When Amanda Light, 38, approached Goroke’s tarnished silver time capsule she only had the faintest recollection of what lay inside. Light was one of hundreds of people who gathered expectantly in Goroke Memorial Hall in March to uncover what their younger selves had buried for the future.
This wasn’t the first time the tiny farming town in western Victoria cracked open the old naval mine to steal a glimpse into the past. First opened in 1973, the huge time capsule was unsealed again in 2000, and most recently this year.
Light’s forgotten treasures included ribbons, postcards and Polaroids of her three teenage loves – two horses, Dude and Wantley Caprice, and her high school sweetheart Travis Colley. She found a wooden pencil box scrawled with TC in love hearts, and burned, for secrecy, on the inside.
She also uncovered an unexpected confession from another classmate, who harboured a secret crush.
“Dear Amanda,” wrote 13-year-old Michael Holt. “You are the most beautiful girl I’ve seen in a long, long time. I didn’t say anything because I know you like Travis (if you remember him when you read this letter) … I don’t know whether it is a crush or love, but anyway, I would like to see what I’m thinking of you in 25 years. (Hopefully we’re still alive.)”
Teenage love triangles are just some of the memories flooding back as time capsules from the Sunshine Coast to the Northern Rivers and Victoria are unsealed across Australia to mark 25 years since the millennium.
About 250 people returned for Goroke’s time capsule opening this year – more than the town’s population of about 200. For a down-to-earth community of wool and wheat farmers, the day brought a dose of drama and nostalgia. “We’ve always been a very close-knit community, but the time capsule really brought us back together,” Light says. Neither of her former flames attended – and she is now happily married to someone else – but Light contacted both men, who she still counts as friends, to laugh over the letters.
It took Geraldine Walter, who chaired the event, more than an hour to sift through the stacks of noughties paraphernalia. There were tributes to the Geelong Cats, football cards and yellowed newspapers, while some items carried more weight. A bottle of Red Bull was the favourite drink of a woman’s aunt, who had died from cancer. A teddy bear addressed to “my great grandchild” was fetched by a small boy who came with his dad and grandad.
The time capsule was sealed again one month later, giving Goroke’s current generation of schoolchildren a chance to cast their predictions for 2050.
Rather than flying cars or robot colonies their prophecies were eerily plausible. “Some kids talked about the environment and the planet getting hotter,” Walter says. “We’ve just had fires in one of the deserts around where we live, so it was very raw.”
When Don Culley penned a letter on 31 December 1999 for a time capsule in Maroochy, on the Sunshine Coast, his greatest wish was to preserve his home town’s natural beauty.
“The odds of my being present are fairly remote, but not impossible,” he wrote. “Twenty five years sounds like a long time, but it is merely a blink in time, but every second is important.”
The former mayor of Maroochy surpassed his own expectations and, at 95 years old, was nominated to open the town’s time capsule in January.
He hoped that the Sunshine Coast’s sprawling beaches would be “preserved and protected” and the ocean would have “plentiful mullet and bream”. Yet speaking in 2025, in the wake of Storm Alfred, Culley acknowledges the unpredictable climate. “The weather’s changed, there’s no doubt about that with the storms we’re copping here,” he says.
The faded newspapers inside Maroochy’s time capsule are eye-raising in the wake of rapid inflation. In 1999, a T-bone steak at a bowls club only set you back $3.95; while a four-bedroom beachfront home was a steal at $219,000.
Before streaming giants gave us decision fatigue, the top videos to rent were Notting Hill, Austin Powers and The Matrix. Before catchy TikTok hits, Tom Jones and the Cardigans’ Burning Down the House dominated the charts.
Instead of dating apps, singles sought love in the paper’s “Checkout Connections” section. One advert reads: “Female looking for a fun loving and caring male, aged between 20-35 to get a flat together and generally for good times. Must be at least attractive to good looking, honest and easy going.” Maybe some things never change.
Culley has written a letter for the next opening in 2050 – although “I’ll definitely not be there for that one”, he says, wryly. He is keeping the content a surprise for his 12 descendants – and counting. While his last letter’s worries about the Y2K bug never came to pass, the spectre of unchecked technology – specifically AI and billionaire space exploration – still haunts his next predictions.
Not all of Australia’s time capsules survived their 25-year sequestrations – some are still mysteries, their secrets lost, damaged or potentially stolen. From Canberra to Western Australia and Phillip Island, some are yet to be uncovered. One search in Yamba, New South Wales, was called off after an 11-month quest, when excavators admitted they had mistakenly thrown the two-foot-long metal capsule into a tip. In Tasmania’s Huon Valley, a time capsule dug up in 2020 was so water damaged the contents were unsalvageable.
Mark Gledhill, the principal of Yarloop primary school in WA, started hunting for his school’s millennium time capsule in 2020. Stowed with photos, visions of the future and a nice bottle of red wine, the capsule was buried safely under a large rock in the playground, with a plaque to mark its whereabouts.
But when it came to retrieving the capsule, it was nowhere to be seen. “We couldn’t find it. We were six feet down, the hole was getting bigger and bigger,” Gledhill says. They tried mechanical machinery – stumbling across an electrical cable – but no capsule. The hunt intensified. Metal detectors, the local water authority and a police officer returned to the school to join the investigation.
Eventually, Gledhill admitted defeat. “There are lots of different theories,” he says. “Someone might be out there reading the kids’ letters with a nice bottle of vintage wine.” He regrets the “missed learning opportunity” for the children – how the magic of time capsules is often in the minutiae of daily life.
Light, who is now a mother to two boys, aged eight and 10, deliberated over what to place in Goroke’s latest time capsule. Her sons aren’t wrapped up in girlfriends or messy love trysts – “as far as I know”, she says – so she settled on 75 photos that capture life at the family’s farm. Like Light, her children will be in their mid-to-late 30s when the capsule is unsealed for the fourth time. “Maybe they’ll have moved out, be married, or have kids of their own.”
It’s impossible to predict what 2050 will hold, but for Goroke’s residents it is likely to be another homecoming.
After the time capsule had been emptied of its secrets at this year’s event, people filtered into the heat of the afternoon. Walter couldn’t believe the number of faces, old and new, milling outside Goroke’s Memorial Hall. “Every seat was filled with people talking about the time capsule,” she says. “That connection is so important – stories are what bring people together.”
