew that he did move people, and there’s no documentation of that.”

‘Like a giant puzzle’

As Hutchins’ schoolboys attended classes and played tennis nearby, Lauren Hanson-Viney was in the mud, struggling to work out who was in each grave.

From their remains, the team was able to determine the likely age of the exhumed people, whether they had experienced some physical trauma, and whether they had had an autopsy.

They were mostly working in the Church of England public section of the cemetery, with some Roman Catholic public and some Wesleyan private areas.

“But the majority of it, there wasn’t much to see, because people were thrifty and kept their belongings. They didn’t put them in the ground.”

Only about three per cent of the coffins had legible nameplates.

Finding the first legible nameplate was a jackpot moment.

It was able to be cross-checked with the most complete burial register from the cemetery.

But as Ms Hanson-Viney described, even the most complete burial register was “very unreliable”.

“There’s a lot of missing pieces. The pages are torn. Handwriting is atrocious,” she said.

The team had to dig deep into the archives, cross-referencing archaeological evidence, nameplates and the burial register with a book from the 1950s, containing handwritten transcriptions of every headstone that remained in the cemetery at that time.

“That record book though — there’s no indication of where you are in the cemetery. But after a while, I figured out it wasn’t just at random — they’d actually walked up and down each row,” Ms Hanson-Viney said.

The team also relied on convict records, historical records of births, deaths and marriages, hospital records, files from the New Norfolk asylum, and inquest reports.

‘Giving them back their identity’

After nine months of meticulous work, the archaeologists have identified more than 1,700 people and released a public list of their names — a moment of immense satisfaction for the team working on the project.

Some were prominent Tasmanians of the time.

John Woodcock Graves was the author of a famous English hunting song “D’ye Ken John Peel”, before he came out to Tasmania in 1833.

Described as a Tasmanian celebrity, he set up business in Hobart as a coach builder and painter but according to an ABC recording from 1951, his business “didn’t do much good”.

He was placed in an asylum, “from which he escaped by climbing over a wall”.

He died in 1886 and was buried at Queenborough Cemetery, although his headstone became neglected and there was talk about moving his remains elsewhere.

The team also found the remains of Henry James Hodgson, who claimed the title of “champion ironbreaker of Australia”, after issuing a challenge to any man in Australia who thought he could beat him at breaking up old iron or guns quicker.

Unsurprisingly, the mass exhumation drew plenty of public interest.

Hobart resident John Hanley was one of more than 100 people who contacted Hutchins wondering if their relatives had been exhumed.

His great-great-grandfather, police officer Edward Hanley, died in 1879, and was buried with other relatives in a family plot at Queenborough Cemetery.

“I would love to pay respect to him as our ancestor and to his mother, the convict … to show that they are well-regarded and to give them a proper burial with a proper headstone,” Mr Hanley said.

But on the weekend, Mr Hanley received the news that his ancestor’s plot was likely just outside the recently exhumed area.

“I know roughly physically where the plot was, and it’s possibly right on the border between Brad’s [the archaeologist’s] work and the tennis courts.”

Mr Hanley hopes that if the tennis courts are ever developed, a future exhumation might uncover his family.

‘Still hundreds of bodies underneath’ school

One of the conditions of the 1960s land deal was the Hutchins School would bear all costs associated with future exhumations.

Mr McEwan said the bill was approaching $1 million so far, but the school was pleased there would be “tremendous learning” from the process.

“Certainly we move forward far more knowledgeable about the site, its history and the need to be sensitive to any development that might take place.”

That’s because the archaeologists only exhumed about 15 per cent of the footprint of the original cemetery, meaning there are still hundreds of bodies underneath the school property.

“It’s not uncommon that you have schools, public institutions and even privately owned properties which are built on top of cemeteries,” Mr Williams said.

The exhumed remains from Hutchins will be reinterred at nearby Cornelian Bay cemetery, with a memorial due to take place early next year.

“It’s been really positive as well to be able to identify people that haven’t had headstones for so many years,” Ms Ralph says.

With thanks to Archives of Tasmania for their assistance with this story.