Updated ,first published
The baby was buried in an unmarked grave with no name, no loved ones and authorities unable to even determine its gender.
But Wesley Hines has given the tiny child the tentative name Rose.
It’s a small dignity Hines has afforded the baby after helping to recover the body from a Ballarat dam 34 years ago.
Back then, the 18-year-old was riding his dirt bike down the Ring Road in western Ballarat, when two young boys breathlessly flagged him down to tell them they’d found a baby in the water.
The young defence office worker followed the boys from the roadside, across a grassy field to a dam where they pointed to a black rubbish bag.
Hines grabbed one of their fishing rods and dragged the object to shore.
“It looked like a doll’s arm in the water … it looked plastic,” he recalls.
Then the bag tore, and all three knew this was no toy.
“We all looked at it and gasped … It was pretty macabre,” Hines said.
The teen then took charge, jumping back on his bike and riding to a nearby milk bar where he asked staff to call police.
Search and rescue squads scoured the dam and surrounds, also appealing to the mother of the baby to come forward and door knocking 900 houses in the area – all to no avail.
On July 28, 1992, two days after the discovery, the then head of Victoria’s homicide squad lamented that police had not received a single call from the public about the case.
In the months that followed, a police investigation, forensic testing and a coronial inquest couldn’t shed any light on what had happened to the child.
By the time Hines and the boys made the gruesome discovery, the body was so decomposed even the child’s gender couldn’t be determined.
The baby was buried in Springvale cemetery a few months later, remaining there until May this year, when the Coroner’s Court of Victoria granted a police request to exhume the body.
“Following a review of the coronial case, detectives hope advancements in technology will assist in identifying the infant,” police said on Friday.
“A forensic examination is under way.”
For Hines, the news comes with mixed emotions.
He has an understandably complicated relationship with that day in Ballarat.
While he has spoken of it many times, it took time for the gravity of the situation to sink in. He never again saw the two boys who flagged him down.
“I wonder what they’re up to, whether they’re still in the area and how it affected them. It would have been worse for them for sure,” Hines said.
“As an 18-year-old, I was full of testosterone, and it didn’t really affect me to start with. But obviously, it stayed on my mind a little bit.”
Hines, now 53, still lives in Ballarat, and works driving road trains.
That day at the dam continues to crop up unexpectedly in his life – like when his youngest son asked him about it only a week ago, or an old friend from the time sends him a text message.
“I’m just feeling weird, you know?” he said, on finding out police had exhumed the body on Friday.
“I literally drove past [the dam] every day to and from work for a few years. I mean, it’s good that [police] are potentially going to find out who she was.”
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