Part 1: How coins were discovered on Toowoomba Bypass site
THE coins, partly rusted with age, glittered in the morning sunlight.
It was about 8am on October 20, 2016, and a machine working near what is now the southbound lane of the Brett Forte Bridge scraped off a layer of dark red topsoil and punctured an old tin to reveal several hundred silver coins littering the dirt.
The finder, an employee of Nexus, the consortium tasked with building the $1.6 billion Toowoomba Bypass, alerted his supervisor via UHF radio.
The supervisor immediately made his way to the find and, according to the account later given to Nexus, collected the visible coins and instructed work to continue.
It was another nine-and-ahalf months before the find was reported to Nexus management.
On August 4, 2017, the worker who first discovered the coins finished working for Nexus.
Before leaving, he reported to the company he found a stash of coins the previous year and handed over 14 silver florins he said he’d found over the intervening nine-and-a-half months.
According to an archaeological report commissioned by Nexus Infrastructure, the worker stated to Nexus the 14 coins were “uncovered after rainfall events within the same vicinity” as the original find.
“The coins appear to have been extensively cleaned when compared to other collected coins from the same findspot,” the report noted.
It took another three days for the company to obtain more information about the find from the supervisor, as he was off sick.
On August 8, the supervisor, who gathered the coins and stored them in a plastic bag in his garage, handed over 449 florins to Nexus management.
The coin discovery was a stroke of luck.
“Remarkably, the grader or scraper must have scraped the topsoil off the coin hoard and left them largely in situ,” the report said.
“This was the state in which the employee first found them and recorded the find on his mobile phone. The tin was badly rusted and fragmented and no distinct features could be recorded.
“However, it fits approximately into a biscuit tin; Arnott’s biscuits pre-World War II were sold in round tins of approximately this size.
“Unfortunately, the finder did not collect any fragments that might have allowed a forensic identification.
“Further, it is Nexus’ understanding the supervisor who was informed of the find at the time of its discovery did not consider the coins to hold any historical significance as they dated from the early 1900s.”
The only records Nexus recovered of the original site are two photos taken on the worker’s mobile phone.
A third was blurry.
But they were key, as the GPS coordinates and timestamp on the photo provided precise information as to where and when they were found.
Once Nexus realised an employee stumbled across a historically significant hoard of coins on the Toowoomba Bypass site and did not tell anyone about it for nine-and-ahalf months, Nexus management went into overdrive.
“Nexus Delivery moved rapidly to enforce appropriate corrective actions to ensure that if anything similar occurred, Nexus management would be immediately informed,” the report said.
It was this action from management that was largely responsible for the reporting of the second, much larger hoard of coins.
A month later, on September 1, a single 1931 florin was discovered by site personnel in Cut 29 – the future site of the Toowoomba Bypass, just west of where the John French VC and Brett Forte bridges are now.
Work in the area was suspended and the site was closed off, and it quickly emerged the soil used to create a temporary ramp within the Cut 29 area had come from the topsoil of the original find.
Incredibly, a tractor-scraper, which is capable of holding 28 tonnes in a single load, “had picked up the soil containing the entire second hoard in one scoop and carted it intact to Cut 29, where it was dumped, graded and rolled” without anyone realising.
On the advice of Turnstone Archaeology, a recovery team began using a metal detector to recover coins.
At first coins were collected on a “relatively random basis” over an area of approximately 1150 sqm, as no one had any idea of the quantity or significance of the find.
But as the pings from the metal detector increased, Turnstone Archaeology recommended putting in place a grid layout with flagging tape and spray paint for areas where the detector recorded the largest density of coins.
Separating the find from the compacted soil, clay, and mud was painstaking work, and coins were found up to 50cm below the surface.
It took four environmental officers and an excavator driver 679 man hours between September 5 and October 30 to recover 5214 coins.
News of the treasure find had obviously spread through the work site and into the broader community, because on October 6, the recovery team noticed the edges of the excavation had been disturbed by hand.
The assumption was that someone had trespassed during the four preceding wet days, but whoever they were had no metal detector and no machinery, and they probably didn’t have much luck, given the compacted nature of the soil that required an excavator to shift.
Nexus installed a security camera to guard over the site, to little effect.
It was promptly stolen by the trespassers and the ground was disturbed.
“Again, it is unknown if coins were stolen but the number is likely to have been small given the compacted nature of the ground,” the report said.
By December 2017, Nexus was in possession of a total of 5676 coins of both British and Australian currency, minted between 1882 and 1940.
It was probably, the archaeological report noted, “the largest coin hoard of modern British and Commonwealth coins (excluding antique bullion recovered from shipwrecks in Western Australia or Chinese cash hoards from the Palmer goldfields) reported in Australia”.
While the condition of many of the coins was poor, and a number had been damaged by the compaction earthworks, “it still represented an extremely valuable and culturally significant find that has major heritage significance for Queensland and Toowoomba”.
“The recovery of the TSRC coin hoard should be regarded as one of the greatest cultural heritage discoveries of recent Queensland history,” the report said.
In 2018, a former Nexus employee was fined $1828 for failing to report the find, as they were required to do under the Queensland Heritage Act.