Wealthy Melburnians have stored gold bullion, guns and cash at the Melbourne Safe Deposit deep below the CBD for more than a century. As part of our Underground Melbourne series, we discover other subterranean places to keep your valuables.
Many of Melbourne’s major banks once used underground vaults as a secure place to store customers’ valuables and money, but the banks have since sold them to private operators.
Two keys were once required to open one of the safety deposit boxes: the customers, who rented the boxes, brought one key, while another was retained by bank staff who accompanied them to the strongroom. Another customer showed staff an enormous gold nugget from the Ballarat goldfields, which was bigger than a grapefruit, and said it was his retirement fund.Customers took their boxes into the private lockers to open them, with the small wooden booths with stained-glass windows resembling church confessional boxes.
It took almost ten years to build the Melbourne Safe Deposit, with a team from England supervising the installation of the safes and a time-delay lock which was “very sophisticated for the time” and meant even staff could not access the building after hours or on weekends. Traditional safety deposit boxes can only hold 20 to 40 kilograms before the bracket snaps, while the larger boxes can hold up to 300 kilograms of bullion.
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