Stone: Stories of Urban Materiality [1st ed.] 9789811546495, 9789811546501

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Stone

Stories of Urban Materiality Tim Edensor

Stone

Tim Edensor

Stone Stories of Urban Materiality

Tim Edensor Institute of Place Management Manchester Metropolitan University Manchester, UK

ISBN 978-981-15-4649-5 ISBN 978-981-15-4650-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Tim Edensor This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgments

My fascination with stone started at Manchester Metropolitan University following a discussion with colleague and friend, Ian Drew. Upon arriving in Melbourne in late 2017, I was immediately drawn to the deep dark textures of the solid, prominent bluestone, the local basalt that pervaded the built environment of the city. Since then, I have hugely enjoyed a voyage into Melbourne’s stony fabric, an adventure that has taken me to many parts of the city and beyond and introduced me to a great variety of fascinating people. I have come to love Melbourne, and in many ways, this book is a love letter to the city. As with all research projects, a book could never have emerged without the friendship, help and support of a great many people. First, of course, are my family, who always share an interest in my preoccupations, and offer advice. Thanks to the mighty Uma Kothari, the indefatigable Jay and the companionable Kim, as ever. I also want to thank Shanti Sumartojo, David Bissell, Peter Mares and Julie Shiels for offering many pieces of advice and for being such great friends.

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Several folk have offered invaluable editorial support in commenting on draft chapters, especially Uma Kothari, Shanti Sumartojo, David Bissell, Eva Mailund Jensen, Vanessa Lamb, Sarah Pinto, Pat Noxolo and Rob King. The book is far better for their advice and discussion. I have also been fortunate to have an enthusiastic editor at Palgrave, Josh Pitt, who encouraged me to pursue the project and has always been ready to offer wise counsel and guidance. I have also been lucky to meet lots of great people who share interest in my work on stone and with whom I have spent much time in discussion and on trips to visit auspicious and interesting places. Susan Walter kindly showed me around Malmsbury’s disused quarries and shared her Ph.D. thesis with me. Laura Harper similarly shared her work and discussed quarries and planning, and Victoria Kolankiewicz introduced me to the fascinating stories of Newport Lakes and Yarraville’s ‘sinking village’. I have had several inspiring conversations over coffee with fellow bluestone enthusiast, Stephanie Trigg, with whom I organised a stimulating workshop, and Loren Adams has been a great companion on explorations and chat, especially about global flows of stone. I also had a wonderful trip to Pipemakers Park with Meg Mundell and a fabulous trip to Kyneton Quarry with Lillian Pearce. Many of these trips have been possible because of the kind loan of their car by Laura and Dom. I am immensely grateful to a host of other people who I have interviewed or have otherwise introduced me to fascinating aspects of stone I would never otherwise have discovered. These include Eugene Perepletchikov and Georgia Nowak, Jenny Whiteside, Millie Catlin, Joseph Norster, Amy-Jo Jory, Kyoko Imazo, John Patten, Nick Steur, Huntly Barton, Peter Haffenden, Trent Nelson, Gavin McDevitt, Libby Straughan, Ruth Siddall, Gary Edge, Celestina Salgazio, Arthur Andronas, James Charlwood, John Malempre, Graeme Biffin, David Horner, Melathi Saldin, Paddy Laraday and Andrew Saniga. I have also received fine advice and had excellent conversations with a range of other people, including Reuben Berg, Catherine Phillips, Sandy Fernee, Richard Fullagar, Elspeth Opperman, Helen Lardner, Cristián Simonetti, Arran Calvert, David Paton, Rose Ferraby, Mats Burström, Jordan Lacey, Lauren Rickards, Izzat Darwazeh, Dan Santos, Andrew Blaikie, Caroline Paterson, Cristina Garduno-Freeman, Susan

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Lawrence, Tod Jones, Beth Cullen, John Hayward, Sarah Pink, The Orbweavers, Gary Presland, Candice Boyd, James Lesh, Matt Novacecki, Ignaz Strebel, Ross Gibson, Eduardo de la Fuente, David Jones and Mary Chapman. It goes without saying that all scholars need a convivial, welcoming and stimulating environment in which to work. I am blessed to work in two such scholarly locations. My colleagues in Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University and more recently, at the Institute for Place Management, have provided very homely settings in which to work. I am especially grateful to Lesley Head and colleagues at Melbourne University’s School of Geography for providing such a hospitable place in which to carry out my research. It has been a blast.

Contents

Part I

Cliff

1 Thinking About Urban Materiality Part II

Tomb

2 Stony Flows Part III 3

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Quartz

Stony Entanglements: Quarrying, Demolition, Disposal and Remediation

Part IV

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Foundation

4 The Maintenance and Repair of Stone Assemblages

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Contents

Part V 5

Tree

Remembering with Stone

Part VI 6

Grotto

Sensing Place: Living with Melbourne’s Stone

Part VII 7

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Garden

Becoming Attuned to Stone: Skill, Craft, Making

Part VIII

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259

Temple

8 The Ghosts of Urban Stone

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Epilogue: Scholar Stone

References

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4

Cook’s Cottage, Fitzroy Gardens Worked stone, Cook’s Cottage, Fitzroy Gardens Pirate Point Guidewall, Newcastle, New South Wales Victorian Parliament Crushing Facility, concrete production, Deer Park Williamstown Library Vintage Bricks, Recycled brick yard Bluestone boulders, Port Fairy quarry Harcourt Granite Quarry, Mount Alexander Disused quarry, Malmsbury Beech Forest Quarry Newman College Stone with rustic finish, Newman College Uniform surface, artificial stone, Newman College Refashioned spire and pinnacles, Newman College Monument to Queen Victoria Australian Hellenic Memorial War Graves, Springvale Cemetery James Joyce Seat of Learning, detail of bluestone and brick top

6 7 52 59 67 75 77 92 93 110 113 132 134 154 157 175 182 183 191

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Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10 Fig. 5.11 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5 Fig. 8.6 Fig. 8.7 Fig. 8.8 Fig. 8.9 Fig. 8.10 Fig. 8.11 Fig. 8.12 Fig. 8.13 Fig. 8.14 Fig. 9.1

List of Figures

Resting Place, King’s Domain Wominjeka Tarnuk Yooroom, Footscray Lie of the Land, detail Garden of Unity, Aiko Makigawa Landmark, Charles Robb Nearamnew, Federation Square, detail Crumbling grave, Melbourne General Cemetery Wet bluestone laneway Effects of shadow and concrete Meeting place, Smith street Granite blocks, Carlton Gardens Old tools, Stonemason’s yard Smashing bluestone bock with sledgehammer, Amy-Jo Jory (Photograph by Amy-Jo Jory) Disused tramway, Heatherlie Quarry Remnants of railway sleepers, Malmsbury Concrete cover of limestone conveyor belt to concrete works, Fyansford Seven sisters, Collins Street With and With Each Other, Geelong Road, Footscray Holes of former railings in bluestone wall, Carlton Gardens Cart tracks, bluestone laneway Traces of utilities in wall Inscriptions on bluestone Worm, Edinburgh Gardens, plinth formerly occupied by Queen Victoria Folly, Northcote Plug and feather traces, Heatherlie Quarry Invented fossil, Paul Blizzard Concrete strata, Pipemakers Park Scholar stone, Tianjin gardens

195 196 198 200 201 203 207 235 237 245 247 266 279 306 308 309 312 313 316 317 319 320 321 323 326 329 331 341

Part I Cliff

Amidst the dense groups of high towers, retail outlets and office blocks of the city centre, a short, rather obscure laneway runs off at right angles from a wide, major thoroughfare. At the end of the narrow asphalt lane, hemmed in by brick walls, a left turn leads into a cul-de-sac. On one side is the car park of a vertiginous office block; on the other, a lower wall festooned with street art. Some ten metres above the end of the lane, bridging the two sides, is a small ramshackle storage hut. It is what lies below this rickety structure that surprises. For there is a rugged cliff bedded within strata of mudstones, siltstones, shale and sandstone, slanted at an angle of 20°: a startling remnant of the pre-colonial land upon which the settler colonial city of Melbourne has been built. Somehow it has escaped the designs of the planners and the ravages of the bulldozer. This remnant cliff must have been connected to a larger expanse of stone that has been erased, its layered surface testifying to the marine deposition of different sediments in the Silurian era, over 400 million years ago, and to the later earth movements that tilted the subsequently solidified stony mass off its original axis. This singular relic summons

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up a topography that has been irredeemably amended, with hills levelled, swamps drained, rivers diverted and vegetation stripped. Grasslands and wetlands that had been carefully stewarded over millennia have been repeatedly paved over, built upon, excavated and dynamited into oblivion by urban compulsions to build and rebuild, leaving no surface unscathed. Yet the cliff intervenes in the ongoing frenzy of planning, construction and demolition, for it helps us to imagine the grassy, muddy, rocky landscape that was here less than 200 years ago and connects us to what still lies beneath the city. It has a sensory charge that provokes an assessment about whether it could be climbed, inviting closer tactile inspection of its rough, loose, crumbling surface. Perhaps the stony realm of which the cliff was part held a symbolic significance for the Wurundjeri people who lived, worked and travelled through these fertile lands. It would have been part of a landscape that they sensed and knew intimately. Across the city and beyond, the stone upon which Melbourne is founded has been hewn away, levelled, shifted or quarried for building. Yet another, less prominent stony vestige of this obliterated landscape lies a kilometre away on the river, where several surviving bluestone blocks are submerged under water. Before the arrival of Europeans, a small waterfall broke the Yarra’s flow where a series of stones provided a convenient crossing point that served as an important Aboriginal meeting site. A juncture at which fresh water met sea water, it also provided an important source of food harvested from both salt and fresh waters; eels, crayfish, migrating fish and mussels. Following colonisation, this line of stones was perceived as an impediment to European desires to deepen the river and thereby extend access to the numerous ships that were sailing into the newly founded port. They dispossessed the traditional owners of this land and in 1883, dynamited the falls. This altered the ecology of the river, reducing its potential as a source of food, creating rapid erosion and extending the stretch of salt water 15 km upstream. Six years later, the Queens Bridge was built to reinstate the river crossing. Adjacent to the bridge are the vestigial bluestone blocks.

Part I: Cliff

Fig. 1 Cliff in city centre

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1 Thinking About Urban Materiality

A Cottage Built of Yorkshire Stone I am walking through Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne’s oldest park, on a scorching late November day in 2016. Recently arrived in the city, I am seeking some respite from the blazing sun in the thick shade cast by the dense foliage of venerable oaks and elms. As I wander towards the park’s Southern edge, there is a bewildering sight. Nestling amidst the trees, a privet hedge encloses a country garden behind what appears to be an English cottage. A stone stable and outbuilding are appended either side of a brick dwelling, all roofed with red pantiles. A British Union flag flutters from the roof. This is Cook’s Cottage (Fig. 1.1). This rustic home, formerly sited in the village of Great Ayton on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors, was built by the father of James Cook, the navigator who it has been claimed, ‘discovered’ Australia. Wealthy entrepreneur W. Russell Grimwade purchased the cottage in 1934 and arranged for it to be disassembled piece by piece, packed into 249 cases and 40 barrels, shipped to Melbourne and reassembled. He considered that it would stand as a memorial to Captain Cook, who claimed the east coast of Australia for the British Crown before the subsequent colonisation of the country. © The Author(s) 2020 T. Edensor, Stone, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1_1

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Fig. 1.1 Cook’s Cottage, Fitzroy Gardens

This origin myth of Cook is sedimented in monuments, history books and heritage sites across the nation. Yet though revered throughout most of the time it has been present in Fitzroy Gardens, regarded as an iconic site of national pilgrimage, the cottage is increasingly controversial and contested. Cook initiated Australia’s colonisation and the frequently genocidal displacement of the original inhabitants, and the cottage has more recently served as a site of Aboriginal protest. On Australia Day in 2014, the walls were daubed with the slogan, ‘26th JAN AUSTRALIA’S SHAME!!!’ The cottage’s building materials disclose that it is the oldest European building in Melbourne. The aged quality of the stone is signified by the roughly chiselled pattern wrought by diagonal furrows, some deeply scored, others shallower (Fig. 1.2). Dressed and assembled by eighteenthcentury quarrymen and stonemasons who toiled without modern mechanised tools, building the cottage would have been tough work. Its venerable textures conjure up the leathery hands of the wiry bodies that

