There is a man named Mal Harrison who has worked under Melbourne for almost twenty years. That’s not a figure of speech. Walking through a maze of tunnels that most people walking above don’t know exists is like being under the city, among the trams, coffee shops, and morning commuters. He has a hardhat on. He has high-visibility clothes on. He also says that something surprises him most days.
That should tell you something about what’s down there. More than 1,500 kilometers of tunnels run under the central business district (CBD) and the suburbs that surround it. The storm drainage and utility tunnel systems are said to be some of the most complex in the world. More than 2,300 kilometers of cable run through it by CitiPower, the city’s main power company. Many of those cables run through tunnels that were built for very different reasons in the first place. They were built as transportation routes, mail corridors, and other infrastructure that was buried and forgotten when the city was leveled and rebuilt along the Hoddle Grid in the 1850s and 1860s.
For example, there is a tunnel under Southern Cross Station that used to connect the station to the old Mail Exchange. Now it has a row of thick black cables running along its walls. Fluorescent strips light it up, and the only sound you can hear is the faint rumble of trams above. It gives you a strange sense of time when you stand inside it.
That feeling almost got too strong because of the Metro Tunnel project. For the largest archaeological dig in Victoria’s history, workers had to dig out more than 600,000 cubic meters of ground to make room for the new rail line. What showed up was really strange. Near Swanston Street, Aboriginal stone tools that are thought to be thousands of years old were found. These tools were probably spear tips or carving tools.
A pretty earring was found. It was likely dropped through the floorboards of a long-gone hotel by someone who never got it back. The teeth were traced back to a dentist named J.J. Forster, who had been throwing outgrown molars down a drain since 1898. There were about a thousand of them. They had been in an old iron pipe for more than one hundred years. Most had deep holes in them. It’s likely that their previous owners were not having a good time.
It’s simple to think of this as interesting background information. But there’s something more uncomfortable going on underneath: the knowledge that a city can live on top of its own history for generations without being aware of it.
Because of that pain, Bella Argyrou, who just graduated from the University of Melbourne with a degree in architecture, spent months researching the tunnels for her thesis. Her entry point happened by accident. They found an unknown tunnel while digging a basement. It hadn’t been marked by anyone. It hadn’t been mapped out by anyone. It was just there. “I was kind of shocked,” she replied, “because how did we not know that was already there?” When someone asks it, the answer seems clear.
Secret societies were said to meet below Parliament, and she found proof of this in sealed documents she had to look at while under surveillance. The documents showed a web of old sewers, buried creek beds, and passages. It’s hard to say for sure if those rumors are based on much truth. They are there, though, which says something about how the city has long thought about its depths.
City explorers have been interested in that mystery for many years. The Cave Clan was started by three teens in Melbourne in 1986. They made a whole subculture out of crawling through the storm drains in the city. They like to hang out in the ANZAC drain, which has walls covered in graffiti and a damp room they’ve been using since 1987. When it rains, there are no drains. This is the group’s main rule. The real danger down there is flash flooding. On a clear afternoon, the tunnels that look fine can get crowded very quickly.
For his part, Mal Harrison doesn’t seem to care about most of it. He once discovered an old runway under a road in Port Melbourne. It turned out to be from World War II and was used to roll planes from Fishermans Bend to the north to New Guinea. “There are all kinds of urban legends about how many tunnels there are in Melbourne,” he said. “I guess only time will tell.” Another time, his crew found a buried cable car system on Lonsdale Street, complete with a gear room. They then closed it up and left.
That seems about right. The city keeps getting bigger. The tunnels’ stories keep coming out. Every once in a while, a shovel hits something that wasn’t on the map.
