Police have gone to the site of a former orphanage in Ballarat to investigate whether scores of children could be buried in the grounds.
Detectives returned to the site in Victoria Street in Ballarat on Wednesday to look for evidence of unmarked graves.
There have been rumours as many as 25 children went missing from the orphanage over the years before it closed in 1968.
The site was bought by a developer in 2013, bringing the issue into the spotlight.
Ballarat Courier reporter Matt Dixon said former orphanage residents had recollected “they may wake up and one of the kids would be gone, and there was no discussion of where they had gone to”.
“It’s been discussed that 25 children had pretty much disappeared over the course of a few years and no one was sure where they went,” Dixon told Fairfax Radio on Wednesday.
Detectives are also working with the coroner’s court, the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine and the government.
On Wednesday, Ballarat police Superintendent Andrew Allen said Victorian police were first notified there might be human remains on the orphanage site in 2013, after the matter was brought up by former orphanage residents at a Ballarat council meeting.
“Since that time, on behalf of the coroner, we’ve made investigations and now are excavating the site to prove or disprove whether that may be the case,” he said.
“There was some previous testing down at the site that led us to commencing the excavation in the past couple of days. I can’t elaborate on what was actually found, I don’t know to be frank.
“There was an indication that took us back to the coroner and as a consequence of that, we are now excavating the site.”
Allen said it was unclear how long the excavation would take.