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Fig. 1.2 Worked stone, Cook’s Cottage, Fitzroy Gardens

inscribed the grooves, slapped on the grainy mortar with trowel and checked that bricks and stones were appropriately aligned. The long-dead inhabitants of the cottage are also summoned up by the doorstep’s gentle depression, forged by their numberless footsteps. I visited the small settlement of Great Ayton early the next year. Roadside signs that greet the motorist refer to Great Ayton as the ‘Boyhood Home of Captain Cook’. On the village green stands a statue of the

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young Cook, and information boards entreat tourists to undertake ‘The Captain Cook Trail’ that connects the village with the towns of Marton, Whitby and Staithes. The removal of the cottage created a vacant space and the site is now occupied by a tiny park, with a low surrounding wall that contains a lawn. In the middle, there rises a 13-foot-high stone monument erected on a wide plinth. This obelisk was shipped from Melbourne where it had been fashioned by stonemasons, and an inscription reads: LIEUTENANT JAMES COOK OF THE ENDEAVOUR, RN, FIRST SIGHTED AUSTRALIA NEAR THIS POINT, WHICH HE NAMED POINT HICKS AFTER LIEUTENANT ZACHARY HICKS WHO FIRST SAW THE LAND APRIL 19TH (SHIP’S LOG DATE), APRIL 20TH (CALENDAR DATE) 1770

Further down, at the base of the monument is another brass plaque inscribed with the following details: THIS MONUMENT IS MADE OF STONE HEWN FROM THE ROCKS OF CAPE EVERARD CLOSE TO POINT HICKS VICTORIA AND IS A FACSIMILE OF THE MONUMENT ERECTED THERE. IT MARKS THE SITE OF CAPTAIN COOK’S COTTAGE REMOVED TO MELBOURNE IN VICTORIA’S CENTENARY YEAR 1934. PRESENTED BY W. RUSSELL GRIMWADE

Melbourne got the cottage; Great Ayton received a granite obelisk. An extraordinary stony transaction. The ironstone, a form of soft, pliable sandstone used for Cook’s Cottage was sourced from one of the several quarries that lie to the northeast of the village on the high land that surrounds a prominent conical hill, Roseberry Topping. Following their shaping into blocks, the stones would have been loaded onto a horse cart and transported to the building site. Yet the first quarry I came across when searching for this site was a much larger void located at a National Trust site, Cliff Ridge Wood. This quarry was a source of whinstone, a very hard dolerite, akin to basalt, that constitutes the thin band of igneous rock of the Great Whin Sill

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that stretches for 40 miles across North-East England. The nineteenthcentury quarry supplied whinstone to the growing industrial metropolis of Leeds to serve as the setts for its cobbled streets and a narrow-gauge railway adjacent to the quarry was constructed to transport the material. It was while wandering though the green moorland that surrounds Great Ayton that I first considered the ideas explored in this book. My encounter with Cook’s Cottage and the Yorkshire village from whence it came encapsulate the key themes that are discussed in this book. It discloses the origins of the stones and how they came to arrive in Melbourne. The cottage is a form of lithic memorial that endures and was installed in Fitzroy Gardens to convey ideological messages in a particular historical era, but these nationalistic, colonialist sentiments are increasingly contested and are becoming outmoded. Yet the building remains valued as an important icon and tourist attraction and as such, is carefully maintained and repaired to preserve its significance. The source of the stone was quarried at a location near to the village in which it was built, as were most structures before the advent of advanced transport networks, since when stone became a national and international commodity. The materiality of the cottage—its aged stone, brick and tiles, its worn doorstep and flagstone floors—conveys a powerful sensory and affective impression, especially in its contrast with much of the fabric of Melbourne’s built environment. And the skilled engagement of those who quarried, dressed and assembled the stone of the cottage is also evident in the obvious traces of working. Finally, the cottage is increasingly mysterious and enigmatic. Despite the stories and effects that surround it, the building remains enigmatic, an uncanny relic of the time of its construction and the era when it was shipped to Melbourne, historical periods that now seem impossibly distant, unknowable. I discuss how the chapters of this book are organised around these themes at the end of this introduction.

Considering Theories of Materiality Forged by the energies of surging magma, the collisions generated by continental drift, or the relentless layering of miniscule grains and tiny particles from marine bodies, stone is one of the most durable of the

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earth’s materials. Mostly formed aeons before life emerged, stone testifies to earth’s cosmic origins, yet as Jeffrey Cohen (2015: 34) insists, ‘stone is fluid when viewed within its proper duration… is part of a continually moving lithosphere’. Though these geological events seem rather incomprehensible, more intelligible are the enduring human engagements with lithic matter, a human-nonhuman companionship that has existed at least since the 3.5-million-year span named the ‘stone age’. Over the past two hundred years, stone has circulated across space through human endeavour at an unprecedented scale. Stone has constantly accompanied humans since time immemorial. As a building material, forming the doorstep we stand on before entering our houses, placed in garden walls, around fires, on paths and in memorials, this association is ancient, as is the recycling of these elements into later structures. In this book, I explore how stone is a key part of the massive material assemblages that constitute cities, it is quarried, transported, dressed, assembled and erodes; is maintained, replaced, demolished, disposed of and consigned to landfill; is deployed to constitute signifying forms and in itself is attributed with symbolic properties; is sensed through everyday urbanisation and comes to be intimately known by those who skilfully work with it. Finally, stone is ineffable, ancient, only partly knowable, mysterious and spectral. The investigation takes place in and around one city, Melbourne, in the state of Victoria, Australia. A currently prosperous city of around five million people, clustered around Port Phillip Bay but rapidly expanding in all directions, Melbourne was founded as a settler-colonial city in 1835 and named in 1837. Yet the history of the terrain on which it is established has been occupied for many millennia before European colonisation, and since ancient times, stone has circulated through its environs. Over the past 180 years, these processes of circulation—through supply, building and demolition and disposal—have multiplied and accelerated to constitute a built environment of increasingly diverse materials installed at different times. Many of the processes through which stone comes to constitute the built environment resonate with those of other cities; others are more specific to Melbourne. All cities are constituted according to a unique mix of material ingredients from diverse

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sources, and in an era of globalisation, Melbourne’s material emergence increasingly echoes that of other cities, with supplies increasingly drawn from international sources. It is my hope and anticipation that readers will make parallels and distinctions between this particular city and the places in which they live. I expect that they will discover that all places have stony histories and geographies that are as extraordinarily rich and fascinating as Melbourne. In embarking on this study into the rich and varied urban materiality of Melbourne, I have found it essential to refrain from adopting any singular theoretical approach. Indeed, most studies of materiality tend to adopt perspectives that draw on particular conceptual frameworks, but this does not work well in my investigation. Certain scholarly ideas are highly pertinent in exploring certain aspects of stone and yet can reveal very little when applied to other areas of enquiry. Accordingly, I have found that a broad range of ideas have proved necessary to underpin my account, and accordingly, I now consider the diverse theories about materiality that are particularly salient to this investigation, a discussion that sketches out key ideas but is necessarily brief. First, I consider Marxian notions of urban metabolism, the textual and representational focus on objects inspired by the cultural turn, and the influential actor-network accounts that focus on the relationalities of materials. I subsequently explore assemblage thinking that focuses on the ways in which materials align or clash with each other, before considering new materialist theories of urban vitalism. This feeds into a discussion about phenomenology and post-phenomenology that explores the sensory and affective encounters that surround materials. I further contextualise the account by identifying key geological notions about lithic matter, and the ways in which the geological is entangled with the biological and the social, a discussion that is foregrounded in the current era that many refer to as the Anthropocene. I conclude by drawing on object-oriented ontologies to underline the limitations of all these theories if they are deployed as all-encompassing frameworks with which to explore materiality per se. This undergirds my conviction, explored in the final chapter, that while all the theories I discuss are useful in investigating the particular aspects of urban materiality that I investigate, they are inadequate when deployed outside of these distinctive approaches.

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Moreover, in grasping these limitations, it is imperative to acknowledge the many unknowable, ineffable and inexplicable elements of materiality that we confront, but also allow ourselves to speculate freely about these mysteries, conjuring conjectural narratives from the traces and propositions that haunt such encounters. Marxian perspectives on materiality have been dominated by a focus on the commodity status of matter and things, and the central notion that contemporary urban space is overwhelmingly produced by capitalist interests. Heynen et al. (2006) consider that the extent to which capital accumulation relies on non-human or ‘natural’ resources has expanded and deepened as capital seeks more ways to turn things and places into commodities. In the city, the embodiment of capitalist social relations, this reaches its most pervasive extent as the material environment is endlessly reproduced by the accelerating metabolic transformation of nature by labour and technology. Oil provides energy and bitumen for road surfaces, iron ore is transformed to provide the primary ingredient for steel, stone is metabolised into building blocks, bricks, aggregate for roads and concrete. Critically, this distribution of metabolised ‘natural’ substances is inevitably unequal since it is undertaken through specific forms of control, ownership and appropriation. Particular materialities, building forms and other assemblages are thus allocated across the city in highly uneven and spatially differentiated ways. Accordingly, urban form is conceived as a reflection of the political and economic dynamics of urban space—yet things could be otherwise under differently configured social relations, for instance, under socialism. At present though, the ‘spatial fixes’ wrought by strategic capitalist investment that are manifest in the built environment, such as suburbanisation, gentrification and business districts, suggest a durable urban landscape, although this is always liable to be replaced through subsequent capitalist processes of creative destruction. Recent accounts contend that contemporary formations of urban materiality emerge as modes of organising capital accumulation shift, arranged through a more extensively scaled space of global flows (Otter 2010), privatisation and the devolution of supply to independent contractors (Tsing 2013). Other recent accounts emphasise how processes of urban metabolism have depended upon hubristic

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notions that infinite natural resources can ceaselessly supply economic and spatial expansion, assumptions that have advanced the global environmental crisis. This overwhelming focus on capital power neglects to consider how religion, nationalism, gender, ethnicity and age might also constitute powerful influences upon the production of the built environment. For instance, in an Australian context, a key influence on shaping human-non-human engagements has been a highly racialised colonialism, wherein settler colonialist thought articulated notions that ‘if some humans were not transforming nature in a productive way, other humans had the right to take over and maximize the environment’s output’ (Cipolla 2018: 62), a culturally specific meaning of ‘productive’ that diverges from Aboriginal conceptions. A privileging of abstract capitalist processes means that cities and their material composition tend to be conceived as epiphenomena of deeper, larger forces, and thus lose their specificity. Moreover, the implication that objects are located in the city at the whim of capital and lack any agency of their own perpetrates a profoundly anthropocentric assumption that the material world is passive. The foregrounding of processes of urban metabolism does focus on transformation of ‘natural’ into ‘cultural’ matter. However, such an analysis has little interest in the material changes that take place before this moment or in anything that happens after the arrival of metabolised matter into the city. As I discuss below, these limitations have been substantively addressed by post-humanist conceptions that emphasise the agencies of objects, and their relationships to each other and to people. Despite these evident limitations, it is essential to consider how material has been extracted, transported, transformed, assembled and removed to understand how the built environment emerges. Accordingly, Marxian material analyses are very useful in foregrounding the dominant power of those able to arrange material flows and hence shape the built environment, as well as highlighting radical global inequalities in the distribution of material resources. These themes recur throughout this book. The identification of the material world as laden with power has also been integral to the approach to materiality articulated by adherents of the cultural turn, which emerged partly in response to what

