An archaeological dig at the Mount Larcom police station in central Queensland is searching for a stash of documents that Constable Edward Robb buried in the yard about 40 years ago after being ordered to incinerate them. The documents could contain evidence of police corruption from the era of premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, records of German settlers interned during the world wars, or accounts of frontier war violence, or they may simply be quotidian records of a railway town.
The search begins
The excavation is led by Katherine Figueiredo, collections manager at the Queensland police museum, and Dr Caitlin D'Gluyas, an archaeologist and lecturer at the University of Queensland. On a hot afternoon in September, the five-strong team scratched out trenches in the dusty slate behind the timber police building, which sits off the Bruce Highway between Rockhampton and Gladstone.
Figueiredo had been told that Robb placed corrugated iron atop the buried cache of files, but the pings from local detectorists proved to be false positives. Without that marker, D'Gluyas said the team could only dig shallow trenches and "hope to get lucky". D'Gluyas, who would not normally take on such a job, said the potential public interest made her willing to make an exception. "There's a saying in archaeology that 'it's not what you find, but what you find out'," she said. "But this is way more like digging for buried treasure."
A story told in secret
The dig began with an old story. Last December, a retired officer walked into the police museum in Brisbane and said his late colleague, Constable Robb, had defied orders to incinerate papers and instead buried them somewhere in the station's back yard. Figueiredo said Robb was allegedly given the directive to destroy documents at the station that were older than 10 years and "had a lot of moral quandary around that".
Robb was the sole officer stationed at Mount Larcom for years during the 1980s. By the end of that decade, the Fitzgerald inquiry into police corruption brought down Bjelke-Petersen, ended more than 30 years of National party governance of Queensland, and led to the jailing of three former ministers and the state's police commissioner. The documents might also relate to German colonists who helped establish the railway town from 1910, many of whom were sent to internment camps during the first world war and compelled to register as "enemy aliens" with local police. Or they could relate to 1855 settler violence against Indigenous people, which led to an attack on settlers at the Mount Larcom sheep station in which at least five people were slaughtered, sparking a wave of brutal killings including by a posse of settlers and mounted police who killed at least 11 Indigenous people in retribution.
Figueiredo said: "We came to the decision that, if there is something out there … it's our responsibility to obtain and preserve." She and her colleagues tracked down Robb's widow and son, who confirmed the story and provided fragments of detail from about 40 years ago.
Archaeology 101
D'Gluyas reads the dirt like an angler reads a river, looking for "disturbed ground". "If we find the edge of a disturbance, we follow it 'round to see its shape. This is archaeology 101," she said. The team scraped away the thin layer of top soil in trenches, but the ground soon felt like concrete, and the police yard seemed to acquire dimensions far greater than its several hundred square metres.
Objects emerged from the dirt – shards of porcelain, an old belt buckle, a shell brooch, a packet of atomic tomato Samboy chips, a crushed beer can. D'Gluyas said one of the misconceptions of archaeology is that you're looking to find something particular. "But it is the chasing of knowledge and understanding that is more interesting than particular finds," she said. "I've never wanted to find a thing so bad," she admitted.
Local reactions
On the second and final day of the dig, Alice Major, an 87-year-old resident who has lived in Mount Larcom for 60 years, sided with Constable Robb. "Good on him," she said. "There's too much of this destroying stuff without thinking twice or thrice about it." Major believes the old owner of a neighbouring home on Bismark Street was a German Australian sent to an internment camp during the war, which ought to be in police records. She said local council records were destroyed when it amalgamated, and as for hidden criminality, "you can't keep those secrets in a little town".
Playing Lotto
D'Gluyas described the excavation as "a giant 3D puzzle", responding to scraps of memories and old satellite images to decide where to swing the next mattock. But halfway through day two, the team decided the odds were too heavily stacked against them. The story of the tin roof seemed to be just a story – perhaps a invention of memory, a sheet of non-metallic roofing, or someone else had already dug it up. Without the roof, the dig felt "too much like playing Lotto", D'Gluyas said. If the cache of papers is still there, they would need ground-penetrating radar or machine excavation to find it, and another season. "There's a very good chance it's still here," she said, walking around the dusty police yard one last time. "We could be standing on top of it."
