General News
1 July, 2025
Local police urge item collection
Maryborough Police is advising locals their lost items may be waiting for them at the Maryborough Police Station, and will need to be collected before they are destroyed.
Maryborough Police Officer David Scott said the back log of missing items at the station needs to be cleared out.
He said depending on what items are handed to police, various objects are disposed of differently.
“If it’s a mobile phone, it gets destroyed because they're items that have people’s personal information on them, so they can’t be given back to the finder,” Mr Scott said.
“If it was a watch or jewelry, the person who found it can keep it if they sign a notice of abandonment to say that they actually want to claim it.
“Cash gets banked, and then it’ll go back to the finder if we can’t find the owner. It gets bank transferred back to the finder at a later date.
“We also get a lot of glasses and keys handed in if they’re not identifiable. We treat glasses and keys as non-valuable items so they just go in a box at the front counter for people to come in and have a look through. We do have a significant amount of keys.”
While Victoria Police generally hold lost property items for three months, Maryborough Police is now only supposed to hold them for a month before they are disposed of.
“We used to hold them for three months, but now they shorten the process because we just hold on to so much lost property. They’ve just tried to clear our backlog of stuff,” he said.
“Sometimes that works in the favour of somebody that’s lost something, as it might take people a couple of months to actually come up to us and ask if we’ve got it.
“One month gives us a very short period of time, but that’s the only amount of time where we have to hold on to lost property.”
Mr Scott said without locals retrieving items they have lost, arbitrary possessions start to accumulate.
“At any given time we do have a significant amount of items, but that’s because we just don’t have the resources to deal with it as quick as possible,” he said.
“I’d like to get it off our books straight away so things get returned to their rightful owners, and then we don’t have to worry about it.”
Mr Scott is urging locals who have lost any personal items at any location throughout town to consider contacting Maryborough Police.
“They can speak to any member here and have a quick look and see if we’ve got their property here, we’ve all got access to the computer system that shows lost items.”