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were regarded as reductive Marxian explanations that solely focused on the forces of capital and class. Cultural theorists conceived the city, for example, as akin to a text that was replete with meanings that had been encoded into space by the powerful. These power-laden strategies also imposed meanings shaped by gender, religion, age and ethnicity, as well as class, that were imparted via architectural styles, commemorative forms and institutional infrastructures. Cities were now studied in terms of symbols, languages and imaginaries, producing a rather radical form of dematerialisation. As with Marxist analyses of the city, urban materiality (Duncan 2005) and landscapes (Cosgrove et al. 1988) were primarily conceived as a product of power, a site of its reproduction, and a backdrop for social action, including contestation. For meanings were not typically regarded as fixed or passively consumed but were available for decoding by different people in different ways. Though an important corrective to reductive understandings of materiality, such accounts have been critiqued because of their overemphasis on the textual and symbolic. As I discuss below in more detail, materiality is construed as passive and lacks a phenomenological impact in the world—it is merely there to be read; material agency and sensation disappear. Tim Ingold (2010: 2) claims that the modern cleavage between nature and culture is reproduced through such textual perspectives; they reiterate a ‘hylomorphic model of creation’ wherein form is imposed ‘by an agent with a particular end or goal in mind, while matter - thus rendered passive and inert - was that which was imposed upon’. The last two decades have witnessed an eagerness to repudiate this excessive focus on the representational, textual and significatory qualities of things. However, this has tended to throw the baby out with the bathwater, neglecting the reproduction of ideological and symbolic material forms and the ways in which they inscribe cities with meaning. A quick historical review of how stone has been imbued with powerful meanings underlines this symbolic importance across time and space. Certain stones, massive in size or peculiar in shape, have been considered to have been intentionally shaped by the hands of the divine. Mark Smalley (2018: 10) points to how such stones may also be construed as ‘shapeshifters that morph between states of being at the uncertain edges of our dreams’, as they spring to life or contain those who have been

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turned to stone. For instance, the Black Stone, installed at the centre of the sacred Kaaba in the Great Mosque of Mecca is revered as an ancient, possibly supernatural relic bestowed by Allah, and those who kiss the limestone Blarney Stone near Cork, Ireland, hope that it will grant them loquacity. Smaller stones are also held to contain magical and supernatural properties, as recorded in medieval lapidaries that itemise the healing properties of certain stones. Belief in such properties is evidenced in the elusive alchemical gem known as the Philosopher’s Stone believed capable of turning lead into gold and producing the elixir of life, and the Japanese kanju and manju, fabled jewels that were believed to grant their owner control over the tides. A nuanced account of how material elements in the landscape might be read is provided by Veronica Strang (2014: 140), who attempts to align the phenomenological with the symbolic, contending that material properties ‘provide consistent cognitive stimuli and phenomenological experience and encourage recurrent ideas, values and practices’. These properties resonate in cultural interpretations across time and space, so water, for instance, Strang (ibid.) argues, has especially salient qualities that promote particular readings: Water’s core meanings as a life-generating, life-connecting source; as the basis of wealth, health and power; as a transformative medium; and as a metaphorical base for concepts of movement and flow, recur so reliably in different cultural and historical contexts that there is little choice but to conclude that its material properties are relationally formative

In considering stone, properties of endurance, hardness, primordiality and malleability similarly resonate across cultures. The multiple properties and sensory effects of material elements thus engage ‘not only with a complex array of cognitive and sensory processes, but also with all the specificities of particular cultural and historical contexts’ (Strang 2014: 167). The symbolic qualities of stone are especially salient to my analysis of lithic monuments, forms installed into urban landscapes to convey particular meanings and celebrate particular people, events and institutions. Stone memorials certainly possess a material force, have

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been assembled according to particular procedures, serve as fixtures around which everyday activities flow and have shifting material constitutions over time. However, I consider that the most pressing analysis of these stone objects focuses on discerning their meanings. Though the meanings of commemorative forms may become obscure, contested and supplemented by numerous other monumental installations, as has occurred in Melbourne, their production revolves around transmitting nationalist, colonial and subaltern significations, as I discuss in Chapter 5. Perhaps the most influential and controversial group of conceptual perspectives devoted to the analysis of material culture have been those grouped around network thinking, and especially Actor Network Theory (ANT). These ideas have importantly emphasised that things are relational and have agency within the relationships in which they are enrolled. All things, whether human or non-human, are conceived as ‘actants’ capable of mediating with each other in a network (Latour 2005). Thus, ANT sees agency as a distributed achievement, emerging from associations in which things ‘rely on the continued (re)enactment of a set of constitutive relations to subsequently act and afford’ (Anderson and Wylie 2009: 320). Things do not stand alone but gain their function and meaning from their relationships with other entities within a larger network. In considering networks of stone supply and distribution, analysis can usefully identify how suppliers and places of extraction, transport links, politicians, entrepreneurs and state actors, procurers, builders and masons all become entangled and connected. Such a network perspective underpins an exploration of the complex processes through which stone arrives in the city to constitute its emergent material fabric, as I explore in detail in Chapter 2. Network thinking also facilitates analysis of how specific processes of maintenance and repair are enacted, as discussed in Chapter 4, and how quarrying, demolition and disposal become enrolled in the making of the urban environment, as explored in Chapter 3. Moreover, we can identify how networks of supply, labour, transport and construction that enrol multiple actors are of varying stability and duration and emerge at diverse spatial scales. Indeed, the focus of ANT approaches to providing ‘an explicitly spatial account of how

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relations in an assemblage are drawn together and stabilised’ (Müller and Schurr 2016: 218), with reference to ‘regions, scales, distance and topologies’, is pertinent to much of my investigation into Melbourne’s stone. This perspective also provides ‘a better understanding of the relational achievement of bringing what is far away close and making the closeat-hand appear far away’ (ibid.: 221). An orientation to the importance of the network is accompanied by other approaches that investigate the provenance of objects that become part of everyday life. Notable here is the ‘Follow the Thing’ methodology that critically examines how and why particular commodities arrive in retail outlets and homes, with questions about environmental justice, labour conditions and pricing brought to the fore (Cook 2004). Network analysis further encourages exploration of how networks change and become differently constituted, revealing how successive technological innovations have made significant advances to the shaping of urban materiality (Müller and Schurr 2016). As Chris Otter (2010: 45) notes, at certain historical junctures, ‘specific materials have played a pivotal role in constituting particular forms of western urban systems: wood and stone in the medieval period, iron and coal in the early industrial period, and steel and glass in high modernity’. Over the past few decades, these have been supplemented with ‘the emergence of entirely new synthetic substances – polyester, polystyrene, Bakelite, celluloid, Teflon, superalloys’ (ibid.: 54). This has created increasingly materially variegated urban environments, augmented by the growing diversity and hybridity of building types (Kärrholm 2013). There are clearly great advantages in adopting network perspectives in analysing urban materiality, and yet there are key limitations. Most obviously, the relational ontology deployed by ANT produces reductive and rigid conceptions about objects. In circumscribing their network roles, such approaches fail to give sufficient weight to the specific properties of things, as I discuss below with reference to the notion of the assemblage. Furthermore, ANT rarely focuses on how distinctive forms of power shape who has access to material resources and which alliance of actors are able to create the networks that are organised to build urban environments. This neglect of power is compounded by a focus on how networks are forged and sustained by managerial, scientific and technical procedures, minimising how these practices operate

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to the advantage of particular groups. Though ANT acknowledges the energetic work that continuously goes into the sustenance of rendering networks stable and coherent, there is a lack of focus on such procedures, namely the key activities of repair and maintenance. Finally, ANT’s flattened ontology also minimises the sensory, affective and creative dimensions of human engagement with materialities, although recent accounts have placed greater emphasis on the fluid, multiple and dynamic qualities of networks and the things enrolled within them (Mol and Law 1994). In this book, I adopt a broader conceptual use of networks that is not strictly oriented around ANT to explore the connections that ceaselessly constitute urban materiality. Assemblage theory is concerned with how separate material elements are brought together to compose a building, and once established, allow it to cohere or conversely, fall apart. The emphasis here is on how these components bring their own distinctive ‘properties’ to the assemblage and how these properties align or react with each other in accordance with their ‘capacities’. Following Gilles Deleuze, Ian Shaw (2012: 621) insists that all objects are characterised by their differential capacities to affect and be affected by other things: ‘they force themselves upon each other – reducing, reshaping, channelling, annihilating, eroding, fusing, scouring, electrifying’. A focus on the capacities of these elements—the ways in which they are affected by and affect each other—attends to the shifting qualities of a building assemblage over time and stresses how all things emerge in accordance with these often unpredictable relations (DeLanda 2006). As Chris Dittmer (2014: 387) contends, while ‘the properties of a material are relatively finite’, the capacities are key since they ‘they are the result of interaction with an infinite set of other components’. Karen Barad (2007) demurs, stating that there is no such thing as an independent property for this is always dependent on the other things that it affects or is affected by, that this is invariably relational. However, Veronica Strang (2014) maintains that material properties do pertain and possess identifiable consistencies. For instance, granite is durable and difficult to work with mallet and chisel, soft sandstone exhibits a granularity that can be sensed through touch and bricks are able to be manually manipulated and readily piled on top of each other. Such lithic constancies endure over time irrespective of cultural contexts.

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Assemblage thinking is especially useful for investigating how buildings, as kinds of material assemblages, are processes, always emergent; at a larger scale, it is an approach that is able to acknowledge ‘the spatially processual, relational and generative nature of the city’ (McFarlane 2011: 650–651). Things continuously change: one component ‘can be working to territorialize the assemblage at any given moment, and soon thereafter exercise a capacity to deterritorialize it’ (ibid.). An emphasis on emergence underpins a processual perspective that accentuates fluidity, adaptation and conjoining rather than determinate form, and an ongoing tension between stabilisation and destabilisation. Things can be disassembled and reassembled, things from other assemblages can be incorporated into new assemblages, or assemblages can cohere or fall apart without any human intervention. A long-stable building may become characterised by ‘excess, flux, and transformation’ (McFarlane 2011: 654), calling for innovation and improvisation, or demolition. A once territorialised entity may suddenly become deterritorialised but may subsequently be reterritorialised by changing its function and material composition. These aspects are especially salient to the focus in Chapter 2, in which I focus on the continuous reassembly of Melbourne through the importation of lithic matter to construct buildings, and in Chapter 4, where I consider how practices of repair and maintenance attend to the disruptions and eruptions that periodically emerge in one stone building. The spatial contexts of assemblage theories tend to focus on the local compilation of materials brought from elsewhere to constitute a particular assemblage; they may therefore neglect to acknowledge larger power structures. However, Colin McFarlane (2011: 655) counters such assertions, suggesting that ‘the urban assemblage is structured, hierarchised, and narrativised through profoundly unequal relations of power, resource, and knowledge’. As such, an assemblage approach can foreground how forms of material inequality and processes of accumulation and dispossession are continuously produced, replaced and contested. Such a perspective can attend to ‘why and how multiple bits-and-pieces accrete and align over time to enable particular forms of urbanism over others’ (ibid.), for instance, perhaps identifying the unequal relations that inhere in architectural practices, contractual negotiations over stone supply, and government regulatory policies about quarrying. This can

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also foreground the shifting political ideas that influence how cities are materially assembled, from colonialist and welfarist strategies, to globally transmitted ideas about culture-led regeneration. But at a smaller scale, the urban might also be reassembled by migrant cultures or oppositional groups who engage in creative practices that produce material forms in space. The popularity of assemblage thinking has emerged along with a theoretical perspective usually labelled the new materialism that further critiques notions that matter is inert and seeks to realign human relationship with vital non-human things. Jane Bennett (2010) emphasises that materials are not static entities that passively wait for human intervention to catalyse them but are inherently active. Matter is unpredictable and shifting, ‘turbulent, interrogative and excessive’ (Anderson and Wylie 2009: 332). As Latham and McCormack write (2004: 707), emergent materials produce a cityscape that ‘is an ongoing outcome of the interaction between a myriad of small-scale self-organizing processes that are not determined by a central controlling or decision-making unit’. This decentres the human decisions that have been integral to the assembly of a building while acknowledging them, in favour of foregrounding the complex human-nonhuman relations that continuously emerge irrespective of human practices. Such issues are explored in Chapter 4 where the agencies of component materials in an esteemed building instigate human practices of repair. A new materialist focus also questions the status of the separate object, the thing that seemingly stands apart from all else, by accentuating its processual becoming. Tim Ingold (2010: 3) considers that though it may stand before us ‘as a fait accompli, presenting its congealed, outer surfaces to our inspection and seems to be defined by its very “overagainstness” in relation to the setting in which it is placed’, a thing is ‘a knot whose constituent threads, far from being contained within it, trail beyond, only to become caught with other threads in other knots’. In a question pertinent to this study, he rhetorically asks, Surely, you will say, the stone is an object. Yet it so only if we artificially excise it from the processes of erosion and deposition that brought it there and lent it the size and shape that it presently has

