At 10.58 am on Tuesday, September 28, church and school bells rang around the town, marking the 52nd anniversary of the event which gave Murchison a historic place in time and space.
Murchison and District Historical Society’s youngest member, 15-year-old Denni Bathman, finds a sense of wonderment learning about the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite believed to have originated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
“It dates back millions of years and formed before the solar system - it’s hard to wrap your head around,” she said.
“How lucky am I to live in Murchison and to learn about this?”
Anyone who lived in the area at the time will have their own story about the day it fell, just like the Goulburn Valley community last week amassed individual experiences of the brief, intense experience of an earthquake.
Although it fell half a century ago, the shower from outer space continues to leave an impression, embedded in the fabric of the Murchison community.
Denni lives on Meteorite St, and her pop has a fragment buried somewhere in his shed.
It’s also a source of continued fascination within the scientific community, with a team of American scientists announcing just last year that the interstellar dust on the Murchison meteorite was about seven billion years old.
Margaret Lock, author of Space Gem: Mysteries of the Murchison Meteorite, was captivated by its history when she moved to Murchison eight years ago, and three years of her life were subsequently consumed by research and writing a book.
Murchison and District Historical Society president Kay Ball said well-preserved fragments of the famous meteorite still carried its giveaway scent - a waft of something out of this world.
