Letters buried for nearly 20 years at a local high school have recently seen the light of day and been returned to their owners.
Grant High School groundskeeper Neil Tobin found eight letters in two plastic bottles while trying to source the origin of a water leak on the school grounds.
The authors wrote the letters in Mr Dickson’s Year 10 class in 2005 with the intention to dig them up on the last day of school which never came to fruition.
The owners were found through the power of social media with a post on the school’s Facebook page garnering the attention of the local identities who are now in their 30s.
Mr Tobin said the letters’ owners were very excited and surprised to receive them and to uncover what they had written at the time.
“It was a lot to do with what bands were around at the time, some romances going on at the time, just general stuff they have written basically to themselves,” he said.
“These have all been claimed bar one letter by the ex-students who now they remember and recall doing that activity, were quite surprised that we’d found them.
“It gave them a buzz to know that we’d found them as well.
“It would be a shock to get a letter like that back really.
“A lot of time capsules they’re obviously dated and marked when they’re underground but these were not, they were just randomly thrown under there.”
Mr Tobin said while he did not find what he was originally looking for he uncovered something more valuable.
“I think after 18 years there was possibly some more dirt brought in to do some sheds and things like that so they were quite a way under the ground which they possibly were not back then when they buried them, they might have been a shovel depth but these were definitely half a metre,” he said.
“They were very damp and whether they would deteriorate in the next 18 years I do not know or possibly found in a 100 years’ time and the school might not even be here.”
Mr Tobin said there were likely other bottles hidden in the same area, but they will not be dug up now or possibly ever.
“We are not going to just dig holes at random to find the other class bottles,” he said.
“It was pure chance we found these two in quite a deep trench so we’re not going to dig up the whole of our agriculture area looking for the bottles.
“Maybe we’ll dig those bottles up by chance or somebody else might in 50 years’ time looking for another water leak and then we will be looking for much older people.”
Mr Tobin said why the bottles were not dug up on the last day of school all those years ago remains a mystery as does the identity of the last letter’s author.
“Why they forgot about them I’m not sure, whether time just got away or they just did not have the chance to dig them back up,” he said.
“The last letter is a little bit unknown and the other students that claimed theirs did not really know who that belonged to.
“It does mention a few names and who loved who at the time but no one has come forward yet.”
Matt Bailey was one of the few to have penned a letter to his future self in which he wrote about his musical ambitions after seeing Green Day perform live for the first time and his inaugural trip to America.
“Now having had received the letters it was to your future self and I’m very proud of mine because I have accomplished the things I wanted to do and more,” he said.
“I am just so proud that I did the things that 15-year-old kid wanted.
“I was 15, I’d just been to America for the first time and … now I have just been to America for the tenth time.
“One thing the letter said was the date I actually started playing guitar which was like the 27th of July 2005.
“For me seeing Green Day was like ‘I want to be a musician’ and that’s when I started playing guitar after that concert.
“Here we are in 2023 and I have just released an EP, I have just released two music videos; both of them were actually filmed in America as well.”
