The following story comes from a series of pieces that bring to life a conversation with two long-standing members of staff at La Trobe University. Michael Torney is Director of Student Services at La Trobe University and has been in the employment of the University since July 1973. Kevin Coates is Deputy Director of Student Services at La Trobe University and has been in the employment of the University since March 1972, when he started (with hair) as a ‘Junior Male Clerk’. Their combined years of service spans over 80 years – they have a wealth of good stories to share, should you ask, and you will never be short of a laugh in their company. This story first appeared on La News, and was written during my time as an intern.

Beneath car park five of La Trobe University’s Melbourne campus is a secret – the University underground is host to a covert operations facility, harbouring Australia’s largest nuclear weapons cache.

But the real secret is no secret at all – not a word of the previous sentence is true, I made it up.

If you refer to the campus map, there is actually no car park five on the Melbourne campus. There is a one, two, three, four, even a six, eight and nine – but no car park five (or seven for that matter).

However, there is no skulduggery afoot. In fact, I doubt many have even noticed that they’re missing.

“Why is there no car park five?” Michael Torney and Kevin Coates chuckle.

The pair begin to count and point in the direction of the car parks that surround them, noticing that my claim is true – the car park is missing.

“Perhaps, I think, ah…the only way to describe that is that’d be I suspect, that initially, they might have expected one on the master plan or something like that,” Mr Coates says.

“And, it never got built and we never paid for it.”

“The children’s centre is now in that space,” Mr Torney says.

“I’d say they’d have a master plan that said , ‘These are all the carparks to be in place and we’ll build this carpark now, and now we’ll build carpark 6 because that’s where Glenn College was, and then we’ll build carpark 8 because the library was there.”

“I think, I suspect it was probably just, once again, there was no, nothing skulduggery. There was no underground nuclear plant or anything,” Mr Coats adds.