My Year with Bluestone: Guest Post

Thinking about the material realities of working with bluestone, this popped in my email box and I'm delighted to introduce my first guest post on this project from my dear friend Andrew Lynch, recently appointed as the new Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.  Andrew tells me this is his first blog; so I'm doubly thrilled. Here's the word from the top, folks!

Hi Stephanie,

Your blog and our conversation reminded me of a past association with bluestone. In the summer after my first year at Melbourne I got a job as a labourer on Kew City Council. The casual employees, nearly all university students like me, did various work. Usually we went out on the 'chippy gang'.  We weren't carpenters, as the term would now suggest. A 'chippy' was given a stick about a metre long (I'm estimating) with a triangular-bladed head attached – this was also called a chippy. The job was to wield the blade to cut or prise couch grass and weeds out of the bluestone gutters in the dominions of the Council. Bluestone blocks are of course impermeable, but grass easily gets into the gaps between them, trapping moisture in which it can grow to Triffid proportions if left alone. We, the chippies, were in the front line: animal versus vegetable, with the aid of mineral. 

There were two kinds of chippy – one had a metal pole with the blade welded on; in the other the blade was riveted to a wooden handle. The metal pole was more secure, but continually banging it against bluestone jarred your hands and arms worse. After a day using either version, you (the part-timer) woke next morning with cramped fingers and blisters. Naturally, we needed many breaks from our labour: a chippy made a passable cricket bat when called on. The real council workers claimed the poles were getting badly bent from being leaned on so often by the 'students': this was clearly an ancient and well-loved joke. One of the regulars, an elderly Italian known as 'Poppa', amazed us by taking up the chippy and rapidly clearing swathes of greenery from a blocked drainage channel, down in East Kew somewhere. He was a professional, and wanted to show us how it should be done. Seamus Heaney would have known how to write about his technique.

I had spent all my life in Kew, but on the other side of the junction, in the leafy streets off Studley Park Road where the chippies never ventured. Naturally, we tended to work the lower, wetter ground. That was a time when people on the 'basic wage' or worse still lived in parts of Kew. At the Council's 'staff Christmas dinner, an 'outdoor employee' unashamedly came up with a sack and swept the leftovers into it to take home. This was also the time when councils began replacing a lot of the bluestone gutters with concrete and selling off the dressed blocks cheaply. A few years later, when I lived in Station St, North Carlton, the neighbour next door built a head-height bluestone wall enclosing his tiny front yard. It's still there: https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-37.78986,144.975281,3a,75y,354.26h,89.16t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s2wvYt4bW8W4ZX1XC4G2f6A!2e0 But then, in that area, so are the gutters. They were made to last.

I doubt there's been a chippy gang for a long time. Even then, we had competition in the war on weeds: the herbicide spray van driven by Hec. Hec did no other job, but still it must have been considered that were some places where nothing but the bodily application of metal to bluestone was adequate. That was where we came in.

Cheers,

Andrew

My Year with Bluestone: Human Glances

Funny how you can ride, walk, or drive past a familiar landmark for years, and then when it's gone you can't remember what was there.

I was walking past this enormous building site the other week and was marvelling at the scale of the hole in the ground; the large backhoes and the piles of big bluestones being dug out of the earth. I couldn't photograph the whole site, so here's a video overview:

I spoke to the man guarding the entrance to the site, and asked him what was here before. A textile workshop, he said, and then I remembered the Charles Parsons building. Joel's school sometimes used to run sausage-sizzling fund-raisers when they had textile sales.

Here's a historical image from google maps: it was a low rise brick building.




Now they are building a block of apartments, of course, with a deep car park. So they are now digging far deeper into the ground than they have dug before, and these big bluestones are now seeing the light of day, and the human gaze for the first time in thousands of years, since they were first carried here in the volcanic flows. (There were active volcanoes in Victoria 7000 years ago, and for up to millions of years before that: I don't yet know enough about the timing of particular flows.)

This is a familiar workaday sight now in the inner city, as manufacturing sites become residential ones. They are sorting bluestone from shale, and will be breaking up the bluestones for use in roads and railways, I guess, unless they salvage some boulders to sell for gardens and decorative use.

I watched as a huge machine scooped up a load of huge stones and shook the tub vigorously, shaking free the dirt and smaller stones, and dumped the boulders into another big truck. It rained a lot yesterday, so the stones on the left have been washed clean; while those on the right have been dug up this morning:

The man also told me that when they sold the factory, there were a hundred women working there, who lost their jobs. Migrant women, I think he said, but they might also have been second and third generation Europeans? He gave the impression that it was a kind of sweat shop, but the company is a decent size, and one hopes these workers would have had some protection from labor laws. Though I can imagine that was not always the case.