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These considerations further entreat us to recognise how the lithic has absorbed that which formerly lived, for instance, as evidenced in the small marine fossils evident in forms of limestone, and in a different state also fosters life as a key constituent of soil, wherein the ‘geo merges and mingles with the bio’ (Instone 2019: 367). The segregation of living and non-living things cannot account for such dynamic, processual admixtures. This is notably evident in those forms of matter that have been disposed and lie beneath the surface, where the ‘apparent passivity and unresponsiveness of the inhuman subsurface realm is revealed as surprisingly active, vibrant and fluid’ (ibid.), as I explore further in Chapter 5. Here, as Instone (ibid.) asserts, the surface should be conceived as an interface, and ‘enmeshed in, above and below ground biological and geological relational networks’ generate multiple processes that will ultimately intrude on a surface. Though some suggest that such strands of post-humanist thought are apolitical, Karen Barad (2007: 69) argues that new political potentialities can emerge by ‘taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are part, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities’. She calls for a heightened awareness of the power asymmetries between humans, and between humans and non-humans. This has the potential to instantiate a new humility towards non-humans in contradistinction to assumptions that the material world has ‘crystallised out as a solid and homogeneous precipitate, awaiting its differentiation through the superimposition of cultural form’ (Ingold 2010: 8). Yet there is also a danger that the emphasis on the vital and dynamic obscures how material forms do assume a durable form over time, at least in terms of how they are perceived, sensed and used by humans. As Fowler and Harris (2015: 128) contend, to conceive material things ‘as an ever-changing bundle of relations, to emphasise the way they are constantly fluid and in flux… risks preventing us from understanding how material culture comes to endure’. A judicious perspective acknowledges that imperceptible, energetic and molecular processes continuously alter materials while also recognising that other forces are concerned with ordering the material world through creating and reproducing assemblages, and of securing things against entropy through perpetual upkeep (Merriman 2019).

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This brings me to a consideration of phenomenological and postphenomenological approaches to materiality. Through the perspective of its most influential practitioner, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2007), phenomenological thought emphasises that the body is the primary site of knowing the world, a corporeal know-how that disavows assertions that the conscious mind is the fount of knowledge. This moves away from the assumption that a subject exists prior to experience towards the notion that a subject comes to be through experience. As Anderson and Wylie (2009: 324) put it, embodied ‘perception and sensation is thus an incorporation of matter into the connective tissues and affective planes of a body subject whose ambit is involvement and engagement, rather than a detached gaze in which materiality stiffens into objectivity’. David Seamon (1979), adopting a more spatially oriented perspective, argues that space is experienced and known through purposeful and sensible embodied action rather than by practices informed by conscious intentions. Phenomenologists thus contend that the material world and the body cannot be disentangled from each other. Despite this, phenomenological thought has been critiqued for actually perpetuating a division between the perceiving subject and that which is perceived; that what is overemphasised is human perception and action. However, Ash and Simpson (2016: 52) commend phenomenology for offering ‘a constitutive openness to the alterity of the other’, the thing that is encountered. Critically, this opens the door to post-phenomenological theories that place greater ‘emphasis on perpetual processes of subject formation’ (Ash and Simpson 2016: 56) and grant a greater role to the material agency that is downplayed in much phenomenological thought. In the important work of John Wylie (2006), encounters with landscape and things are shaped by the materialities and sensibilities with which we see, touch, smell and hear. These interactions are irrefutably relational and shift continually, provoking pleasure, avoidance, disgust and comfort, for instance. Critically, post-phenomenological thought also considers that material agencies continuously unfold in the absence of humans. As Ash and Simpson (2016: 60) aver, by taking seriously the autonomy of objects, ‘post-phenomenology can begin to investigate relations between non-human objects without reducing these relations to how they appear to human beings’.

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Nonetheless, things that we encounter can powerfully solicit feelings and actions: ‘from the first we detect, in materialities and liquidities, in telluric, celestial, and organic processes, imperatives to action which guide, imply, and ordain corporeal sensibilities’ (Anderson and Wylie 2009: 325). These spurs to action raise James Gibson’s (1979) concept of the affordance: what an object affords to a perceiver or agent, how it stimulates different actions inspired by the possibilities that seem to inhere in it. In Chapter 6, I discuss how the affordances of stone shape the sensory and affective experiences of those who live and move through Melbourne, with a particular focus on the diverse, changing affordances of texture and colour of different kinds of stone surfaces and structures. The phenomenological turn away from the symbolic is countered by Charles Tilly (2004: 224), who acknowledges that we also need to investigate ‘the hermeneutics of interpretation’ and ‘metaphoric and metonymic linkages between things’. For instance, though in modern times, stone is characteristically considered as a resource to be exploited for economic gain or as an object of scientific enquiry, other cultures across space and time have adopted different perspectives. In such cultures, as Nicole Boivin (2004: 2) maintains, stones and minerals are ‘symbolically meaningful, ritually powerful, and deeply interwoven (with)… social, cosmological, mythical, spiritual and philosophical aspects of life’. Critically, such understandings sense the lithic as animate and imbued with lively and spiritual energies, chiming with current depictions of vital matter. This contrasts with the common metaphor that possession of a ‘heart of stone’ signifies lifelessness. In exemplifying these lively and symbolic interpretations, Alex Brumm (2004) details how Aboriginal understandings of materials such as ochre and quartz are conceived as the blood, bones and internal organs of ancestors, and ritual practices reinforce such associations. Indeed, Paul Taçon (2004) explains that painting the body with ochre is a sensuous, fun-filled, pleasurable, social occasion. Aboriginal cultures have also associated geological materials with distinctive identities (Brumm 2004), for example, with properties of durability and hardness synonymous with age and wisdom. Here, stony matter is associated with the body, with which it becomes physically intimate through allusions and the sensuous

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experience of materiality: quartz is carried and concealed about the person, greenstone is quarried and sharpened, ochre is deployed to adorn the body as transformative practice (Boivin 2004). Emphatically, these emblematic meanings resonate with the material properties of stone and the ways in which these are sensed. Despite these cultural practices of entwining feeling and meaning, phenomenological accounts have tended to overlook the highly specific ways in which the senses are culturally produced. As Susan Stewart (1999: 18) insists, the senses are ‘cumulative and accomplished, rather than given’; they do not provide unmediated access to the world. Similarly, Constance Classen contends that, ‘(W)e not only think about our senses, we think through them’ (1993: 9, her italics); that is, we perceive according to norms which prescribe what is sensually desirable and acceptable, and what is repulsive and should be avoided. This reveals how sensory attention is directed towards particular objects according to cultural conventions and preferences, and how sensory experiences are diversely assessed in terms of value. This, as I will explore, is integral to ways in which different Australians might sensorially experience, understand and value aspects of the city. Despite the specificity of the human sensorium and its capacity to create sensory commonalities that diverge from how non-human creatures apprehend the world, sensing the material world does not produce universal understandings or experiences. In considering the shaping of sensory values and effects, and the distribution of affordances across the city to produce the conditions for sensory apprehension, the work of Jacques Rancière (2009: 13) is significant. His important notion of ‘the distribution of the sensible’, he explains, ‘revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time’. It is crucial to recognise how sensual realms are partly forged through the ways in which the powerful delineate what is seen and unseen, smelled, heard and touched. An awareness of this influence on how we become attuned to the materiality of the city aligns with my focus on the distribution of urban materialities. Yet besides acknowledging the production of sensory environments by the powerful, I also want to more broadly attend to the different

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ways in which people engage with the material world, to foreground their agency. Accordingly, I explore how they sensorially and affectively experience, understand and engage with objects and matter in dissimilar ways. Besides the different bodily capacities that expand or limit sensory engagements with particular material affordances, a prolonged engagement with certain materials can foster a deep, intimate, skilled knowing. The study of such practices, as I undertake in Chapter 7, further demolishes any materialist essentialisms, for by examining very different artisanal ways of working with stone, I demonstrate how different embodied skills and sensory knowing are acquired through divergent immersive practices over time. Here, stone is known, sensed and worked with in very different ways. Though this book does not take a geological perspective, several themes that emerge from this field are pertinent and need to be acknowledged. While legacies of certain kinds of uplift, folding and sedimentation may endure across topographies over many millions of years, more recent events such as floods, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes may instantaneously transform landscapes, and leave little trace of former geological processes that lasted for millennia. In accounting for these divergencies, Gary Brierley (2010: 81) considers that ‘all landscapes have a partial or selective memory of past events and processes’; each uniquely possesses a distinctive array of fragmentary evidence from the past. In this context, ‘Australia is an old, low relief landscape that retains an extensive memory of influences from the past’. In Melbourne, much of the city in built on a rather more recent, extensive volcanic plain that deviates from the very old sedimentary strata and older volcanic peaks that are also scattered across its surrounding landscapes. These geological contexts are important in identifying the kinds of stone that lies beneath the city and furnish it with building materials, but in addition, though the science of geology is complicit in the separation of non-human ‘nature’ and the human world, it is in reality thoroughly entangled with it. For as Clark et al. (2018) assert, magma may have contained some of the elements essential for biological life, rendering stone from earth’s interior inseparable from ‘biological becoming’. Jagged volcanic terrain, they consider, also offered affordances for concealment and shelter for early creatures. Moreover, as Sarah Moss (2018: 30) maintains, ‘liquid fire-rock seeps and bubbles below our feet’

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and in places where the crust is thin, threatens to burst out. We live with stone in the landscapes we inhabit, with mountains, outcrops and glacial erratics, and underneath the urban ground upon which we walk. In conceiving stone as other to the living we might forget that as Robert Macfarlane (2019: 37) notes, we ‘are part mineral beings too… and there is a geology of the body as well as of the land’. He elaborates that it is ‘mineralization – the ability to convert calcium into bone – that allows us to walk upright, to be vertebrate, to fashion the skulls that shield our brains’. In a different vein, as I discuss below and in the conclusion to this book, human entanglements with the geological extend to the ongoing production of lithic matter, material that is a key signifier of the Anthropocene. As Matthew Gandy (2018: 97) remarks, extensive urbanisation is producing a ‘future stratigraphic record marked by a distinctive melange of burrowings and material traces’. Living with stone demands recognition of these ongoing entanglements between the geologic, the social and the biological. Accordingly, thinking about the geological can be expanded to engender ‘new kinds of knowledge production and politics, culture, and lifestyles’ that honours ‘the lively, vital and fluid intra-action between the human, nonhuman and inhuman realms’ (Instone 2019: 364), and acknowledges how they co-constitute the emergent places we inhabit. As I discuss at greater length in Chapter 8, the temporalities through which stone emerges, lingers and is dissolved, the massive durations and incrementally accumulating processes of lithic change, are beyond the capacity of humans to experience, even grasp. Yet geological processes of reassembling, layering and fracturing are currently being co-produced by humans. For across the Earth, many areas of humanly modified ground contain materials absent in earlier geological compositions. Pottery, glass, brick, tile, metal alloys and plastics join the ‘anthropic rocks’ (Cathcart 2011) such as concrete and tarmac that are constituents of new geological strata. As Matt Edgeworth (2016: 106) claims, in the future, ‘material traces of present-day human activity – extracted out of the mesh of bodily relations, social networks, world-wide-web and electricity grid – will be preserved in a new configuration of stratigraphic relations’. ~~~

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In the above discussion of different theories of materiality, it is clear that all have limitations, but all also possess particular attributes that are useful in exploring the particular themes explored in the separate chapters of this book. Accordingly, in order to substantively investigate the multiplicity and complexity of urban lithic materiality, I shift between different theoretical perspectives, following Fowler and Harris’s maxim (2015: 145) that, ‘modulating between modes – continually reconfiguring phenomena in varying ways – is vital to exploring what things are and can be’. These conceptual limitations also make it evident that a wholly comprehensive grasp of the attributes of things will invariably remain elusive. This recognition resonates with the arguments about the limits of relational thinking expressed from the perspective of object-oriented ontology (OOO) that a thing’s entanglement in webs of relations can never exhaust its autonomy, for things ‘always exhibit a surplus, something that is outside relations, and enables them to plug into other assemblages’ (Müller and Schurr 2016: 220). Similarly, Ian Shaw (2012: 621) asserts that although ‘objects affect one another, that affecting does not exhaust the potential range of affects possible’. Certainly, the ways in which materialities and objects are subject to human use, perception and meaning are always likely to obscure their ‘hidden qualities, dormant aspects, and effects not yet seen (or perhaps never to be seen)’ (Kärrholm 2013: 1117). Matt Edgeworth (2016: 95) contributes to this line of thought by claiming that a ‘focus on a specific affordance … inevitably sends others receding back into the shadows, or never reaches into the object’s inner core to trouble all those other possible affordances in the first place’. Moreover, this raises the possibility that material affordances unrecognised by humans may be essential to non-humans who seek shelter, nourishment, safety or conditions for growth. Nonetheless, while the inscrutability of things is aptly recognised by object-oriented ontology, their construal as autonomous seems overstated since as I have discussed, they continuously evolve, dissolve or meld with other material substances. The sidelining of these processual qualities, according to Edgeworth (2016: 98), means that such thinking about things ‘leaves behind time itself ’. Consequently, Edgeworth (ibid.: 100) suggests, ‘the objects of OOO can sometimes appear by comparison too

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solid, too closed, too well-defined, too static, too spatially and temporally bounded, too unified, too autonomous, too neatly separated off from other things’. Critically, this denial of time, as Fowler and Harris (2015: 131) assert, ‘does not account for the historic relations’ that have produced objects at the point that we encounter them. This acknowledgement allows us to both understand the constitutive role of relations in producing the material world and recognise the unknowable potentialities that inhere in any object.

