My Year with Bluestone: murder by bluestone

I'm blasting through the first draft of this first chapter. I've set myself a target of 2000 words per week while I get it started, but have a bunch of other activities lined up for the weekend, as well as a meeting at work at 9.00 tomorrow on my one day I'm often able to work at home and get more writing done. So this evening I have put 1000 words into the file, though some are longish quotes that I'm sure will have to be culled.

I need to get the right mix of overviews about the prison system with the affective emotional discourse that is my chief concern. It's easy to find gothic descriptive language to describe Pentridge architecture, for example. But harder to make sense of dark ironic facts, such as the murder at Williamstown of John Price, the Inspector-General of Prisons, formerly governor at Norfolk Island, and enjoying a grim reputation for cruelty. He had gone to Williamstown to discipline some prisoners on the point of riot, but made the mistake of turning his back on them. He was pelted first with clods of earth, and then with the stones the prisoners were breaking up: bluestones of course...  One of them hit him in the back, and he was taken away unconscious and died the next day of his injuries.

Bluestone is often described as soft in our laneways; but its sharp heavy edges would be brutal.

My Year with Bluestone: Telling the Time

One of the best bluestone sites at Williamstown is the Lighthouse and Timeball Tower. Like many bluestone buildings it's been remodelled a number of times. A lighthouse was first erected in 1840, made of timber on a bluestonebase, and then rebuilt as a bluestone tower in 1948. This picture is from 1853.

But in 1853 a timeball was added: a large copper sphere that would drop at 1.00 pm. I think the time was calculated locally, but it would be interesting to know at what point it was linked to Greenwich mean time, as part of a global navigational network.

As this place was the first permanent settlement is Victoria all survey are measure from the tide gauge at Gellibrand's Point. In 1853, a Mr R. L. J. Ellery, the first Government Astronomer, commenced determining accurate local mean time, and established a time ball so that shipmasters to correct their chronometers "at the fall of the ball" at exactly one o'clock each day.
http://www.lighthouses.org.au/lights/VIC/Williamstown/Williamstown%20Lighthouse.htm#History

The timeball operated until 1926, and by 1934, when a 30 foot brick extension, painted with alumium paint, was added. What a monstrosity!  What a strange attempt to double the height, keep the rectangular windows, change the right angles to curves, to modernise from bluestone to brick, and presumably to mimic the lighthouse function without a light, with the alumnium paint. Also looks as if they have built crenellations at the top to mimic the original crenellated balcony.

The brick addition was removed between 1987 and 1989, and a replica timeball was added, which apparently now drops at 1.00, run by a computer mechanism. I will have to time my next visit more carefully.

The tower is really quite imposing. When we were asking directions, we were told, "you can't miss it" and indeed it is very striking. Its slightly tapered shape is unusual, I think. I was very struck by the 1855 stone inset at the base, which demonstrates why bluestone isn't often used for figurative or detailed scupting: it's already chipping away. 

The temporal ironies abound here. The timeball that drops at scientifically produced time each day, while the building rises and falls around it, so subject to fashions and styles in building, time-keeping and heritage construction. 

Can I just say, by the way, how much I am loving this project!!

My Year with Bluestone: The Old Morgue

Yesterday we took the ferry from Southbank over to Williamstown: a beautiful ride down river past the docks and under the Bolte and West Gate Bridges. There are bluestone sites a-plenty here in the old town, and I will have to go back another time. But here's a taster.

In 1859 the busy city of Williamstown (main port for Victorian goldfields) established a morgue at the end of Gem Pier, where our ferry docked. The plan was that the remains of autopsies and mortuary procedures would be washed away at the end of the pier, and the fishes would do the cleaning up... But apparently this became a little unsavoury and in 1873 the building was taken down, bluestone by bluestone, and reconstructed a few blocks away in Ann St. It was used until 1925.

As you can see from this last photograph, it's not an active tourist site, though you can book a tour with the local heritage guides, which I will do in March. It's part of an enormous marine precinct, with a little museum, and if you walk down further on the dock you come to the berth of the Sea Shepherd. The little morgue is small and very unmonumental, in comparison to many bluestone structures. The low roof is also striking, as bluestone is often associated with gothic style in this period.

I touched the stone and tried to think about death and its mysteries. But the historian in me was mostly thinking about the effort and the decision taken to move the morgue, but keep the same building. Was it a heritage question? They clearly didn't need any larger building. And because there are bluestone quarries in the area, you wouldn't think the stone would be in very short supply.

I looked it up when I got home. One website said the morgue was moved because it was becoming too much of a tourist destination! An excess of affect, then. And as many of the heritage sites we visited reminded us, the stones themselves were "hewn" by convicts, who slept at night on the big prison hulks anchored in Hobsons Bay. This will be a common theme of much of the bluestone building in and around Melbourne.

I also found a site that offered late night ghost tours of the morgue. Apparently it is haunted (of course!) by a young girl who just might grab your arm in the dark....