Arabic version: تنقيب في ماونت لاركوم يبحث عن سجلات شرطة مدفونة

According to The Guardian, archaeologists and Queensland police museum staff searched the grounds of the Mount Larcom police station for documents allegedly buried by the late Constable Edward Robb about 40 years ago. Robb was said to have defied an order to incinerate papers older than 10 years while he was the town’s sole police officer during the 1980s.

The search was prompted after a retired officer told the police museum last December that Robb had buried the material in the station yard. Katherine Figueiredo, the museum’s assistant curator and collections manager, said Robb’s widow and son confirmed the story and provided fragments of information that could help locate the cache.

The documents, if found, could concern police misconduct during the era of premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, German settlers who were required to register as “enemy aliens” during the world wars, or everyday events in the central Queensland railway town. The records could also potentially add to understanding of frontier violence, although the killings linked to the Mount Larcom area predated the police station’s founding in 1916.

Dr Caitlin D’Gluyas, a University of Queensland lecturer, led a five-person team that dug shallow trenches behind the timber station building. Metal-detector signals did not identify the corrugated iron that Figueiredo had been told was placed over the files. The team found objects including porcelain shards, a belt buckle, a shell brooch, a packet of atomic tomato Samboy chips and a crushed beer can, but not the reported documents.

After two days, the team concluded that ground-penetrating radar or machine excavation may be needed for a further search. D’Gluyas said there was “a very good chance” the cache remained in the yard and that the group could have been standing on top of it.