Chapter Outlines I thus honour the mysterious dimensions of things, but I also seek to explore the multiple and dynamics relations within which they are entangled—with meanings and uses, power and values, other things and nonhuman agencies. Accordingly, this book investigates the multiple ways in which stone is and has been entangled with the city of Melbourne, and as such, adopts a multi-perspectival theoretical approach. Chapter 2 considers how the city is continuously assembled and reassembled by the lithic matter that flows into it from elsewhere. The differently scaled networks of varying duration through which the built environment of Melbourne has grown and changed since the late 1830s were preceded by Aboriginal flows of stone. Drawing on network and assemblage thinking, I explore how these flows have been constituted at colonial, local, regional, national and global scales and identify how they have been shaped by unpredictable and shifting cultural, technological, economic and political factors. The chapter is organised around the most distinctive forms of stone and lithic matter that continue to reconstitute Melbourne, moving from sandstone and basalt, to brick and concrete. Chapter 3 considers how the city is transformed and replenished by four interlinked processes: quarrying, demolition, disposal and the remediation of landfill sites. Developing the analysis of stone supply in Chapter 2, I elaborate further on the production of distinctive, historic and emergent geographies of stone extraction to supply the material for Melbourne’s ongoing construction. Yet the city does not only build, it destroys, and a subsequent analysis of demolition practices discusses how

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lithic matter—and the buildings composed from it—are always liable to become devalued according to changing political, economic and architectural approaches. The stony rubble produced by demolition needs to be disposed and conveniently, the many quarries that have supplied the building material for the city continue to serve as sites for landfill. Landfill technologies and practices have changed, and I investigate how this has impacted upon the destiny of those former quarries that have been used as sites of disposal, noting occasional hazards and accidents. I also explore how quarries have variously come to serve as sites of recreation, conservation, building development and creative practice following landfill or instead of it. Finally, I examine how these redesignated former quarries require remediation, a practice characterised by contesting ideas and increasingly sophisticated landscaping approaches. The practices of repair and maintenance through which stone buildings endure is the focus of Chapter 4. The analysis concentrates on one extraordinary building, Melbourne University’s Newman College, and explores how its friable material constitution has required constant attention since it was completed in 1918. Assemblage theories are especially pertinent in highlighting the multiple agencies that have continuously wrought material transformations and solicited strategies of maintenance and repair, critical practices in reproducing the material world. I identify how different repair techniques have been mobilised at different times. These efforts have solicited invention, experimentation and testing, and I show how they have also been surrounding by contesting aesthetic and technical approaches. In contextualising the discussion, I emphasise that such practices involve the forging of new supportive networks and associations, as well as the assignation of value to particular buildings to ensure that they endure. Chapter 5 examines how stone has been deployed in the distribution of memorials in the city. As elsewhere, nineteenth-century marble and bronze figures on elevated stone plinths continue to occupy public space. I examine how in Melbourne, these colonial installations have been supplemented by equally selective twentieth-century nationalist commemorative forms, thus signifying power in the city’s landscape. Since the Second World War, a plethora of alternative, subaltern and oppositional

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memorials has decentred but not replaced these authoritative monuments, and I argue that they have multiplied the representational and textual meanings across urban space. In investigating the meanings and ideologies encoded in these diverse stony creations, I consider how these hylomorphic commemorative endeavours contrast with Aboriginal ways of understanding how memory is embodied by already existing lithic forms in the landscape. The focus changes in Chapters 6 and 7 to explore the sensory and affective relationships engendered by encounters with stone, drawing on ideas from non-representational, phenomenological and postphenomenological thinking. Chapter 6 examines how the lithic composition of Melbourne offers a host of distinctive affordances that solicit particular practices and experiences. Particular attention is paid to how the tactile affordances of stone in the city cajole bodies into particular kinds of performances that vary from functional to playful. In addition, the ways in which light reflects on stone to generate particular experiences of colour are shown to be especially distinctive with regard to Melbourne’s dark bluestone. These considerations foreground the nonrepresentational apprehensions of routine practice and emphasise that though the affective and sensory experience of materiality is often difficult to access, it constitutes an integral role in shaping how people come to know, live and belong in a place. Chapter 7 continues with this sensory and affective perspective but concentrates on the sustained, intimate engagements through which artisans and artists come to know, feel and love the stone with which they work. Here, working with stone generates a skilled and sensuous knowing rather than a cognitive, scientific appraisal of lithic qualities. I draw on and extend thinking about practices of skilled work, especially attending to practices of touch, to examine the heightened attunements to materiality that these artisans achieve. In focusing upon those who skilfully work with stone in very different ways—quarriers, masons, sculptors, lithographers, flint-knappers, performance artists and stonebalancers—I further account for stone’s multiple affordances and potentialities and its capacities to generate sensuous and affective experiences. Finally, as I have discussed above, the myriad qualities, understandings, resonances and associations of stone can be investigated by adopting

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particular theoretical approaches—but only partially. For stone remains enigmatic, mysterious, ineffable. Accordingly, nine vignettes are included throughout the book in between each of the chapters to expand my focus. Chapter 8 more acutely considers how we might account for these qualities without reducing stone to an analytical object, by telling stories about the peculiar absences, residues, traces and juxtapositions that litter urban space as part of its multi-temporal materiality. I explore how stone haunts Melbourne in many ways: though ancient geological origins, Aboriginal traces, outmoded memorials, phantom networks, discarded fashions, worked surfaces, lithic things that return and objects that seem out of place. Encounters with such eerie, weird, inexplicable stony things seem to thwart understanding but they nonetheless, stimulate the telling of speculative narratives.

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Latham, A., & McCormack, D. (2004). Moving Cities: Rethinking the Materialities of Urban Geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 28(6), 701–724. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macfarlane, R. (2019). Underland: A Deep Time Journey. London: Hamish Hamilton. McFarlane, C. (2011). The City as Assemblage: Dwelling and Urban Space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29 (4), 649–671. Merriman, P. (2019). Molar and Molecular Mobilities: The Politics of Perceptible and Imperceptible Movements. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37 (1), 65–82. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2007). The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Boston: Northwestern University Press. Mol, A., & Law, J. (1994). Regions, Networks and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology. Social Studies of Science, 24, 641–671. Moss, S. (2018). Whinstone, Northumberland. In M. Smalley (Ed.), Cornerstones: Subterranean Writings. Little Toller, Dorset: Little Toller Books. Müller, M., & Schurr, C. (2016). Assemblage Thinking and Actor-Network Theory: Conjunctions, Disjunctions, Cross-Fertilisations. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41(3), 217–229. Otter, C. (2010). Locating Matter: The Place of Materiality in Urban History. In T. Bennett & P. Joyce (Eds.), Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn. London: Routledge. Rancière, J. (2009). Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press. Seamon, D. (1979). A Geography of the Lifeworld. London: Croom Helm. Shaw, I. (2012). Towards an Evental Geography. Progress in Human Geography, 36 (5), 613–627. Smalley, M. (2018). Introduction. In M. Smalley (Ed.), Cornerstones: Subterranean Writings. Little Toller, Dorset: Little Toller Books. Stewart, S. (1999). Prologue: From the Museum of Touch. In M. Kwint, C. Breward, & J. Aynsley (Eds.), Material Memories: Designs and Evocation. Oxford: Berg. Strang, V. (2014). Fluid Consistencies: Material Relationality in Human Engagements with Water. Archaeological Dialogues, 21(2), 150–153. Taçon, P. (2004). Ochre, Clay, Stone and Art. In N. Boivin & M. Owoc (Eds.), Soils, Stones and Symbols: Cultural Perceptions of the Mineral World. London: UCL.

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Tilly, C. (2004). The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology. Oxford: Berg. Tsing, A. (2013). Sorting Out Commodities: How Capitalist Value Is Made Through Gifts. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(1), 21–43. Wylie, J. (2006). Depths and Folds: On Landscape and the Gazing Subject. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24 (4), 519–535.

Part II Tomb

A poignant example of maintaining cherished geographical connections in an era of settler colonialism, is a fine gravestone located in a scrubby burial ground on the outskirts of Melbourne. Alongside the busy Hume Highway as it passes through Campbellfield is the Scots Church, a solid, squat, plain Presbyterian place of worship built in 1855 to serve the spiritual needs of the city’s first Scottish settlers. Surrounding the church is a graveyard, established a few years earlier. In this cemetery amidst the spindly eucalypts is the burial place of one of these nineteenth century Scottish migrants, John Watt. He was born in Ballater, Aberdeenshire, in 1810, and emigrated to Australia in 1860.1 His gravestone stands resplendent against the decaying sandstone and marble tombstones that surround it. It is wrought from a glistening red granite that was sourced from a quarry in Boddam, close to the north-eastern Scottish fishing port of Peterhead.2 John Watt brought this memorial stone with him when he left the land of his birth and migrated by sea to Melbourne, a lithic reminder 1Thanks

to Susan Walter for bringing this to my attention. am grateful to Andrew Blaikie and Caroline Paterson for identifying the source of the gravestone.

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of the land that he had known all his life. It was later marked with the inscription 1860 THE BURYING GROUND OF JOHN WATT OAKFIELD On the opposite side of the tomb, it is recorded: SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN WATT DIED JUNE 8TH 1880 AGED 69 YEARS Realising he would never return to Scotland, he could at least make sure that in this foreign domain he was buried beneath a small part of his homeland, a polished granite gravestone.

