Men pose in front of the picket fence unearthed in the early 1920s during excavation work for the Capitol Theatre on Swanston Street. Credit:Courtesy of Tony Whelan and Robyn Annear

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size 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. At its base emerged a wooden track and, nearby, the stump of a long-ago chimney. 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. Melbourne as a European settlement had existed only 30 years before that. Jeremy Smith, principal archaeologist, Heritage Victoria and Meg Goulding, archaeologist and member of the Heritage Council of Victoria Credit:Eddie Jim 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. 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. But 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.


Archaeologists 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. Foundations of a school exposed under the manse at the Wesley Church site (Lonsdale Street) Credit:Jeremy Smith/Heritage Victoria Someone remembered the photo in Annear’s book and the archaeologists tossed around theories, namely that they were digging into basements. But how then to explain the evidence of gardens, windows, fireplaces and that picket fence discovered by Whelan's workers so long ago? The Heritage Council of Victoria commissioned a study to find answers. It would become, says Jeremy Smith, principal archaeologist with Heritage Victoria, one of the "most significant combinations of historical and archaeological research that’s ever been conducted." The report has now been delivered and "It wasn't what we expected," Mr Smith says. "It’s going to have implications for the way we do archaeology for the next 50 years." The Alliance Archaeology study, Heritage in Ruins: An investigation into Melbourne’s ‘Buried Blocks’ reveals details of a forgotten campaign throughout the 1850 and 1860s by Melbourne’s then-council to raise the levels of swampy Melbourne’s putrid streets. Hills were flattened and low-lying areas filled, the reason for today's milder up-and-down cross-town walks.


However, the bombshell in the study was its discovery of a law passed in 1853 requiring those in low-lying areas to bury their homes. If a landowner refused or was too slow, the council was empowered to raise the level of the land itself and charge the costs. The researchers pored through old council records, newspaper articles and existing archaeological reports to find references to at least 30 sites (although there are likely dozens more), many of which would still be frozen in time under Melbourne’s CBD. Unsurprisingly, many early residents were devastated. They pleaded with the council for mercy (and there is evidence it occasionally worked). Others rebuilt their homes above the new level. Melburnians scavenged rubbish and bartered for road off-cuts to use as fill, which became a precious commodity.


To understand why people had to bury their homes, it’s important to appreciate the landscape and squalor of early Melbourne. The report includes vivid first-hand descriptions of such city landmarks as "Lonsdale Swamp", at the eastern end of Lonsdale Street, which brewed with vegetation, rubbish and offal from slaughtered pigs and sheep. Early Melbourne's hills and water flows A writer who documented early Melbourne, Edmund Finn (known as Garryowen) said, similarly, Flinders Street was a swamp, and described Swanston and Elizabeth streets as shallow gullies with "deep and dangerous ruts". Even Collins Street "was so slushy and sticky that … one required to be equipped in a pair of leggings or long mud boots".


Disease thrived in these low-lying areas, where "the humble classes" made their lives. The people care not for drainage and cleanliness, they are so full of meat, bread, brandy and water. A speaker at an 1850 ratepayer meeting, as reported by the Geelong Advertiser. "We celebrate the Hoddle Grid, but the Hoddle Grid is very uniform," Mr Smith says of Melbourne’s now-helpful rectangular and right-angled design. "Melbourne wasn’t suited to that. Elizabeth Street was a watercourse. It’s not an even landscape and the system that was imposed by the European settlement did not cater to the watercourses and the river flows." As the population increased and the city began its transformation into "Marvellous Melbourne" of the 1880s, the answer, according to the council, was to fill the holes and fill them fast.

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