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1828: The Tunnel Under Sydney: Australia’s First Great Bank Robbery

On the night of 14 September 1828, thieves broke into the Bank of Australia in Sydney. A teller arriving the next morning found the strongroom breached.

Thieves had tunnelled through a drain on the opposite side of the street, burrowed underground, and cut through a foundation wall between five and nine feet thick, work that would have taken at least three to four weeks to complete. They made off with 12,000 to 14,000 pounds in cash and property, a sum worth a small fortune today.

For two and a half years the robbers evaded capture, even as some of the stolen notes began surfacing in circulation and officials issued repeated warnings against using them. The case only broke when one of the gang was sentenced to 14 years on Norfolk Island for an unrelated highway robbery in 1829. Nearly a year into that sentence, he accepted the Governor’s offer of a pardon and confessed, naming his accomplices: one of whom had fled to Ireland, another who had since died, and three more who joined him on Norfolk Island.

Not all the stolen money was recovered. Rumour has long held that boxes of coins from the robbery remain buried near the water’s edge on Sydney’s North Shore.

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