Part II: Tomb

Fig. 1 Tomb of John Watt, Scots Church, Campbellfield

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Introduction The city is continuously reconstituted by a whirl of imported and disposed matter, stuff that is put in place or transported away, a perpetually emerging assemblage that is depleted, supplemented and restored at daily, annual, centennial and millennial scales. Imported matter includes the restocking of commodities in retail outlets, the keepsakes and functional objects brought into homes, the street fixtures that adorn public spaces, the accretions deposited by rivers, wind, plants and animals, and the construction materials imported to replenish and extend the built environment. Exported matter involves the manufactured products distributed to storage depots elsewhere, the objects taken by people when they move home, the erosive material that is carried away by wind and water, and the disposal of substances that are no longer valued. Despite this ferment of mobility and mutation, certain material elements convey an impression of durability and consistency: stone, concrete and brick. However, this apparent durability blinds us to the dynamism of lithic substances and the volatile processes through which the city is continually brought into a state of material becoming. © The Author(s) 2020 T. Edensor, Stone, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1_2

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In this chapter, I investigate the differently scaled networks of varying duration through which lithic matter has been imported into Melbourne to sustain its ongoing reproduction. This story has taken many twists and turns and includes multiple flows, numerous substances and various fashions. I explore how successive connections have been forged with other places that supply stony material and how these networks have been shaped by unpredictable, shifting cultural, economic and political vicissitudes. I identify key decisions, processes and events that have shaped how and why stone has been imported into the city in seeking to answer a series of questions. Why have certain stony building materials been deemed preferable to others at particular times and why have other lithic supplies fallen out of fashion? Which political and economic imperatives decree which particular buildings at particular times are considered worthy of preservation or demolition? What planning and architectural ideas are imposed upon the city and how does this influence which stony material is used for construction? I begin by sketching out a theoretical basis for my enquiry before focusing on the key elements of Melbourne’s stony fabric and the diverse social, economic and historical factors that have drawn them into the city. First, I focus on the circulation of stone during pre-colonial settler times and discuss how patterns of distribution of stone tools were characterised by very different network spatialities to those forged in colonial and post-colonial eras. Second, I explore the early importation of stone from various colonial sources and the subsequent emergence of extensive local building stone supplies, notably Victorian basalt, sandstone and granite, along with local brick. Third, I discuss the declining popularity of these materials with the rise of post-war modernist desires that favoured steel, glass and concrete and examine how the growth of heritage as a central marker of place-identity has led to a renewed usage and appreciation of bluestone. The chapter concludes by examining the current global constitution of supply networks.

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The Changing Constitution of Material Flows Human-generated flows are small in comparison with the vast earth processes through which stone perpetually circulates. Lava erupts from within the earth, flows across the land and cools to form new layers of stone or catalyses pre-existing material to form new stony compounds. Rivers deposit granular sediments from eroded stone in new stratigraphic configurations and wind blows fine grains that settle on surfaces and sink into soil. The human-generated movements of stone from one place to another add to these complex circulations and contribute to the dramatic earth-shaping processes of the Anthropocene. A consideration of how and why things come together and stick together in place can be usefully explored through the figure of the assemblage, introduced in the previous chapter and also discussed in Chapter 4. Manuel DeLanda (2006) foregrounds the ongoing constitution of all entities, wherein assemblages are constituted at different scales. For instance, a brick belongs to an assemblage of various other substances that constitute a house, while a collection of houses contributes to a larger urban assemblage. Both are always being ‘assembled and reassembled in changing configurations’ (Sheller and Urry 2006: 216). As an especially dynamic concept, the assemblage departs from recursive notions about places that assign them a particular and enduring genius loci, each with their own unique, identifiable specificities that distinguish them from other places. Instead, the assemblage foregrounds multiplicity and flux in the ongoing composition of the world, implicitly addressing Doreen Massey’s (1993) critique of reductive assumptions that places are bounded, ‘space-envelopes’ containing distinctive practices, cultures and features. Her ‘progressive’ sense of place is construed as constituted by routes rather than roots, wherein place is produced by social and spatial interconnections. John Urry also emphasises how cities are ‘economically, politically and culturally produced through multiple networked mobilities of capital, persons, objects, signs and information’ (2006: ix), while Maria Kaika contends that cities are best understood as ‘dense networks of socio-spatial processes that are simultaneously human, material, natural, discursive, cultural and organic’ (2005: 22). In recent times, the

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complexity of these connectivities, including material linkages, has intensified, proliferated and become denser. As John Tomlinson asserts, this is primarily due to the logic of capital accumulation as it responds to global conditions in which businesses, politicians and bureaucrats must ‘respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions’ (2000: 2), a feature of contemporary stone supply that I discuss later. As these notions infer, the daily reproduction of the city involves the incessant supply of matter to produce an ever-changing material fabric around which social practices change or are re-enacted. Yet the networks through which the city keeps functioning—the canals, sewers, electricity cables and radio waves, the daily (re)assembly of the city’s infrastructure and the supply of goods, information and materials—are typically taken for granted. In considering the material flows that connect places, Amin and Thrift (2002: 22) foreground ‘the spatial and temporal porosity of the city’ to emphasise the multi-scalar origins of the heterogeneous urban assemblage, disrupting ‘bipolar logics of the local and the global’ (Sheller and Urry 2006: 216). Materials carried by these flows are ‘stitched into place by fragmented, multi-scaled and multi-sited networks of association’ (Jacobs 2006: 3). As Robert Sack declares, the ‘flows through space are the strands from places that are woven and re-woven to become elements in yet other places’ (2004: 248). In the case of stone, cities are continuously reconstituted through their ever-changing connections with geological resources from other places. In supplementing materials from numerous sources, including wood, clay, tiles, plaster, glass, plastic, iron and steel, copper, piping and wiring, stone adds to the urban assemblage, the historical exploration of which can highlight the diversity of the enduring and changing materialities of the city (Edensor 2009). As I will explore, Melbourne has been assembled with materials that derive from multiple origins, yet regular consistencies reveal enduring connections between the city and other places. This exemplifies Sheller and Urry’s contention that supply networks may be ‘tightly coupled with complex, enduring, and predictable connections between peoples, objects, and technologies across multiple and distant spaces and times’ (2006: 216) but at other times they may be

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unpredictable, volatile and unreliable. In Melbourne, some stone supply networks have been momentary while others have been prolonged. Established connections are liable to be rapidly superseded as commercial relationships break up, new supply sources are discovered or old ones dry up, companies go bankrupt, new deals are made, or building materials deteriorate or become unfashionable. In Melbourne, flows of stony material have accelerated and expanded under conditions of economic prosperity and urban regeneration and slowed down during periods of recession. Such flows are uneven across the city, with the fabric of especially prosperous districts rapidly changing whereas in poorer areas, ageing buildings may be patched up or left to decay. Stone supply chains are thus provoked into being by a host of factors, what Bruce Braun calls ‘imbroglios that mix together politics, machines, organisms, law, standards and grades, taste and aesthetics’ (2006: 647). These factors include changing architectural fashions and styles, building techniques, cost, technologies of transport and quarrying and stone masonry, local politics in the sites of supply and destination, labour supply and quantity of resource required. Yet volatility does not always ensue. As Moran et al. (2016: 416) note, the mundane processes of ‘commissioning, procurement, tendering, consortia-building and negotiation’ typify the somewhat systematic processes through which ‘costefficient, robust,unglamorous’, standardised buildings such as prisons, retail parks, warehouses and call centres are assembled. Yet, invariably, as stone is imported from other places to stabilise building assemblages or construct new buildings, fresh connections emerge while old links may vanish, become dormant or be rekindled. This highlights how ‘processes of decoupling and modifying relations and positions’ might occur as well strategies to keep ‘the possibility of reconnection open’ (Callon and Law 2004: 9) when supply ceases. In a British context, but addressing an almost universal historical process, Graham Lott (2008) explains that before the eighteenth century, the stone used for the buildings and material infrastructure of most places was overwhelmingly local, as confirmed by the evidence of medieval quarries adjacent to many villages. The only quarries able to achieve wider distribution were those sited next to navigable river systems or

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the sea. As Veronica Strang declares, ‘how things move is also a fundamentally material business, dependent upon the physical characteristics of the resource in question and on technologies of transport’, and she emphasises that ‘substantial materials such as stone and timber require stalwart oxen, large trucks or hefty ships’ (2014: 142–143). Critically, the advent of the industrial revolution and the subsequent development of canal and rail networks made it possible for many growing towns and cities to access better quality building materials than those that were locally available. The economic efficiency of transport links and technologies continues to determine which sources of stone supply are cut adrift, which remain connected and which are newly forged, with the rise of shipping container and cargo technology expanding contemporary options enormously, as I discuss below. These transport technologies are supplemented by contemporary communication technologies that allow bulk orders from far and wide to be instantly enacted. Equally important for the emergence and disappearance of material flows into the city are the architectural fads that dictate which kinds of stone are deemed fashionable; in an era in which stones can be supplied in multiple shapes and dimensions, the current choices available to tastemakers are enormous. No longer constrained by limits about the sizes of building block and kind of dressing that may be used, contemporary technologies that cut stone into thin veneers to clad large structures have promoted multiple possibilities for architects. Yet practical questions of cost and political considerations also remain pertinent, including imperatives to use local or more sustainable stone sources, and circumvent questionable labour or environmental practices. Amin and Thrift characterise the mobilisation of power in cities as comprising a shifting array of agents, including those who represent political, corporate, lobbyist, technical, bureaucratic, infrastructural and planning interests, and this means that decisions and policies tend to be ‘distributed, coalitional and heterogeneous’ (2017: 16). Sometimes, relationships between all parties concerned with the supply, transport and transaction of material may be predictable and comfortable, militating against the forging of new arrangements. However, powerful new coalitions may organise new connections that come to prevail. The relationships between sites of supply and large, politically and economically

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powerful cities such as Melbourne are invariably imbalanced with decisions made by urban elites having the potential to render obsolete industries such as quarrying that are critical to rural economies. Such considerations emphasise how the city plays a powerful role in reconfiguring the material, economic and social constitution of other places within networks of extraction and supply. Though an abundance of globally sourced stone is available to a highly connected city such as Melbourne, unlike many other urban centres where good building material has had to be imported, the city has been blessed with a variety of local stone (Edensor 2011). Thus, Melbourne is materially composed out of large quantities of locally sourced bluestone, granite and sandstone, supplemented by vast quantities of locally produced brick. Yet despite these stony consistencies, the city’s built environment has also always been materially variegated and is becoming more so. In this sense, it diverges from sites that possess a more homogeneous constitution. This is most glaring in Kapadokia in Turkey, where material resource and building coincide in place: the city literally emerges from the underlying rock, with buildings carved out of the stone in situ. The lithic variety of Melbourne is composed of locally supplied stone with material from further afield. The variegated assemblage of the city charts the expansion and changing of the city’s connections through which Melbourne perpetually emerges as an increasingly diverse composition, with material drawn from varied historic sources and miscellaneous contemporary sites of supply. Indeed, stone combines with a host of other materials—brick, slate, tarmac, plastic, concrete, mortar, wood, glass and steel—to produce an ever-more complex palimpsest of increasingly diverse materials derived from sources at ever-greater spatial scales and following advances in information, transport and extraction technologies. For Ian Hodder (2012), the evolution of this ever-increasing material complexity is located in antiquity; he depicts how the accelerating production of different kinds of bricks at the ancient city of Catalhuyuk already signifies the process whereby innovative production techniques generate a swelling, complex array of materials and assemblages, as well as increasingly elaborate relationships between humans and materials. In contemporary times, it is evident that the velocity of material flows is

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speeding up in tandem with other expansive capitalist tendencies, as the tentacles of urban demand stretch out to draw in places of supply but are then apt to drop them, seeking supplies from elsewhere. Yet Hodder also recognises that there is often a tendency to maintain things as they are, to persist with supplies and to satisfy the interests these represent. Indeed, in Melbourne, resonant historical continuities, enduring materials and consistencies remain, with the widespread prevalence of local brick, the continuing popularity of bluestone and the persistence of smaller quantities of locally sourced granite and sandstone. Stone is distinctively distributed across Melbourne, testifying to different phases of development and the particular and changing requirements of the diverse areas of the city, as I discuss in the remainder of this chapter.

Aboriginal Stone Networks Stone has been transported and deployed by humans across Australia for many millennia. Accordingly, any exploration of the circulation of stone around the area now known as greater Melbourne must account for the exchange, use and working of stone carried out by Aboriginal people long before the arrival of European settler colonialists. Best known are the traces of lithic exchange embedded in indigenous memory and explored by archaeological research that focus on the tools and weapons that derive from Mount William greenstone quarry, or Wilim-ee Moor-ring —translated as ‘axe place’ in the Woiwurrung language of the local Kulin custodians. Around 80 kilometres north of the city, an extensive supply of resilient basaltic diorite was quarried with which to fashion axes, spears and other implements. Isobel McBryde (1984) has identified several stone anvils upon which the rock was worked, along with 268 mining pits across a large, forty-hectare site. She explores how these utensils and weapons were traded across a network that stretched into what is now New South Wales and South Australia. This trade was not merely guided by functional exchange but involved inter-cultural gatherings that forged complex ‘social and political networks (that) were extended in webs of kinship ties which also gave access to external economic resources’ (McBryde 1984: 274).

