A glint of silver, hidden in the soil of a front yard in regional Tasmania, has turned out to be the long-buried heirloom of a wartime romance.
Adrian Dawson was sweeping the front yard of his George Town home with a metal detector last week when he chanced upon the object: a silver bracelet inscribed with words of love from an army recruit to his wife during World War II.
"I spotted a silver thing in the ground," he said.
"I put it together, it was in two pieces, so it wasn't until I cleaned the bracelet up that I realised there were words on it.
"The words had some meaning to the place where we lived, or the people who lived here before us."
The bracelet, composed of eight silver hearts each inscribed with a single word, connected in the middle by the shape of mainland Australia, reads:
To my dearest wife MAVIS, from your loving husband CHARLIE.
Mr Dawson immediately recognised the names.
A chance connection
By chance, he had worked with Chris Geale, son of Mavis and Charlie Geale, in the mining industry in the 1990s.
Chris and his siblings sold the Geale family home to Mr Dawson in 2010.
So when the metal detector hobbyist discovered the relic, he knew who to call.
Chris Geale said hearing of the unexpected find was an emotional experience.
"It was a bit emotional, they've been gone for a while now … they've passed on now, so mixed feelings, coming up after all that time.
"Something like what, 84 years, 85 years late, the bracelet resurfaces?
"Obviously, he thought a lot of her to send her the bracelet."
Love in wartime
Mavis Geale was born in Hobart.
At the age of just 16, Mavis boarded a boat with a friend on her way to mainland Australia, in search of work during the Great Depression, Chris Geale said.
He said she returned to Tasmania two years later, on the steam turbine ship SS Taroona, landing at Beauty Point on the island's north coast.
"From there, she went to George Town and met Dad, so that's where the romance must have happened," Mr Geale said.
By the time they met, World War II had broken out with Charlie soon signing up for military service.
Not long after, he was sent to a posting in Queensland.
Chris Geale believes his father must have had the silver bracelet made and engraved there, before gifting it to his sweetheart in Tasmania.
A gardening mishap?
Chris Geale said he has no memory of the bracelet from his childhood.
"It's strange because Mum and Dad never, ever mentioned it, maybe because Mum had lost it and she didn't want to bring up that she'd lost the bracelet," he said.
"Obviously she didn't want to bring back the memory of losing it."
The only evidence of how the bracelet came to be buried in the front yard of the George Town house comes from a relative of Mr Geale's, who now resides in a nearby aged care facility.
She declined to comment for this story, but referred to comments she left on a social media post about the discovery last week.
In it, she said recalled what Mavis Geale told her when she was a teenager; that the bracelet had slipped off a wrist while she was gardening.
"She was broken-hearted and talked [about] it when I visited her … your heart breaks now, so sad, but to find it is just remarkable."
