The piece is a granite and marble time capsule with the busts of four unidentified people on top. 

It is marked ‘To be opened in 2100’ and appears to have been made in or just prior to the year 2000.

Bizarrely, there is nowhere in the capsule that items could be placed in and closed off.

Langi Morgala Museum’s Jerry Bolt is uncertain as to how the item came to be in the donor’s possession. 

He believes it was obtained by an unnamed resident who purchased it at the Ararat Rural City Council depot on Flattely Street and kept it as a garden ornament. 

Years later his son found it while cleaning the house out, and contacted Mr Bolt.

The time capsule was so heavy a crane was needed to transport it. 

Mr Bolt said the item was bizarre, and that the design left museum volunteers baffled. 

“It’s is too poor to be believed,” he said.

“The granite pieces are two totally separate pieces of granite and as you can see, the plinth does not fit on the base. It's been almost cobbled together.

“We have these four holes drilled in the base but they wouldn't accommodate anything unless they went right through, and if you do it right through it's going to make the base very fragile.”

The four busts on top were also strange, each being made by different materials.

“The white one is almost certainly alabaster or marble. This is the other strange thing about it - they are all different materials,” he said.

Mr Bolt thought that the piece may have actually been intended to sit on top of the real time capsule, since there are no obvious places to keep items in it.  

“I'm thinking this may have sat on a square block and that that square block plinth was the actual time capsule,” he said. 

Mr Bolt also said that his own inquiries about the piece had failed to reveal the item’s origins. 

“One of the gentlemen I talked to at Flattely Street (depot) … has been there for 28 years of continuous service. He denied all knowledge, he said he’d never seen it before,” he said.

The volunteers have hidden the time capsule out of sight because they find it too ugly to have out in the open. 

Mr Bolt said there was only one reason the museum was keeping it.

“We don’t really want it as such; it’s a pretty terrible object. It’s just the sheer mystery of it,” he said. 

The museum is open Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10am to 3pm, and Saturday from 1pm to 4pm.