Queen Elizabeth II in November 1986 wrote a letter to the people of Sydney but millions of current residents of Sydney may not be able to read the letter.
The letter is stored in a time capsule and is kept in a secret vault inside the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney’s Central Business District. The letter sits inside a glass case in the restricted dome area at the top of the building.
It was written to celebrate restoration of the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney which was built in 1898 to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria.
Queen Victoria was Queen Elizabeth-II’s great-great grandmother.
The letter written in 1986 is addressed to the Lord Mayor of Sydney. The letter bears the instructions: “On a suitable day to be selected by you in the year 2085 AD, would you please open this envelope and convey to the citizens of Sydney my message to them.”
It is signed: “Elizabeth.”
The contents of the letter remain unknown, even to her personal staff.
As mentioned in the letter, the envelope cannot be opened until 2085. This means that people born in the 2000s will be 85 and those born in 2022 – the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s passing – will be 63 by the time the letter will be opened.
The Queen Victoria Building was nearly demolished in the 1950s to open up space for car parks and other infrastructure but a bid was made to restore the historic building which was successful. The restoration work was completed in 1986 following which the mysterious letter was written.
The Queen Victoria Building was opened in 1898 and was named in the honour of then-reigning Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. A Malaysian company restored the building in 1984 and still holds its 99-year lease. They based their remodeling on the images they found of the QVB at the time of its opening.
However, these are not the only letters of the queen which remain a secret in Australia. A correspondence between the British monarch, who is also Australia’s constitutional head of state, and Governor-General Sir John Kerr remains secret after an Australian court called the interaction ‘personal’.
There were demands that the contents of those letters be made public since in 1975 former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam’s government was dissolved, resolving a month-old deadlock in Parliament and it is said that the queen knew of Kerr’s plan to dismiss Whitlam’s government.
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