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

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