Time capsules here, then. The original volcanic flows, the modern factory, the temporal lag of the old-style textile industry, depending on manual labor, all now exploded into this vast cavity...

And a postscript: they are digging up the tram tracks along Swanston St this morning. I couldn't help notice that the digger they are using has a pointy bit about half the size of this one they are using to dig up the compressed volcanic stones, and loosen them from their ancient resting place.  It's a sight that is utterly ordinary, and utterly momentous to me:

My Year with Bluestone: Friday House Day (1)

For the next little while, Friday is going to be House Day. That is, I'm closing in on the various bluestone sites around my own house. Some were there when Paul bought the house over twenty years ago; some we have brought in ourselves. I've lived here for twenty years myself...

First up, from the far corner of the back yard, a row of bluestone pitchers that protect the roots of the Boston Ivy from the chickens. Paul laid this row about three years ago, using stones that had formerly lined the front driveway, where they had been cemented with limestone. He has used a rough concrete mix, here. 

Before he built the chook yard, the back gate (on to the bluestone laneway, of course) cut into the yard on an angle, and after we painted the burnt umber wall, a bit of graffiti landed on that side wall before the new back fence was put in. 

I'm photographing the wall and the purple door to mark this particular colour combination as a moment in domestic fashion. I should photograph the leaves again in autumn.

We have four big chickens. They are very messy eaters, and have sprinkled their shell grit all over the bluestone. You can see Paul's cement filling up the even shape of the stone here: 

From the left, Farrah, Audrey, Talullah and Audrey: 

We also have two new young 'uns, kept separate for the moment, Billie (Holiday) and Bessie (Smith).

 


The main part of the chook house (not pictured here) has been converted from Joel's old tree house, itself made of a mixture of recycled timber, window frames. In the chookyard, bluestone frames our inner-city gestures towards self-sufficiency. And in thousands of gardens, bluestone pitches and clumps will be doing similar work: retaining walls and embankments and edging gardens in thousands of phases of use and re-use. One thing I am learning about bluestone in suburban and urban use: as often as it is monumental and stable, it is also often re-used and reassembled. It seems an infinite resource.

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: Framed by Bluestone

Two weeks ago, we met with one of the curators at the Melbourne Museum about another project, on fire. At the end of our discussion I told Liza about the bluestone project. She had a few great ideas on the spot and a few days later she emailed: 

And BTW, here is a thought for Stephanie’s project on bluestone:  I was thinking on the way to work this morning, looking at the bluestone gutters and garden edging – how Melbourne seems to be framed by bluestone.  It is in all the edges – window ledges, streets edges, garden edges, fencing, foundations for buildings, back street lanes. Very functional, but on the edge of centre.

This expresses very well the way we experience bluestone in the city. It isn't always in the main gaze, though there certainly are some spectacular buildings here, and elsewhere in the state. But as I walked to the tram in Fitzroy, and then from the tram in Carlton, here are just a few photos of the thousands similar ones it would be possible to take all over the city.

A small stretch of the miles and miles of bluestone laneways behind Victorian and Federation, where the nightsoil used to be picked up. This configuration of bluestone, brick and rolling doors is seen all through the city. People walk down laneways, harvesting lemons and grapes that overhang the fences or pick armfuls of fragrant jasmine in spring. Cycling down them is a great way to avoid the traffic, though it can be a bumpy ride.

This configuration below is also very familiar: the foundations are less smooth than the stones above, and kept unpainted, like the margin or frame of the house.

 This side entrance is less common: note smoother bluestones for the steps:

Our streets are lined with bluestone gutters: 

Little traffic islands surround posts and notices: 

Bluestone is also the foundation for many an iron fence: 

The same configuration is used for grand public structures too: here is the corner of the gateway to the Exhibition Gardens on Rathdowne St (my photo of the gateway from the front came out badly: 

I'll leave that for another post): 

Often the railings have been removed or been destroyed: this is a very common site around Melbourne. Note the reddish colouring where the iron has rusted: 

And my last, most decorative shot from this morning's walk down Grattan St: a pretty tiled verandah framed by bluestone foundations and iron fence.

As the city's 

framework, bluestone is functional, solid, unobtrusive: the support for elegance and grandeur but also beloved in its own right. 

My Year with Bluestone: Stairs to Nowhere

Along the Merri Creek just a little upstream from the Heidelberg Rd bridge, the concrete bike path diverges into a little set of stairs. A bluestone retaining wall frames the embankment on one side, and longer stones frame the stairs on the right. The staircase seems to lead to a path along the river but it didn't look very inviting. Perhaps I'll explore when it is no longer the height of snake season.

