In a process similar to that employed in Egypt thousands of years earlier, quarrymen cut and split the rock by hammering wedges in the joints. This is because transport costs were prohibitive, and the main brickworks were to the north and east of the city.Įarly bluestone quarrying was dirty, dangerous and labour intensive. In the 1920s there was a vast quarry located near the old Footscray Borough Quarry, roughly on the site of the sports grounds below what is now the Victoria University Footscray Park campus.īluestone buildings are far more prevalent in central Melbourne and its western suburbs than in the east. Many significant Melbourne buildings have bluestone foundationsĭuring the second half of the 19th century, quarrying spread west and north, with quarries opening in Williamstown, Footscray and Brunswick and, towards the end of the century, in Coburg and Preston. An 1877 map shows that Footscray Council had its own Borough Quarry, roughly where Michael McCoy Reserve is now located in Ballarat Road, while another large quarry was located at West Footscray approximately where Hansen Reserve is now located. Many smaller quarries were operating at Yarraville and Upper Footscray. There were more than a dozen quarries in the vicinity.īy the 1870s, quarrying in what is now the Braybrook Shire specialised in producing stones for use as road metal and railway line ballast, while Footscray offered blocks for buildings, roads and bridges. In the 1860s, the inner west suburb of Footscray had become known as 'Stoneopolis', and the vast majority of its residents were described in the directories as 'quarrymen'. Quarries in Clifton Hill, worked by convicts from the Collingwood Stockade in Carlton North, produced stone for Pentridge Prison, built in 1851. Melbourne's first quarries, which opened in the 1830s and 1840s, were located in (what is now) the Fitzroy Gardens, Carlton and Clifton Hill.īy the Victorian Gold Rush of the 1850s, bluestone had become the preferred building material in Melbourne as it was stronger, more plentiful and easier to work with than most other available materials. There is archaeological evidence that Aboriginal people were using bluestone around 8000 years ago to build eel traps and stone houses in the Lake Condah region of western Victoria. The term 'bluestone' was coined during the 1850s to distinguish the local stone, quarried in Footscray in Melbourne's inner west, from other more bland, greyish basalts.īluestone was identified as a useful commodity even before European settlement. The basalt plains of Victoria are the third-largest in the world, extending from the west of Melbourne to the South Australian border.Īs it is an igneous rock, its colour and consistency can vary, depending on the rate at which it initially cooled. What is commonly referred to as 'bluestone' is actually olivine basalt, and was formed by a massive Pleistocene lava flow which covered most of what is now south-western Victoria.
What is bluestone, and why is it so prolific in Melbourne?
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