Step inside the bank vaults beneath city streets

By Cara Waters

Bank vaults have been used to store cash and jewellery, but also guns.Credit: Illustration: Marija Ercegovac

Save articles for later

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.

When it was opened in 1891, the Melbourne Safe Deposit underneath the former Stock Exchange building in Melbourne was one of the most secure places in the world.

Constructed on bedrock, with 91-centimetre thick walls, the huge vault contains 3000 safe deposit boxes which were once believed to be filled with gold, guns, documents and jewellery, but are now empty.

Deborah Lasky-Davison, manager of the ANZ archive, inside the Melbourne Safe Deposit in the basement of 90 Queen Street. Credit: Justin McManus

The underground room is still there at 90 Queen Street in the CBD, largely untouched but now deserted, since ANZ closed the facility in 2017.

In the Underground Melbourne series, The Age is exploring what lies hidden underneath the city streets.

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.

ANZ attributes this move to changing customer behaviour, while NAB retail executive Krissie Jones says NAB is “simplifying the business to focus on core products and services.”

“Gone are the days where we kept troves of personal belongings for customers,” she says.

What lies beneath

Stepping through the wrought iron gates at 90 Queen Street and down the steep bluestone steps to ANZ’s Melbourne Safe Deposit is like going back in time.

The temperature drops instantly as you enter the manager’s office, next to the heavy front door, with stained-glass windows and intricately carved dark wooden panelling separating it from the main space.

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.

Raised from the floor, the strongroom was built of wrought-iron boilerplate, lined with undrillable steel and weighing almost 200 tonnes.

The entrances to each of the four sections in the strongroom were protected by grill gratings and heavy steel doors weighing 2 ½ tonnes each.

Deborah Lasky-Davison, archives manager at ANZ, which owns the Melbourne Safe Deposit and continued to operate it until six years ago, says staff then ushered the customers into the “Writing Room” with private lockers.

Lasky-Davison says the bank never knew what was in the boxes.

“It was very much a policy of ‘don’t ask’,” she says. “What people put in their boxes was very private, but I would imagine that they would have been probably things like guns, fur coats, deeds, wills and that kind of thing.”

Lasky-Davison says there is a rumour that a precious medieval mace, which was stolen from the Victorian parliament in 1891, ended up in the Melbourne Safe Deposit. But this has never been proved.

“It was never retrieved, so we don’t know whether it was or not,” she says. “But somebody came down with a large parcel apparently around the time of that being stolen. ”

Former staff recall one box contained a cutlery set which looked like it was made entirely out of gold. It was so heavy the box had a label advising people not to lift it by themselves.

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.

A pleasant experience

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 was a privacy and security measure, and it also kept people away from the safe, so that they weren’t bumping into other people and seeing other people’s keys.”

Dust covers the empty metal boxes which once stored valuables inside the Melbourne Safe Deposit. Credit: Justin McManus

Lasky-Davison says the Melbourne Safe Deposit was “the most beautiful” of all the vaults, with the ornate interiors reflecting Melbourne’s wealth at the time it was built.

“Everything was just designed to be as beautiful as it was functional,” she says. “This was for your premium clients, too, so I guess they wanted to have an environment that was pleasant.”

The Melbourne Safe Deposit was designed by William Pitt, and the vault was made in 1890 by Millers in Liverpool, shipped to Melbourne and installed in what was originally the English and Scotland Bank.

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.

”The stock exchange who owned the building in the first place thought [the Melbourne Safe Deposit] would be a great way of making money,” Lasky-Davison says. “But unfortunately, between commissioning the building and it being finished, the whole [gold rush] boom had crashed, and so they ended up regretting that they put so much money into it and apparently took 40 years to pay it off.

Lasky-Davison says there was never a break in attempt to the Melbourne Safe Deposit.

“At the time it was considered the most secure building in the Southern Hemisphere,” she says. “Even if you got into the building, you’d still have a safe-cracking job to do after that.”

In 2020, private operator Guardian Vaults bought ANZ’s safety deposit boxes, and the NAB’s vaults, which are underneath what was a NAB branch at 271 Collins Street.

Biometric facial scanners identify customers by bone structure to gain access to Guardian Vaults’ facilities. They must pass by security cameras, security guards and provide two forms of identification to gain access to the vaults, which operate using the two-key system.

Jewellery, passports and cash

The vaults, which sit on bedrock, are guarded by ballistic doors and have half-metre thick walls, while seismic sensors underneath would alert Guardian if anyone tried to drill into them.

The Collins Street vault contains 4500 safe deposit boxes and includes boxes especially designed for storage of gold and silver bullion.

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.

Chris Blematl, branch manager of Guardian Collins Street vault, says that like ANZ more than 100 years ago, Guardian Vaults doesn’t know what is contained in the boxes it stores.

“Our terms and conditions that they need to sign before they open up the box state that there’s no illicit drugs, firearms and things like that stored inside,” he says. “Of course, at the end of the day, we wouldn’t really know.”

Besides bullion, Blematl says items stored are likely to include passports, documents and jewellery.

”We have a big Indian and Asian community, and it’s part of their culture to lock away their valuables, whether it’s jewellery, precious stones and things like that that’s been passed down from generation to generation,” he says. “Come Diwali, which is an Indian festival towards the end of the year, it’s crazy, it’s so busy with customers coming through getting all their jewellery out, ready for their celebration.“

Guardian Vaults manager Chris Blematl carries a safety box into a vault.Credit: Chris Hopkins

Staff can access the boxes if police bring a court order or search warrant. Then a locksmith is called to crack open the relevant box.

“A lot of the times the police have raided the client’s house and found the keys, so the investigation’s already under way,” Blematl says. “There’s been a few instances where there’s a lot of cash, sometimes drugs, everything found inside the box. One time, over a $1 million worth of money was stored inside.”

Guardian’s vault also contains hundreds of boxes of items which belonged to NAB customers, which have not been claimed.

The bank has been contacting people for several years inviting them to collect their property.

Blematl says while the major banks are out of the vaults business, there’s still demand for Guardian’s services.

“A lot of people think it’s just in the movies,” Blematl says. “It’s real life and it’s definitely still a service that customers are wanting.”

NEXT: Take a tour of the city’s secret tunnels

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.

Most Viewed in Politics

Source: Read Full Article