Long couch grass is growing between some of the stones. That's pretty unusual, as bluestone walls usually fit pretty tightly. (I can foresee a time when I might be able to make judgements about the quality and even the date of bluestone walls from their mortar: there seem to be quite thick layers here.) The pole on a slant bears, if I remember correctly, a warning about flood levels. Just to the right of these steps is a low timber crossing, which is regularly flooded after heavy rains, as the Creek fills up. 

To me, it's hard not to see something a bit whimsical here. The stairs certainly help shape the embankment as the path twists and curves to the right, yet they also lead the eye and the step upward, away from the determined running, walking and cycling that goes on daily here. The steps seem to offer your own secret little space of wilderness, in dramatic juxtaposition to the civic geometry that invites you there. 

My Year with Bluestone: "What's all this nonsense?"

Driving through Richmond last week on the way back from the Epworth, I was trying to take short cuts and quick routes to avoid the busy main roads. I found myself heading towards Victoria Park, the home of the Collingwood football club, and realised I had taken a wrong turn and would end up driving through Clifton Hill. But as I turned a corner by the railway line I found myself exclaiming aloud, "What's all this nonsense?"

Dear reader, it was nothing but some bluestones laid in a diagonal pattern. Just a humble patch of bluestone on the road, perhaps to slow traffic very slightly.

I don't know when this patch was laid, but its diagonal structure is so clearly not a nineteenth-century pattern. If, like much modern bluestone use, it's made from older pitchers, then some of them have had to be cut into these irregular triangular shapes to form the diagonals. A new kind of bluestone labor (manual? or using what tools?)  but one that will make it harder to use these stones again for any other use. Bluestones are often re-used, and buildings re-assembled or moved. They are like nineteenth-century Lego blocks. Cutting them up like this seems somewhat short-sighted.

 I laughed, though, at my own reaction. So accustomed have I become, already, to seeing bluestone everywhere and remarking about it and thinking about it, that this unusual pattern made me exclaim, stop the car and get out and take a photograph. Because I am blogging daily, too, I am thinking about the project every day. How quickly the square form of bluestone and its right-angle layering have become normative.

My Year with Bluestone: Pentridge Piazza: "it's like being someone special"

Pentridge prison was decommissioned  in 1997, and in the rush to privatisation that characterised his government, Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett sold nearly 30 hectares of crown land to private developers.

One of these, Peter Chiavaroli, whose family comes from Abruzzo, envisaged his housing development along the lines of Italian walled towns. The discourse is determinedly Italianate, with the "Centrale Chiara" rose garden and "Aurora" fountain, as well as the central concept of "Pentridge Piazza." 

It's a clever way to re-code a prison coded as grim and severe into a welcoming housing community. Architect and co-developer Luciano Crema cites the northern Italian town of Treviso as his inspiration.

There was also a local model too. One of the developer's early newsletters, from 2005, cited Carlton's Lygon St, another Italianate community of shops, bars and restaurants close to the University, as a model.

One article in the newsletter is headed, "Village is a must for strong family values," and features an interview with a woman, Cathy, who is now moving up to a larger house in the development (possible because the value of the first has gone up, naturally).

"You see," she says with the kind of passion reminiscent of her Lebanese heritage, "living in Pentridge means something very special. "We love it because it is our home, but we love it even more because it is like living with a great big family.

"And, you know, when you tell people you live in Pentridge Village, it's like being someone special."

She smiles at the thought and then, hugging herself as if to emphasise her point, she says, "It is difficult to explain, but we all feel so safe and happy here. We really are part of something special." 

Brilliant interviewing/copy-writing!  Demonstrates precisely the symbolic force of Pentridge as heritage site: nothing specific about ghastly haunted prisons, but simply something "special."

One of the first couples to buy were a policeman and his partner, who bought a two-bedroom warehouse shell in the old prison mill.



Interviewed in The Age, Mr Hinton was "not concerned about its violent history."

"If these walls could talk they would certainly have a bit to say, but I'm not bothered at all," Mr Hinton said.

Ms Shields thought the retention of the bluestone perimeter would provide a strong sense of community. 

The development has not been uncontroversial, stylistically, or in heritage terms. Here are a few pics I've found on the web, showing first, an attempt to build the apartments on top of the walls, over an archway that as Vaughn showed us yesterday, leads down to the old laundry, one of the oldest parts of the estate.

 

and here, a reminder that for all the "safety" and "community" of a walled village, that "safety" depended on making sure you didn't escape.

 I particularly like the way they have kept the interesting feature of the tower, but made steps up/down to it on the wall, to reduce the oppressive "prison affect" of the walls.

My Year with Bluestone: Pentridge

Where to begin??

It's a bright and sunny Melbourne day with the promise of a dry south-westerly wind change later in the afternoon. Deirdre picks me up and we meet Helen and Anne at the café for our tour of Pentridge's D Division.

