{"id":933257,"date":"2026-10-19T02:26:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T02:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/933257\/"},"modified":"2026-10-19T02:26:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T02:26:13","slug":"corruption-massacres-or-town-gossip-the-bid-to-unearth-secrets-a-rural-queensland-police-officer-took-to-his-grave-queensland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/933257\/","title":{"rendered":"Corruption, massacres or town gossip? The bid to unearth secrets a rural Queensland police officer took to his grave | Queensland"},"content":{"rendered":"

Was it by the light of a full moon that Constable Edward Robb dug a hole in the yard of the Mount Larcom police station to bury a trove of documents he had been ordered to destroy?<\/p>\n

To what did those papers speak? To police corruption that was rampant in the era of Joh Bjelke-Petersen \u2013 premier at the time Robb buried them, four decades ago? To the German settlers forced into internment camps during the world wars? Did they carry echoes of the massacres that took place here during the frontier wars? Or were they simply the quotidian accounts of a central Queensland<\/a> railway town?<\/p>\n

What exactly is the secret that the rural police officer took to his grave?<\/p>\n

This is the question that may be answered by an unlikely team led by a museum curator and an archaeologist. On a hot afternoon in September, they scratch out trenches in the dusty slate behind the timber building off the Bruce Highway between the cattle city of Rockhampton and the industrial and coal port of Gladstone.<\/p>\n

But just as blustery winds scatter away the dark clouds above without a drop of rain, the dig is in danger of failing to deliver on its promise on its very first day. The Queensland police museum\u2019s collections manager, Katherine Figueiredo, was told Robb placed corrugated iron atop his cache of buried files.<\/p>\n

But the pings of the local detectorists she engaged proved to be false positives.<\/p>\n

Katherine Figueiredo, assistant curator and collections manager at the Queensland police museum, stands outside Mt Larcom police station. Photograph: Sylvia Liber\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Now, without this promised X marking the spot, Dr Caitlin D\u2019Gluyas, an archaeologist, says the five-strong team can only dig shallow trenches and \u201chope to get lucky\u201d.<\/p>\n

The University of Queensland lecturer wouldn\u2019t normally take on such a job, she says. But given the potential public interest, she is willing to make an exception. \u201cThere\u2019s a saying in archaeology that \u2018it\u2019s not what you find, but what you find out\u2019,\u201d she says. \u201cBut this is way more like digging for buried treasure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like all good treasure hunts, this began with an old story, told in secret.<\/p>\n

Moral quandary<\/p>\n

Last December, a retired officer walked into the police museum in Brisbane to share a few nuggets of information from his days of service.<\/p>\n

This, in and of itself, was not unusual, Figueiredo says. Old coppers and crooks alike, victims of crime and injustice too, enter the Roma Street building with tales to tell. But the assistant curator had never heard anything like what she was told had occurred, four decades ago, in a town of a few hundred people more than 560km up the Bruce.<\/p>\n

Map of Mount Larcom relative to Brisbane<\/a><\/p>\n

The ex-cop said his old colleague, the late Constable Robb, had defied orders to incinerate papers and instead buried them somewhere in the station\u2019s back yard.<\/p>\n

\u201cAllegedly [Robb was] given the directive to destroy documents there at the station that were older than 10 years,\u201d she says. \u201c[He] had a lot of moral quandary around that.\u201d<\/p>\n

What stoked his conscience?<\/p>\n

Robb was the sole officer stationed at Mount Larcom for years during the 1980s. By the end of that decade, the watershed 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 as well as the state\u2019s disgraced police commissioner.<\/p>\n

Documents buried at a Mount Larcom police station might shed light upon historic events \u2013 if researchers can find them. Photograph: Sylvia Liber\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Did the constable feel duty-bound to preserve documents that contained evidence of police misconduct? And if not, what other sweeping historic events might this small town\u2019s history shed light upon?<\/p>\n

From 1910 a wave of German colonists helped establish the nascent railway town. But when the first world war broke out, it unleashed a tide of anti-German sentiment around Australia, with many sent to internment camps. Acts of parliament compelled them to register as \u201cenemy aliens\u201d with local police. Were these documents in Robb\u2019s buried cache?<\/p>\n

Or could they have carried any whispers from the silences of even earlier and darker times? In 1855, settler violence against Indigenous people led to an attack on the settlers at the Mount Larcom sheep station, in which at least five people were slaughtered. This sparked a wave of brutal killings, including by a posse of settlers and mounted police who tracked and killed at least 11 Indigenous people in retribution.<\/p>\n

The massacres of the frontier wars here predate the founding of the Mount Larcom police station in 1916. But could its historic accounts have shed light on its survivors \u2013 and perpetrators?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe came to the decision that, if there is something out there \u2026 it\u2019s our responsibility to obtain and preserve,\u201d Figueiredo says.<\/p>\n

So Figueiredo and her colleagues tracked down Robb\u2019s widow and son, who confirmed the story, and gleaned what fragments of detail they could recall from about 40 years ago that might recover those lost papers.<\/p>\n

