My Year with Bluestone: Brief Lyrical Interlude about Time

I took this photo at the cemetery last week: lichen on bluestone. I love the contiguity of patterns here: a lovely symmetry of little bubbles in the stone under the layer of little flowers in the lichen. The lichen looks as if it has been dropped — splat! splat! — onto the rock from a giant ladle but of course it has grown by spreading out, incrementally, over the surface in thin, widening and conjoining circles. At first glance it looks like a contrast between informal, spontaneous, organic growth — the colour of pale new spring; and an unyielding, formal, institutional surface — the dark grey of heritage time. And in once sense that's true. But the stone, now cut into in a rectangular block, was once part of a molten red volcanic flow, moving and bubbling much faster than lichen could ever grow. And in a cemetery? Time capsules everywhere.

My Year with Bluestone: When Bluestone Isn't

The Melbourne general cemetery is a good place to think about the specific cultural associations of bluestone. I need to know more about when and why granite and marble became the default stone for tombstones, for example. Its re-modelled gatehouse told me bluestone remained an appropriate stone for building, after the first mid-nineteenth-century flush of enthusiasm.

And this building (I haven't yet dated it but I'm almost sure it was put up in the last ten-fifteen years) is another lesson: 

It's a service building of some kind, over on the far west side, backing on to Princes Park Drive that curves between the cemetery and the green fields of Princes Park. I rode past it every day in the good old days before my cycling accident in October. I used to love riding home as dusk turned to dark, as the sporting fields were lit up all velvety green on one side, and the low rise tombstones on my right would catch the light; and as soft lights dotted the dark spaces of the crematorium.

At first glance, its shape, colour and texture suggest it is made of bluestone like the old chapel, not far away. But the little portico, like a suburban driveway, the rollerdoor, and the proliferation of "hazchem" signs signalled that here was something else.

In fact it is made of two different kinds of composite concrete, made to look like two different kinds of bluestone (smooth and rough). 

This was a lovely simulacrum of both "bluestone" and also "bluestone building". It's easy to understand how this form of association works: it's designed to look as much like the adjacent chapel as possible, but because it's not really a heritage building, it can be plastered with all the signage; and that was the first thing that made me think, as we walked towards it, that it was not ... I was going to say "real".  Of course it is real, and as a new building, made me think about what was inside. Is it just gardening and maintenance equipment? Or does it contain traces of the mysterious undertaker's business? What work on behalf of the dead goes on behind its doors? And was it really built out of fake stone, in that shape, all at the same time? It's not an obvious heritage site, so may need some more detailed archival research to probe its mysteries?

My Year with Bluestone: Geometry and Grief

There is a bluestone chapel at the Melbourne General Cemetery. I took this photograph that didn't come out so well (truly, just using a phone at the moment, but will organise better camera soon), but did better with closeups of a few details.

I'm starting to notice more features of the way the bluestones are put together. Sometimes they have little fringes carved into the edges of fancier buildings. This one also features the delicate interlace of spider web across stone. 

And I'm remembering to take photos of inscriptions and foundation stones.

I'm also coming to observe the little H pattern, and the way the squares and rectangles of bluestone are fitted in around the angles and curves of gothic style. And the way bluestone and slate are so often paired.  

And questions of scale are interesting too: as well as the balance of vertical and horizontal here. (I hope that by the time I write the book I will have a more articulate architectural vocabulary.) 

But then, looking for a better image of the chapel, my interest in geometry got deflected. 

First I notice that the Cemetery's website is practically, not historically oriented, and when you click under 'chapel' they make the point that there are no functioning chapels here.

And then I was caught by this beautiful picture, 

It heads up the "dealing with grief" page. Like their site on funeral etiquette, it is full of sensitive and thoughtful advice. No bluestone here (granite and marble are the funerary stones), but a lovely reminder that bright light and architecturally interesting images aren't a natural affective fit with grief. Is there a disjunct here? 

I sometimes think my affective bluestone history will be a differential one: as much about when and why bluestone isn't used; and about when and why bluestone doesn't carry affective charges.

My Year with Bluestone: Cemetery Gatehouse and Foliate Heads

The Melbourne General Cemetery was not the city's first, but was established in 1852. The current gatehouse was rebuilt in 1934-5, using materials from two other demolished entrance buildings dating from the 1850s.

So, nearly one hundred years after the gatehouse was first constructed, bluestone was still the preferred stone of choice. I imagine the original building was more gothic in style (something to check). 

There also a sweet little two-sided waiting area as you come through the main gates on College Crescent.

On either side of one of the gates, we found two foliate heads. These are both carved in sandstone, a stone that is much softer and more appropriate for any kind of carving, let alone detailed figurative work like these: 

I guess these are part of the "not-bluestone" part of my history: where the functional, sturdy bluestone gives way to but also supports the warmer sandstone used for trims and carvings. The woman seems to have Victorian-style ringlets...

And finally, also framed or backgrounded by bluestone, a notice about flowers and candles they haven't bothered to translate.

My Year with Bluestone: Elvis's Birthday

When I used to live in North Carlton, I walked through the cemetery every morning, and in the old days (the last few years) when I used to ride to work, I would sometimes cycle along its paths. It's on highish ground, surrounded by low houses and parklands, and to the east you can look right across the suburbs towards the Dandenongs.

It is of course like a little city: its own roads, avenues, grand street frontages, ghettoes and slums.

But one of the most extraordinary monuments is that which was assembled in honour of Elvis Presley in 1977.  It was opened by 'Johnny O"Keefe.'  On anniversaries of Elvis's birth (today) and death, I have often seen people laying fresh flowers or bringing tape recorders or guitars and playing soft music.

I have enlisted Paul into this project, and his hi-res photos will appear in the book, but here are my quick snaps.

The astute observer will point out that the actual monument is not bluestone at all but conventional black marble or granite (note to self: do quick course in stone identification), and as we wandered around the cemetery we realised it's only the older nineteenth-century tombs that are based on bluestone (more on this in another post). But the grotto that surrounds the monument is made of very uneven bluestone rocks, stuck together with cement, and at several points, the cement has been dribbled down to resemble limestone stalactites. 

For the first time I noticed there is another similar grotto (without memorial) on the other side of a big bluestone mausoleum (again, for another post). We took many, many photos of bluestone tombs and buildings today: I am going to have no trouble finding images to post each day this year. 

But here is indubitably a place of pilgrimage. Not many people there today, but we saw some laying fresh flowers, and placing cards. And while I don't have a photograph to prove it, as we were standing by the memorial, an old, bright red car cruised by. At the wheel, a man wearing a large plastic Elvis wig, dark glasses, and a bright orange leopard-skin shirt or jacket. Too fast to photograph. He drove around a bit but didn't stop to get out. I said "beautiful" to one woman who was laying pink and red carnations, and carefully arranging some red glittery butterflies, and a picture of Elvis in a plastic wrapper, but she didn't reply. Her husband (?) stood behind her, also without speaking, and a daughter (?) with high ponytail and white rhinestone boots sat quietly on the park bench and watched. 

There's a neat blog by Mark Holsworth on Melbourne shrines, that remarks on Melbourne's propensity for shrines to those who never visited here. Holsworth also comments that the Melbourne cemetery shrine is "the only officially approved Memorial to Elvis Presley outside Graceland in Memphis."