Updated July 3, 2026 — 6:16pm,first published 10:06amThe baby was buried in an unmarked grave with no name, no loved ones and authorities unable to even determine its gender.But Wesley Hines has given the tiny child the tentative name Rose.It’s a small dignity Hines has afforded the baby after helping to recover the body from a Ballarat dam 34 years ago.Wesley Hines who, as a teenager, found a baby’s dead body in a Ballarat dam.Jason SouthBack then, the 18-year-old was riding his dirt bike down the Ring Road in western Ballarat, when two young boys breathlessly flagged him down to tell them they’d found a baby in the water.The young defence office worker followed the boys from the roadside, across a grassy field to a dam where they pointed to a black rubbish bag.Hines grabbed one of their fishing rods and dragged the object to shore.“It looked like a doll’s arm in the water ... it looked plastic,” he recalls.Then the bag tore, and all three knew this was no toy.“We all looked at it and gasped ... It was pretty macabre,” Hines said.The teen then took charge, jumping back on his bike and riding to a nearby milk bar where he asked staff to call police.Search and rescue squads scoured the dam and surrounds, also appealing to the mother of the baby to come forward and door knocking 900 houses in the area – all to no avail.In deposition records released to this masthead by the Coroner’s Court, the two boys, then aged just 12, who found the baby told police they had gone down to the dam to go fishing when they noticed a bag floating in the water.“[My friend] asked me to try and hook the bag because I had a lure on my line,” one of the boys said.“I cast out about four times before I could hook it. When I hooked it, I dragged it in slowly, grabbed onto the line and pulled it up out of the water. When we got it out... [the other boy] grabed it with his hands had his foot and he pulled it open. I said that it stunk and turned away.”The boy then told police he had seen a hand “by itself, cut off”.“They said they thought it was a doll’s hand,” he said. The pair then ran to the road to flag down help. That help was Hines.On July 28, 1992, two days after the discovery, the then head of Victoria’s homicide squad lamented that police had not received a single call from the public about the case.In the months that followed, a police investigation, forensic testing and a coronial inquest couldn’t shed any light on what had happened to the child.By the time Hines and the boys made the gruesome discovery, the body was so decomposed even the child’s gender couldn’t be determined.The baby was buried in Springvale cemetery a few months later, remaining there until May this year, when the Coroner’s Court of Victoria granted a police request to exhume the body.“Following a review of the coronial case, detectives hope advancements in technology will assist in identifying the infant,” police said on Friday.“A forensic examination is under way.”For Hines, the news comes with mixed emotions.He has an understandably complicated relationship with that day in Ballarat.Police at the dam where the baby’s body was found in 1992.WIN NewsWhile he has spoken of it many times, it took time for the gravity of the situation to sink in. He never again saw the two boys who flagged him down.“I wonder what they’re up to, whether they’re still in the area and how it affected them. It would have been worse for them for sure,” Hines said.“As an 18-year-old, I was full of testosterone, and it didn’t really affect me to start with. But obviously, it stayed on my mind a little bit.”Hines, now 53, still lives in Ballarat, and works driving road trains.That day at the dam continues to crop up unexpectedly in his life – like when his youngest son asked him about it only a week ago, or an old friend from the time sends him a text message.“I’m just feeling weird, you know?” he said, on finding out police had exhumed the body on Friday.“I literally drove past [the dam] every day to and from work for a few years. I mean, it’s good that [police] are potentially going to find out who she was.”Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.From our partners