Archaeology 101<\/p>\n

D\u2019Gluyas reads the dirt like an angler reads a river. To a trained eye, ripples on the surface of water can reveal the type and size \u2013 even frame of mind \u2013 of the fish that would otherwise swim unseen in the murk and shadow.<\/p>\n

Archaeologists use terms like \u201cbioturbation\u201d, but apply the same principle to their search for artefacts.<\/p>\n

D\u2019Gluyas, Figueiredo and their three volunteers scrap away the thin layer of top soil in trenches. Once revealed by mattock and trowel, the archaeologist can tell almost instantly if the subsoil has been dug through before, even decades or centuries earlier.<\/p>\n

\u2018If we find the edge of a disturbance, we follow it [around] to see its shape\u2019 \u2026 volunteers and archaeologists carefully excavate part of the grounds of Mount Larcom\u2019s police station. Photograph: Sylvia Liber\/The Guardian\u2018It is the chasing of knowledge and understanding that is more interesting than particular finds,\u2019 says D\u2019Gluyas. Photograph: Sylvia Liber\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re looking for disturbed ground,\u201d D\u2019Gluyas says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we find the edge of a disturbance, we follow it \u2018round to see its shape. This is archaeology 101.\u201d<\/p>\n

But though the trenches are only an inch or so deep, the ground soon feels like concrete. The sprawling police yard seems to acquire dimensions far greater than its several hundred square metres.<\/p>\n

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Objects emerge from the dirt. Shards of porcelain. An old belt buckle. A shell brooch. A packet of atomic tomato Samboy chips. A crushed beer can. On a more traditional archaeological dig, this might be the stuff of research.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the misconceptions of archaeology is that you\u2019re looking to find something particular,\u201d D\u2019Gluyas says. \u201cThe question I always get asked is: \u2018What\u2019s the coolest thing you\u2019ve ever found?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it is the chasing of knowledge and understanding that is more interesting than particular finds.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is no regular dig, though. Time is short. The workers are volunteers; the brief highly specific.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never wanted to find a thing so bad,\u201d D\u2019Gluyas admits.<\/p>\n

As the day draws to a close, the diggers keep gambling on one last swing of the mattock, like anglers convinced they will finally land a catch with one last cast despite knowing, deep down, that the fish aren\u2019t biting.<\/p>\n

\u2018Good on him\u2019<\/p>\n

On the morning of the second and final day of the dig, Alice Major sits in the sun on the patio of her single-storey timber home on the other side of town. There is a giant fig tree out the back of her acre block, a Hills hoist, a garden of bromeliads and a scattering of concrete ornaments.<\/p>\n

Major is 87, legally blind and has lived here for 60 years \u2013 back when Mount Larcom was \u201cstill called a village\u201d. She does a double-take when she hears about the archaeological dig, but quickly sides with Constable Robb.<\/p>\n

An excavation is like \u2018a giant 3D puzzle\u2019, D\u2019Gluyas says. Photograph: Sylvia Liber\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

\u201cGood on him,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s too much of this destroying stuff without thinking twice or thrice about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Major believes the old owner of a neighbouring home on Bismark Street was a German Australian sent to an internment camp during the war. That ought to be in police records, she says.<\/p>\n

But the unsolved mysteries to which Major\u2019s mind turns are of a more parochial kind.<\/p>\n

There was a dry well, the stumps of an old house and remains of a chicken coop when the Majors moved on to their Mount Larcom block, and they have always sought to know who used to live there before them. But local council records were destroyed when it amalgamated.<\/p>\n

As for hidden criminality, you can\u2019t keep those secrets in a little town, says Major, leaning forward. And she doesn\u2019t know of any really bad stories.<\/p>\n

\u201cOr if I do, I\u2019ve forgotten them,\u201d she says with a mischievous smile.<\/p>\n

Playing Lotto<\/p>\n

An excavation is like \u201ca giant 3D puzzle\u201d, D\u2019Gluyas says.<\/p>\n

The archaeologist is responding to scraps of memories she\u2019s been told, poring over old satellite images, trying to extract clues from beneath the dirt to make ever evolving decisions about where to swing the next mattock.<\/p>\n

\u2018There\u2019s a very good chance it\u2019s still here \u2026 we could be standing on top of it,\u2019 says D\u2019Gluyas. Photograph: Sylvia Liber\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

This is the thrill of the chase, she says, of the gamble. But halfway through day two, the team decides that the odds are too heavily stacked against them.<\/p>\n

The story of the tin roof that was supposed to make this such a simple extraction seems to be just a story. Was that a invention of memory? Had it been a sheet of non-metallic roofing? Had someone else already dug it up?<\/p>\n

Without the roof, and with the tools at hand, the dig was feeling \u201ctoo much like playing Lotto,\u201d D\u2019Gluyas says.<\/p>\n

If the cache of papers is still there, she says, they needed ground-penetrating radar to find it, or machine excavation to remove swathes of topsoil.<\/p>\n

They would need another season.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a very good chance it\u2019s still here,\u201d the archaeologist says, as she walks around the dusty police yard, one last time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could be standing on top of it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Was it by the light of a full moon that Constable Edward Robb dug a hole in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":933258,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-933257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=933257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/933258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=933257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=933257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=933257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}