Century-old time capsules were discovered in a Sydney wall. But how did they get there?

Stonemasons were carefully chipping away at a five-metre-high sandstone wall at Parramatta’s old Female Factory when, ding, they hit something hard: a glass jar wedged between two blocks. The jar was rammed full of old newspaper clippings from 1900 and 1901. And now they were flying across the garden.

“Some of the papers just flew out and the wind took them all around that yard, and they had to frantically chase after them to collect them all for us,” recounted Rhian Jones, an archaeologist working at the site.

Jones and her colleague Jane Rooke, both of AMBS Ecology and Heritage, raced to see them.

“It was a very unusual call, and we did have to ask a couple of times, ‘A time capsule? Are you sure?’ because it’s not something we’d normally find inside such a large sandstone masonry wall.”

But the workers who had discovered the glass jar were right. An unknown someone had wedged two glass ink jars into two different gaps between sandstone walls.

The uncovering of the capsules is the latest in a long line of discoveries at the site and comes amid increasing debate about the state government’s plans to upzone much of the surrounding area for high-rise apartments.

Inside the jars were dozens of clippings of articles from The Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph and supplements of the now-defunct Queenslander, all published in 1900 and 1901.

The capsule that didn’t break open during excavation has been preserved in place, and the newspaper articles inside will not be opened. But the other, the contents of which have been laid out in an archival book, gives some clues about the purpose of the capsules.

There are articles “of a global interest”, said Rooke, who organised the collection. “You’ve got prime ministers and presidents and kings and dukes.”

But there is one thing that ties together most of the articles: “There seems to be a large interest in death and funerals.”

That gives a hint about how they ended up in the wall of the Parramatta Female Factory, which dates back to 1818, and the Parramatta Lunatic Asylum (later the Hospital for the Insane, and still today a mental health facility).

“An institutional site like this often has somewhat abnormal behaviours. If you are confined to a place where your identity is taken away, you have very few possessions, there are certain kinds of behaviours that people want to do,” Jones said. “You want to do mark-making and graffiti, you want to reclaim a space or your own identity. So we do see evidence of that, people scratching and scoring their names into the stones of this place.”

But if the walls were made before the 1900s, how did newspaper articles from that period end up inside them?

“In the 1880s, you start to see a big shift [in the treatment of mental health patients on the site]. So the patients were encouraged to do maintenance work: gardening, landscaping, farming,” she said. “And so perhaps they were repairing the walls and decided amongst themselves to put something like this in during the repair works.”

If the person who dropped the capsule in wasn’t a patient, the archaeologists suspect it could have been Dr William Cotter Williamson, the medical superintendent of the facility from 1900.

“He seems perhaps very well aware of his position, wanting to make his mark literally. So coming in, in 1900, obviously federation [of Australia, coinciding with] him starting – perhaps he’s wanting to mark the epoch of a new era for the hospital, and maybe even himself.”

The discovery was revealed by Parramatta MP Donna Davis, who said the slow conservation work was the only reason the capsules were preserved.

“There’s little treasures that have been uncovered along the way in all these buildings,” she said, highlighting the markings on the walls of people who had previously lived here. “The very fact that these artefacts have been found speaks to the level of conservation that is being conducted on this site, and how important it is to us as a government to ensure this site is protected.”

The state government is planning to rezone significant sections of land around the precinct, but Lands Minister Steve Kamper said the government would retain control of the cultural precinct where the capsules were found.

“Amazing discoveries like these time capsules show the worth in doing restoration properly and carefully – to preserve the items and buildings that have shaped this precinct’s storied past,” he said.

“Parramatta North includes around 30 significant heritage listed buildings, which we have earmarked for conservation and adaptive reuse.”

The Sydney Morning Herald has opened a bureau in the heart of Parramatta. Email parramatta@smh.com.au with news tips.