We are lucky with our guide, Vaughn. We four are the only ones on the tour, so we can choose whether to focus on architecture and the bluestone, or gruesome stories about the prisoners. Some of the state's most notorious criminals lived here: Ned Kelly, Chopper Read, Carl Williams, Jean Lee, Ronald Ryan (the last two hanged here). Vaughn was a warden here in 1978, but is also a lover of history, and a brilliant story-teller. And in spite of our declared interest in stone, we did certainly veer back to the stories about the inmates. It's a human place, after all.

One thing that became abundantly clear is how huge the whole complex is. Much of the land has been sold for private development, and there are numerous of wings of rather ugly-looking apartments, making awkward attempts to integrate the existing bluestone walls. The newly discovered panopticon exercise yards are in another area altogether and we will have to make a separate time to visit them, if we can.

I also had a proper camera with me, though I haven't yet worked out how to zoom, and haven't yet connected it to the computer, but here are two shots I took with the phone after we had driven around the whole area: these are the main gates...

With notes, photos, and four people asking questions and taking notes, I have enough material for a week's blog posts, to say nothing of a chapter for the book. Helen has already done a lot of work on Pentridge, and of course, there are many publications to read.

The main thing I learned today was how to start reading bluestone construction a little better. How the outer walls of Pentridge are formed by two layers of thinner bluestone, filled in with rubble and bricks. How a wooden frame was used to shape the really long slabs used in the cell walls. How the blocks were cemented together with lime and sand, with great precision. But that precision made it easy (relatively) to ease out a large stone; and one was big enough to allow a body to squeeze through. Vaughn had found a prisoner in exactly that act, with the stone half out of his cell wall. Prisoners used to escape all the time, but the cops would tell the guards, 'don't shoot them': i.e., don't ruin your own lives; as we'll catch them and bring them back. There was a distinctive chiselled effect on lots of the stones: something to look out for. I'm learning to tell the difference between (relatively) earlier and later work on a particular site, between high status and less important walls. The floors of D division were large squares: also bluestone, though smooth as slate. And you could also see dips and wear in the heavily used areas near doorways. We noticed that the windows on many of the cells were painted over. The prisoners would do it, to give themselves more darkness, to be able to sleep better during the day. This was one of the saddest things.

Helen or Deirdre asked about the prisoners breaking the bluestones, "It was a torture," Vaughn said. I had always thought there was a very precise connection between Pentridge and the bluestone dug out of what became the Coburg lake but that connection wasn't in the foreground of the discourse today.

And finally -- there'll be more, once  I write up my notes, and unload my photos -- the great irony was that bluestone made it very hard to see escaping prisoners. So many of the corners of the buildings were whitewashed, to make it easier to see the silhouettes of escapees as they broke out.

I thought our visit might tell us a lot about the prison's origins and construction; and so it did. But what I feel most is the weight of all these stories, from one guard's experience, at the time of my own adolescence.

UPDATE:  I was telling my friend over drinks this evening about this project and the day's excursion, and she told me that her ex-husband had once arrested Ronald Ryan and had admired him for his agility as he raced over the rootftops: it sounded like something out of Oliver Twist. Anyway they developed a bit of a relationship, and Ryan even invited Bryan to his hanging. Bryan declined the invitation...

My Year with Bluestone: "a bleak and scary building"

I was going to devote this week's blogs in preparation for my trip to Pentridge tomorrow, delving a little into its history, but instead it is turning into a series on other regional gaols: Parramatta, Bendigo, and today Geelong. Kerryn Goldsworthy reminded me about the Geelong gaol, which is indeed a true bluestone beauty. I love the way the photographer here has tried to get under the imposing bluestone gateway. This is becoming a common theme: the way dark bluestone walls tend to loom forbiddingly....

Like Pentridge, this gaol was built by prisoners, between 1849 and 1864. In the meantime, they slept on "high security barges" on Corio Bay. The gaol seems to be a mixture of basalt (bluestone) and brickwork. In this photograph, it doesn't seem so dark and grey...

I will certainly go and visit this gaol but in the meantime, here is the article Kerryn sent me. It is full of the evocative language that is one of the subjects of my study. The gaol is a "bleak and scary building", and I particularly love this sentence: "In today's terms the prisoners lived in appalling conditions with freezing blue stone walls and iron bars." There's a real awkwardness here in trying to translate emotional affects from present to past and back again. 

You can do a normal tourism tour, but there is also, of course, the haunted ghost tour, with very scary picture:

I've never been a zombie or horror buff of any kind, and have never been on a scary ghost tour (though there were moments under Edinburgh Hill that felt distinctly creepy), but maybe in the interests of research I'm going to have to change my ways. Yikes!