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McBryde suggests that the area upon which Melbourne stands was a centre at which multiple objects were traded, and the routes along which such transactions were carried arrived from numerous directions. Ornaments, belts and necklaces, rugs from the south-west and sandstone from the south-east were exchanged for the high-value stone tools from Mount William as well as white and gleaming quartz stones from the goldfields around Bendigo, which were carried as symbolic and sacred objects. As elsewhere, quartz ‘rings with magic across the world and back into antiquity’ (Cracknell 2018: 62). Gary Presland (2001) contends that a key trading route from the quarry followed the valleys of the Yarra River tributaries which provided a source of food and shelter as well as traversable byways. The creation of the sharp edges for cutting implements also necessitated the use of abrasive sandstone, and on Mount Macedon and Hanging Rock, over 20 kilometres away from the quarry, there are deep grooves where the partially shaped pieces—the ‘axe blanks’—brought from Mount William were sharpened. Importantly, McBryde also points how the many extensive networks and routes through which such objects were exchanged, social links maintained and ceremonial practices upheld, are symbolically and cosmologically integral to indigenous sacred geographies: they mark out ‘the lines of travel of the ancestral beings when, in the Dreaming, they created the land and its features, at the same time establishing the law governing human actions within them’ (2000: 157). She further claims that this ancestral presence and power is maintained by ceremony and by singing the song-cycles and stories of the Dreamtime events at the significant ‘places of power’ along the way, thereby also underpinning and transmitting a deep cultural and geographical knowledge. McBryde contrasts these ‘numinous landscapes of the mind, peopled by beings from an ever-present Dreaming whose actions were marked by the features of the created landscape’ (2000: 156) with European classificatory, scientific and aesthetic apprehensions. The brutality and systematic occupations of European settler-colonialism have ensured that many of the traces of these ancient path networks were obliterated, along with a deep knowledge of the routes and the nodes of ceremonial and symbolic significance. Critically, these Aboriginal practices of working, transporting and exchanging stone are inextricably linked with being in and intimately knowing country.

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There are numerous other traces of the indigenous use of stone in and around Melbourne. In the Maribyrnong valley, there are several smaller quarries, more concerned with local supply than extensive trade. Silcrete, a crystalline material found in alluvial sands and formed as groundwater containing dissolved silica forms a hard stone, was mined for stone axes, blades and scrapers, as well as for hearthstones (Canning et al. 2010). Remains of these everyday tools and their working are extensively scattered across the city and its environs. So too, are manifold grinding stones that served multiple purposes for cracking nuts and seeds, sharpening tools and stone-knapping (Pardoe et al. 2019). Knowledge of the locations of the numerous rocky outcrops, cliffs and boulders would have fashioned routine movement to collect the stony materials out of which these tools were forged (Presland 2008). It is difficult to surmise more generally about what may have existed before European colonisation and the subsequent displacement, murder and infection that decimated Aboriginal populations, but we can imagine that an array of shelters, walls, dwellings, eel traps, and perhaps boundary stones were scattered across the landscape in low-lying areas. There is plentiful evidence that stone was an important resource for Aborigines in other parts of Victoria. At Lake Condah, an elaborate system of basalt walls to channel eels into traps, weirs and ponds and thereby ensure an annual supply of food is at least 6000 years old. The settled Gunditjmara community who stewarded this complex, sophisticated form of aquaculture lived in permanent stone-built houses around the lake, and there is some evidence that similar stone structures were also installed on the Maribyrnong (Pascoe 2018). One recently researched site closer to Melbourne is Wurdi Youang, an egg-shaped arrangement of locally sourced stones located near Little River, around 50 kilometres west of the city, created by the Wathaurong people. 30 other such stone arrangements are recorded in Victoria and there are potentially hundreds more, according to Norris et al. (2013). Of indeterminate age, Wurdi Youang consists of 100 bluestone stones of varying size that are arranged into a form of 50 metres in diameter. At the western apex are three larger, prominent stones that seem to indicate the position on the horizon of the setting sun during the equinoxes and solstices, thus resonating with the mooted astronomical arrangements of

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the ancient stone circles found in Europe, such as Stonehenge. The careful configuration of these stones suggests that this may have been a site of ceremonial occasions or a marker of calendrical events. Another well-known and still current symbolic use of lithic matter amongst Victorian Aboriginal people is the widespread use of ochre for ceremonial purposes. The Red Bluff at Half Moon Bay, Sandringham, is composed of a bright red sandstone material that is used as a pigment for the glyphs on possum skin cloaks, rock painting and body adornment. This substance is associated with the blood of an Ancestral Dreaming and possesses a potent sacred significance. Along this part of the coast in Bayside, other ochre hues line the cliffs, providing a veritable palette for creative embellishment and ritual. In Bruce Pascoe’s important Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture (2018), an abundance of archaeological and archival evidence from the writings of early colonists is marshalled to highlight the grotesquely overlooked yet complex methods of building, agriculture, hunting and land stewardship practised by Aboriginal cultures across Australia. Pascoe reveals the landscape to be replete with vestiges of a host of cultural practices involving the use of stone. In addition to extensive stone aquaculture infrastructure, other Victorian remnants of a vanished culture include stone troughs, grinding stones, stone-lined wells, ovens, grain stores and stone arrangements that recorded the harvesting of crops. Pascoe also notes that these early colonial reports provide ample descriptions of stone houses, ruins of which remain in numerous places, notably in Western Victoria. As with the greenstone axe trade, these circulations of stone were accompanied by the transmission of ideas, news, art and technology.

Colonial Sources: Imports and Ballast Following the rapid evisceration of Aboriginal trade routes, cultural knowledge and sites, in the early years of settler colonialism in Victoria most buildings were created out of imported timber, and the stone used to build nascent Melbourne was largely supplied through intra-colonial

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networks. Imported stone from a range of quarries came by ship, including sandstone from Kangaroo Point, Point Ventenat and Spring Bay in Tasmania, Oamaru limestone from New Zealand, and Sydney’s Pyrmont (or Hawkesbury) sandstone, all of which provided material for several extant iconic Melbourne buildings as well as for the sills, hearths and steps of houses. The quarry in Spring Bay, operating from the mid-1850s until the mid-1880s, provided good quality sandstone that constitutes parts of the Law Courts, the State Library of Victoria, St Patrick’s Cathedral and the Town Hall. Sandstone from Kangaroo Bay supplied some of the structural elements for the gothic ANZ Bank (formerly the London Chartered Bank) and the State Library, and much of the dressing for St Patrick’s Cathedral. White sandstone from Point Ventenat was deployed in the construction of the General Post Office while Hawkesbury sandstone, highly important for nineteenth-century building in Sydney, was used for the old Stock Exchange and St Pauls Cathedral. Oamaru limestone, used extensively in Adelaide and still widely exported, was utilised in the construction of the Scots Church and elements within the ANZ Bank (King and Weston 1997). A further source of stone emerged from connections within the British colonial network as the volume of shipping trade between the UK and Victoria expanded. This was the stone ballast deployed to weigh down ships on their return voyages once they had unloaded their cargo, or on the way to pick up a load. Indeed, from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century, millions of tonnes of ballast were shipped between ports across the world’s oceans, with large ships requiring loads that equated to a quarter of their weight to stabilise them at sea. Contemporary ballast typically consists of water-filled tanks, but in these earlier times more solid material was deployed; sand, iron, gravel, brick or stone, usually sourced from adjacent areas to the port from which ships were departing. When arriving in a port, ships would usually deposit their heavy ballast load in the sea or on nearby shores. Consequently, archaeological and geological investigation can reveal the trade routes between places. For instance, Mats Burström (2017) details how old walls in the eastern English seaport of King’s Lynn contain stones from Baltic locations, indicating a medieval trade with Estonia. Similarly, early parts of

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Savannah, Georgia, USA, are built from a medley of sandstones, granites, basalts and limestones quarried in north-east America and Canada, the UK, France, Spain, Portugal and Madeira. In Melbourne, between the 1850s and 1890s, bluestone was quarried along Stony Creek for use as ballast, cut into one-foot square blocks for ballasting. Myths persist that this bluestone ballast is an integral material ingredient in the paving at London’s Trafalgar Square and in the old, varied cobbles of Covent Garden, though this is not evident. There are, however, plentiful examples of bluestone ballast dumped in the nineteenth century by the numerous freight ships from Melbourne that arrived at Newcastle, New South Wales, to accommodate the coal cargo that they had arrived to collect. The bluestone ballast they emptied mingles with the other stone ballast that was subsequently used to reclaim land and construct Newcastle’s early breakwaters, notably the Pirate Point Guidewall built between 1861 and 1872, that made the port more accessible to maritime traffic (Fig. 2.1). A text sprayed onto the harbourside includes the following passage quoted from an editorial in the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miner’s Advocate on 7 November 1877 that mused upon the perplexity of a future visiting geologist: Here we have geological specimens from every part of the world. The whole expanse of ground has been built up of ballast from the ships that come to our harbour. In one place we tread upon a layer of London flint, next a collection of stones from the shores of the sunny Mediterranean. These are succeeded by a rocky mound from Scandinavian coasts and these in turn give place to bluestone from Melbourne, green trap from New Zealand, limestone from Singapore and even the sun burnt bricks and glazed uncouth carvings from a dismantled village far off China

Gary Vines (1993: 7) reports that by 1879 the ballast trade was booming, with ‘56 lighters carrying 2,400 tons of stone employing 108 men carrying for 200 quarrymen’. Besides exporting large quantities of ballast abroad, Melbourne also received considerable quantities from the UK. Most British ships discharged their heavy loads close to land, altering the foreshores of estuarine and maritime coasts, and diversifying

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Fig. 2.1 Pirate Point Guidewall, Newcastle, New South Wales

their geological characteristics. Research reveals that these deposits introduced a variety of non-local rocks types to Melbourne’s seafront, including gneiss containing crystallised red garnets, schist, fossil-laden limestone and quartzite (Vines and Lane 1994). Moreover, this stone ballast was accompanied by other materials and living forms, seeds that would germinate non-indigenous plants, insects from Brazil and South Africa, and shells from North-West America. More peculiarly, Burström (2017) claims that during an archaeological dig at Port Gellibrand, a Palaeolithic hand-axe was found amidst a layer of flint that had served as ballast for a

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British ship, a discovery that initially mystified local archaeologists. Ironically, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sydney, such flinty loads deposited on the shore provided valuable material for indigenous craftsmen to shape into tools; this ballast could be adapted to local production techniques (BBC News 2018, March 31). Pig iron was also transported as ballast by British ships, providing the original source of one of Melbourne’s most stylish architectural features, the wrought iron decoration that adorns the verandas, balconies and stairways of domestic houses. Indeed, Black Duck and Klein contend that ‘over 40 local foundries were kept busy, melting and casting pig-iron bars that arrived as ship’s ballast’ (2010: 96). Despite the huge volume of stone that came into the city as ballast, there are few recorded examples of ballast being used for building material. However, it is certainly evident at the Old Melbourne Gaol where the floor of the corridor and cell block is fashioned out of a black Yorkshire slate that arrived as ballast on a British ship. The plentiful supplies of stone ballast deposited in the city testify to an era in which large quantities of stone contributed to the reshaping of Melbourne’s landscape and provided some of its building materials. Yet soon enough, growing knowledge of the geological resources that surrounded the city turned builders towards locally available stone: basalt, sandstone and granite.

