Australia Day 2025 had extra significance in Hobsons Bay as it marked the 25th anniversary and opening of the Millenium Time Capsule.
On January 26, 2000, more than 12,000 messages from local students, residents and organisations were placed in plastic capsules and lowered into a 12 tonne concrete vault beneath the summit of Truganina Park.
And there, under the watchful gaze of the Time Beacon guardian statue, the time capsule stayed for the next two and a half decades until being recently exhumed ahead of its silver jubilee.
On Sunday, a quarter of a century on, the time capsule was finally opened in the form of 41 mini-capsules, each belonging to a Hobsons Bay school and containing messages from their students, put on display at Central Square shopping centre in Altona Meadows.
“There are over 12000 messages from Hobsons Bay schools,” said Bryan Goodwin from the Altona Rotary Club who organised the display.
He said the re-opening of the time capsule meant those who wrote those messages as students could now get them back as adults.
“They were inaugurated on Australia Day 2000 and we’re displaying them 25 years later today and giving some of the people who put messages in, giving them back their envelopes,” he said, adding that after getting their envelope back, people could then choose to donate their messages to the Altona Rotary Club for a curated time capsule display.
Mr Goodwin said more than 100 people had stopped by to retrieve their envelopes on Australia Day.
One of the people handing them back was the man whose idea it was to create a millennium time capsule in the first place, Geoff Burnnard.
Mr Burrnard said the purpose behind the time capsule was to unite the community.
“To give everybody an opportunity to express what they’d like to see in the future,” he said of the project which originally began in 1998 and was partly inspired by the forced council amalgamations of the mid-1990s.
“The millennium was coming and we’d already amalgamated a few years before so it was to unite everybody into the one municipality.”
Asked whether it succeeded in that aim, Mr Burnnard was succinct.
“I think so yes.”
Those who wrote messages and want to collect them are urged to contact their former schools.
For more information visit: www.altonacityrotary.com.au/timecapsule
Cade Lucas
