Archaeology dig at Frederick Street | The Examiner | December 5, 2025 - video Dailymotion

The Examiner

A team of amateur archaeologists descended on the former infant school at Frederick Street in Launceston. Video and voiceover by Joe Colbrook

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00:00Many Launceston residents might remember digging in the dirt at the former Frederick Street

00:05infant school. However, this isn't playtime.

00:10We're doing an archaeological dig here. We're going to be doing some building of a Jenny Gill

00:15archive here in this location and so before we do the dig we want to make sure that we

00:21capture all of the history of the site. It is a state heritage listed property and so

00:26we need to do the archaeology to find out what we can about the history of the place before we

00:31build the building over the top of it because once we do that it's not going to be able to be

00:35accessed for a considerable period of time. We've got a little bit of clay down the bottom which is

00:42the original sort of alluvial soil from the this area would have been a flood plain early on so

00:50from the early clay then we come into a sort of really mixed layer of topsoil. It's dried out now

00:57but when it was wet it was quite a damp and dark soil and then they've put this really orange layer

01:06of gravel across the whole surface at some point in time in the playground and then on top of that's

01:13a really thin layer of pine bark so they put some gravel and then pine bark for the playground and then

01:19over time the soil has just built up with leaf litter and a bit of a bit of pine bark still in the top

01:27section so and and all the tree roots that are coming into this above the gravel layer so we can

01:32see we've had to go through a whole range and we've got a few bricks here so there's some bricks in the

01:39area so that there's been some buildings here and they're just tumbled and fallen and that's what we've

01:46got in terms of the remains of it so it's really good we can see a really good stratigraphy of what's

01:51been going on here since it was originally a flood plain. We've got a number of interested and

01:58enthusiastic young budding archaeologists here we've got some 10 students from La Trobe University

02:05on Wednesday we had 12 students from year nine at St Pat's they come every year so that's really nice

02:12to have them back last year we had four university students and it's it's now 10 this year so it's

02:19been an increase and it's it's great for them to get some good experience. The dig took the better part

02:25of a week late November and having sifted through countless pails of dirt the volunteers found quite a

02:33few artifacts and items of historical relevance. What we're finding here is there is a really deep

02:42layer of material that's accumulated over the years we've got a really rich history of the school yard

02:52a lot of things coming out of the school yard we've got lots of marbles so you can imagine the kids

02:57playing marbles and they lose their marbles in the mud or the dirt we're finding them now 150 years later

03:03from when and even more modern there might be people seeing this that oh that's my marbles i've

03:09lost them because every second person i talk to around La Cisne says oh i went here or my dad went

03:15here or my mum went here and so does that mean they'll be able to come and claim their lost property?

03:19I don't think so but if if they can identify them that'll be terrific and we found a lot of modern

03:25toys as well so little plastic toys we've got a dinosaur and a bear and dolls we've um we've been

03:31finding a lot of artifacts we've got a lot of stuff that's associated with the with the old

03:36kindergarten and school which um you know sort of like toys and things like that but we're also

03:40finding a lot of coins we had an 1843 um four-pence coin um came up the other day in one of the trenches

03:48over here um we've got some clay pipes we've got some buttons um some later coins and this is some

03:55chinese hand-painted porcelain which is usually around about pre-1840 um the building was built

04:01in 1836 so we think that you know we've got some pretty early stuff from that period as well so it's

04:07nice to get all that different um layering within the side of of what what was here and and the things

04:14that were were found were dropped we will uh we will take these away we're cataloguing inside we'll

04:20catalog the artifacts they'll tell us a bit of a story about the site hopefully a little bit of a

04:24story about the people that lived here um we will also be writing a report which will go to heritage

04:29tasmania which is part of the process um the artifacts themselves will stay on site as part of a

04:35display um and we're hoping that you know this is such a unique experience we've got a nice storage

04:41place here it's one of the the only ones that we've got in tasmania that's privately owned

04:46and we'll be able to store some of the artifacts the more important things that we find throughout

04:50tasmania here in in special conditions for for them yeah

Archaeology dig at Frederick Street | The Examiner | December 5, 2025

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