Archaeologist Sarah Myers had expected clerical items tied to the city’s telegraph office as part of exploring below the former town hall and lands office which now form the art gallery.

Instead she found there was a home attached to the station and a feeding bottle likely to have been used by a baby boy who died of an infection in 1875.

“It’s that juxtaposition, you’re looking at something exciting with technology developing, the telegraph the forerunner to the internet but at the same time they didn’t have the technical knowledge that meant their children died of something our children would never die of,” Ms Myers said.

In researching the feeding bottle, which came from English company May, Roberts and Co, Ms Myers learnt such containers became known as “murder bottles” because infants died due to bacteria being trapped in the tube used by the baby’s to suck up food. 

Other items on display include theatre ticket stubs, paper labels, clerical and sewing pins and a piece of Morse code type. 

The archaeological dig was a planning condition for the project to turn the former Albury Town Hall and neighbouring Burrows House into MAMA which opened in 2016.

Unearthed: What lay beneath QEII, a display of some of the 2000 relics found from March 2014 to September 2015, is at the Albury library until February.