By JESSE GRAHAM
WHEN Yarra Ranges Councillor Maria McCarthy found a wedding ring while renovating her house almost a decade ago, she was determined to find the hand it belonged to.
The ring, it turned out, had been missing since 1968, and it was seven years before the owners – Delwyn and Graeme Ellis – crossed paths.
Delwyn, Graeme and Cr McCarthy all sat down last week to talk to the Mail about the miracle find and how the ring found its way back onto the right hand earlier this month.
Graeme, then a carpenter, said he lost the ring after taking it off in the house, which he had helped build in Lilydale.
It wasn’t until Cr McCarthy and her husband were renovating their house in 2007 that the ring resurfaced behind the cabinets.
Cr McCarthy said that, before the ring was found, she had a strange dream about finding rubies in the wall behind some cabinets in her ensuite.
Lo and behold, the removal of the cabinet resulted in not rubies, but gold.
She said that she had heard the former owners of the house were still in the area, and felt compelled to hold onto the ring until she found them.
“I don’t know why, but I had to keep it,” she said.
“It wasn’t mine to melt.”
“I knew that, one day, I’d find these people, but I didn’t know how I’d find them.”
Delwyn and Cr McCarthy crossed paths through their association with the Rotary Club of Lilydale, but it wasn’t until a mutual friend visited the house and mentioned it to Ms Ellis that the coin – and the ring – dropped.
Coincidentally, Cr McCarthy had retrieved the ring from her drawers the night before finding out the owner’s identity.
“When I was cleaning my drawer, looking for it the night before, I was thinking “I have to find these people – these people must be somewhere,” she said.
After being missing for around 46 years, the ring was finally returned on Thursday 3 July.
Delwyn and Graeme said the missing ring had become a joke within their circle of family and friends in the years since it disappeared, and that they were happy to have it back.
“It’s great – our kids think that it’s wonderful,” she said.
Due to Graeme’s carpentry work and the risk posed by wearing jewellery, he never ended up replacing the ring, but, since retiring, is happy to wear it again.
The return of the ring was interrupted on the very night it was returned, when the pair went to get fish and chips before heading back to their Healesville home.
Delwyn said that, after getting to the shop, the ring had disappeared once again.
After thoroughly sifting through the contents of their car, the ring was found again, and now sits comfortably on Graeme’s hand.
