Geelong Keys

Lore & Background

The Geelong Keys were a set of five keys discovered in 1847 at Limeburners Point, on the southern shore of Corio Bay, near Geelong, Victoria, Australia. A worker showed two of a set of five keys to Charles La Trobe, Superintendent of the Port Phillip District and a keen amateur geologist, claiming to have found them the day before in a layer of shells 15 feet (4.6 m) down an excavation for a lime kiln, which was about 40 feet (12 m) from the shoreline. La Trobe was fascinated by the find and believed, from their appearance, that the keys were between 100 and 150 years old (~1700-1750 AD).

Reader's Guide

The Geelong Keys are significant primarily for the controversy they have generated regarding early European exploration of Australia. Since the 1802 expedition of Matthew Flinders is the earliest proven European presence in the vicinity, writer Kenneth McIntyre has suggested the keys may have originated with some earlier European explorers of the region, possibly the Portuguese. McIntyre has connected the discovery of the Geelong Keys with the presence of the so-called Mahogany Ship, further west on Victoria's Shipwreck Coast, claiming that it could be another possible relic of early Portuguese exploration. However, contemporary and later investigations cast doubt on the keys' antiquity. The editor of the Geelong Advertiser at the time, James Harrison, noted that metal objects were often embedded in new diggings to detect the leaching of payable metal. Ronald Gunn, a friend of La Trobe, told the Royal Society of Victoria in September 1849 that on questioning the limeburner he found that the keys had not, in fact, been dug out of the shell layer but were found with shells at the bottom of the pit, and could have fallen from any layer. Research in the 1980s by geologist Edmund Gill and engineer and historian Peter Alsop showed the age of the deposit in which the keys were supposedly found was between 2330 and 2800 years. The keys themselves, and all original drawings of them, have been lost. The keys are referred to in the children's books The Voyage of the Poppykettle and The Unchosen Land by Robert Ingpen, in which the keys are used as ballast in a clay-pot ship sailed by migrant Peruvian gnomes.

Did You Know?

• The keys were discovered in 1847 at Limeburners Point, near Geelong, Victoria, Australia.
• Charles La Trobe believed the keys were between 100 and 150 years old, but the age of the shell deposit remains disputed with no widely accepted scientific dating.
• The keys and all original drawings of them have been lost.