![]() ![]() Someone remembered the photo in Annear’s book and the archaeologists tossed around theories, namely that they were digging into basements. ![]() We know these details thanks to historian and writer Robyn Annear, who devotes them a paragraph in her 2014 book, A City Lost and Found: Whelan the Wrecker’s Melbourne.īut little else has ever been said or explored, even as other Pompeii-esque finds, far too deep for such a young city, accumulated across Melbourne's CBD in more recent decades.Īrchaeologists were no more confounded than in 2017, when they unearthed a preserved neighbourhood block, the size of four or five tennis courts, metres below the grounds of Lonsdale Street's Wesley Church.įoundations of a school exposed under the manse at the Wesley Church site (Lonsdale Street) Credit: Jeremy Smith/Heritage Victoria ![]() The discovery was remarkable enough for Jim Whelan, the man responsible for the theatre’s dig, to souvenir the fence for his own backyard and for two anonymous and well-heeled Melbourne gents to pose for a picture. Jeremy Smith, principal archaeologist, Heritage Victoria and Meg Goulding, archaeologist and member of the Heritage Council of Victoria Credit: Eddie Jim ![]() Melbourne as a European settlement had existed only 30 years before that. There was no ready explanation for the workers, digging foundations for what would be Swanston Street’s famed Capitol Theatre, as the building they had just demolished had stood since 1865. What they must have wondered, nearly a century ago, when a metre down in Melbourne clay their shovels found a picket fence, its planks still hard and neatly rowed.Īt its base emerged a wooden track and, nearby, the stump of a long-ago chimney. ![]()
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