Bluestone In being used as ballast material, basalt was quarried in the early years of Melbourne’s emergence. In 1838, the first quarry was opened at Point Gellibrand to supply stone for early roads, sea walls and piers, as well as ballast, and worked by convicts in leg irons housed in hulks in Port Phillip Bay. However, bluestone was not initially preferred as a building material, as evidenced at a remaining wall of Melbourne Old Gaol’s first cell block, constructed in 1845 from a roughly textured ironstone sourced from the banks of the Yarra or Ascot Vale. Though it was to become the stone most associated with Melbourne, and despite the fact that the west and north of the city are situated on a basalt flow, the third-largest volcanic plains region in the world,

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bluestone was initially regarded as too hard and difficult to work, and its dark colour and rough texture was considered unsuitable for building. As Robyn Annear (2014: 9) puts it, the ‘thunder-grey basalt was abjured as too gloomy and workmanlike a fabric for entire buildings’ and was largely ‘limited to foundations and dressing’. However, in the early 1850s, its use in ecclesiastic and commercial buildings gradually increased. Its widespread availability and propensity to easily split made it more advantageous than more expensive imported stone, while its durability offered great structural integrity to buildings. Most local sandstones, as I discuss below, were of poor quality and the bricks being produced in Melbourne at that time were friable and liable to crack. Suddenly, bluestone industrial buildings and warehouses sprang up and local basalt quarries provided key materials for roads, homes, drains, gutters, walls, barracks and prisons. Quarries proliferated in the west and north of the city, as I discuss in Chapter 5, especially along the Merri Creek, Williamstown and Footscray. Though the use of bluestone exponentially expanded across the city, it was only used to constitute the foundations of prestigious civic and private buildings. These robust lower courses remain at the Town Hall and State Library, for instance. Despite its persistent utility as a strong, loadbearing and highly durable building material, bluestone did not possess a material capacity for moulding, carving and ornamentation. At a meeting held in 1859 at the Association of Victorian Architects, expert John Knight (1864: 4–5) acknowledged the merits of basalt: ‘for foundations it is eminently suitable; for stores, its sombre hue imparts an appearance of commercial as well as structural solidity’. Yet he also articulated widely shared views about its shortcomings: Its durability is not questionable but its suitability for much works of architectural pretension is generally doubted… (it is) unfitted for any public edifice where the design embraces a moderate amount of architectural embellishment. I fear there is a disposition to tax bluestone beyond its capacity, to produce architectural effects. In Melbourne, thousands of pounds are almost wasted working delicate mouldings upon this material, such details in many instances being scarcely visible… (for) the colour of bluestone destroys the proper effect of shadows – they are to a great extent

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absorbed by the stone… the colour of the material is unequal to the production of those ordinary effects of light and shade which are essential to realise the spirit of classical architecture

Despite such misgivings, numerous nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury bluestone buildings are liberally scattered across Melbourne in historic buildings that have become iconic, notably in central, western and northern suburbs. It adds its dark tones to the brutal, functional designs of Melbourne Old Gaol and Pentridge Prison (Trigg 2018). It has also been widely used in many of the city’s oldest churches, forming much of the fabric of St Patrick’s Cathedral and is found in the Timeball Tower at Point Gellibrand. Bluestone is the prevalent material in other infrastructural elements of the city, including its bridges—notably the iconic Princes Bridge spanning the Yarra—and in many harbour walls in the old docks. Its presence extends in the numerous laneways of inner suburbs, in the kerbstones and gutters of main roads, in walls, gateposts, paths and thousands of houses. Though the harder material quarried around the city’s West and North was not appropriate for sculpting, the more pliable, greyer Malmsbury bluestone, sourced less than 100 kilometres to the north, became popular for work that required more decorative elements. Moreover, the width of its columns meant that large pieces could be carved, it possessed a particular slip resistance and it was cheaper to work, besides being located conveniently close to the Melbourne to Bendigo railway line (Walter 2018). Malmsbury bluestone can be found in parts of the Scots Church, St Paul’s Cathedral, State Library and the ANZ Bank and its sculptural qualities are exemplified by Melbourne University’s elegant gateposts at its Grattan Street entrance. This pliability is also evident in the two ornately carved Atlas figures who once supported two lost figures of Britannia and Neptune above the doorway of the Colonial Bank, Elizabeth Street, demolished in 1932, that now adorn the gateway to the underground car park beneath Melbourne University’s South Lawn (Walter 2019). Though its popularity as a building material declined after the Second World War, demand for bluestone aggregate for railways and roads

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increased, greatly facilitated by technological innovations in mechanical stone-crushing equipment. Still crucial to Melbourne’s contemporary road-building industry, huge quantities of bluestone aggregate are also used in concrete manufacture. These demands have somewhat sheltered basalt quarrying from economic periods of decline and boom, and bluestone’ dark-grey tones remain an enduring feature of Melbourne’s urban landscape. Indeed, this lasting presence is now recognised as integral to Melbourne’s place-identity, and I discuss below how it has become newly valued as a contemporary building material and as a signifier of the city’s heritage.

Local Sandstone With the transformation wrought by the discoveries in Victoria’s goldfields, notably the influx of skilled workers—including many stonemasons—in pursuit of mineral riches, and the sheer wealth generated by the large quantities of gold that were discovered and traded, city leaders demanded an architecture that befitted the elevated status of what became reputed as ‘Marvellous Melbourne’. From the 1880s, desires to create grand neoclassical and gothic buildings commensurate with the city’s growing wealth could not be satisfied with bluestone and attention turned to finding local and regional materials more suited to these prestige-oriented aims; the quest was undertaken to find high-quality sandstone. Several sources of conveniently available sandstone close to the city had already been exploited, including at Kyneton and Griffith Point, the former supplying the stone used to build Melbourne University’s Old Arts Building. The most popular sandstones in the mid to late nineteenth century were quarried in the Barrabool Hills and at Bacchus Marsh. The most notable presence of the Cretaceous, brown-yellow Barrabool sandstone is in St Paul’s Cathedral, where it is supplemented by limestone sourced from Waurn Ponds, near Geelong, and spires wrought from Hawksbury sandstone imported from Sydney. Barrabool sandstone was also used for Trinity, Queens and Ormond Colleges and the Old Pathology and Old Zoology Buildings at the University of Melbourne. It remains a component of several churches, the

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Old RMIT building (originally the Workingman’s College), and Prahran Court House and Police Station. The paler Bacchus Marsh Permian sandstone is prominent in the Old Treasury Building and the Library of Parliament House (King and Weston 1997). Yet many buildings constructed out of these local sandstones rapidly deteriorated for as King and Weston (1997: 128) remark, they are ‘prone to fretting, exfoliation, splitting, cracking and shrinking due mainly to the reaction of clays, zeolites and calcite to the weather’. As I discuss at length in Chapter 4, the inadequacies of Barrabool sandstone as the primary material used in the construction of the extraordinary Newman College continue to have lasting consequences for the building’s maintenance. As awareness about the limitations of these local sandstones grew, the search for a durable and workable sandstone expanded to take in potential sources further away from the city. New connections with high-quality quarries were desperately needed if Melbourne was to accommodate the prestigious, architecturally refined buildings commensurate with its growing wealth and compare to the grand structures of inter-colonial rival, Sydney.

Heatherlie Sandstone This quest for durable, workable and attractive dimension stone was intensified with the decision to construct an imposing new Parliament House to accommodate the Victorian state government. Tests made it apparent that neither Bacchus Marsh nor Barrabool sandstone was of the requisite quality for such a significant building, and an initial decision was made to import the appropriate sandstone from New South Wales. Further trials examined the properties of a white-coloured stone sourced further away from Melbourne, from Heatherlie Quarry in the Grampians, which was used for construction in the nearby town of Stawell. While this stone proved to be of very high quality, the sole mode of transportation available to convey it from the quarry to the railway at Stawell was expensive bullock cart, and the original decision was retained. This caused a furore that was intensified by the growing rivalry between Victoria and New South Wales.

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The issue was taken up by the MP for Stawell, John Woods, who embarked on a campaign to ensure that the parliament building would be constructed out of Victorian sandstone as a matter of local pride. His crusade culminated in the erection of a still standing 4-metre-high pillar of Heatherlie stone outside the Royal Exhibition Building with the accompanying claim that so hard-wearing was this material that it would outlast the building in front of which it stood. This vociferous lobbying provoked further enquiries into the stone’s qualities and on viewing the recently completed Stawell Court House, which showcased the stone’s workability and sturdiness, a contract for the use of Heatherlie sandstone for the parliament project was signed in 1881. A year later, the government subsidised the building of a tramway from the quarry to Stawell to reduce transport costs (Fig. 2.2). Subsequently, the high-quality Heatherlie sandstone was deployed in the construction of numerous other buildings in central Melbourne. It was used to clad Melbourne Town Hall Portico and administrative buildings, the State Library, the Melbourne Port Authority Building, the Regent Theatre, the General Post Office, the Supreme Court Annex and several grand banks (a fuller list is available in King and Weston 1997: 73). Indeed, so high was the demand for the stone in the late 1880s that the quarry employed around 100 workers, many of whom lived in makeshift huts and tents nearby, and a school for their children was briefly opened. Yet towards the end of the century, demand rapidly declined because of the stone’s hardness, for this made it difficult and expensive to quarry and the abundant presence of flints meant that masons found it tough to dress and cut. In addition, it also proved expensive to source, with a high quantity of wastage of material that was insufficiently white, and with economic depression at the end of the nineteenth century, demand waned. The quarry was periodically worked until the mid-1930s, when it was closed, though small quantities of stone have occasionally been extracted to complete repairs on existing buildings. The supply of most of the Heatherlie sandstone used for the city’s buildings only took place over a few years, and yet its endurance has meant that it continues to constitute a significant proportion of central Melbourne’s stony fabric, notably in some of the city’s most iconic older structures.

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Fig. 2.2 Victorian Parliament

Harcourt Granite Besides Heatherlie sandstone and bluestone, a third building stone also frequently recurs across Melbourne’s built environment; Harcourt Granite is a speckled black and white material that has been quarried since 1859 at Mount Alexander, 125 kilometres north of the city. From the 1880s, the hard, durable, easily split and polished granite was conveniently transported to Melbourne on the nearby Echuca railway line, and in the 1920s, as road transport developed and accessed further areas of the mountain, new quarries were opened up. The stone remains popular and two quarries continue to extract and trade.

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Harcourt Granite appears in numerous constructions across the city, its early usage still evident in the columns of the original Stock Exchange in Collins Street and in Parliament House. It was later deployed for foundational and structural elements and especially utilised as a strong constituent of the lower courses of buildings. Harcourt Granite was also ideally suited as material for the ornamental features that added allure to the classical and gothic facades of many banks and commercial buildings. The Colonial Mutual Life Building built in 1896 and demolished in 1960 was the most monumental building to use Harcourt, but amongst many extant structures, it remains evident in the Princes Bridge (1888), the extravagant Block Arcade (1892), Flinders Street Station (1910), the National Australian Bank Head Office in Collins Street (1927) and the beaux arts Port Authority Building (1929–1930), where it complements the Heatherlie sandstone that clads the upper levels. In 1863, the massive 36-ton Harcourt Granite block that constitutes the Burke and Wills memorial in Melbourne General Cemetery took several weeks to transport from Mount Alexander to Melbourne and required the efforts of 250 men and 36 horses. Since then, the granite has been consistently deployed in monumental masonry, plentifully distributed across Melbourne’s cemeteries. Its popularity for tomb design chimes with the popularity of Australian stone for monumental uses across the domestic market as a whole, constituting 80–90% of supply in the 1990s. Other key Australian memorial granites include Imperial Black and Calca from South Australia, Grandee from New South Wales, and Austral Verde from Western Australia. Unlike the locally sourced Heatherlie sandstone and bluestone, Harcourt Granite has been extensively exported across Australia and overseas. Its use has expanded to encompass flooring, kitchen work surfaces, pool coping, walls and garden ornaments. Mount Harcourt Granite is thus an example of a locally available stone that has been supplied as part of an enduring network between Melbourne and Mount Alexander since it was first quarried. Its material affordances and easy availability have meant that it has maintained its value, and while the uses to which it has been put have changed over the years, its supply has been subject to less volatile vicissitudes than

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bluestone or Heatherlie sandstone. Unlike most Australian stone supplies—but like Imperial black granite from South Australia and Sydney’s Hawkesbury sandstone—Harcourt Granite has stood the test of time.

Federation: The Symbolic Turn to Australian Stone For a few decades following Federation in 1901, parochial imperatives to utilise Victorian stone subsided and were replaced by an ethos of building with stone supplied from across Australia. This ideological impulse to materially manifest a spirit of Australian unity saw buildings forged out of compilations of different national stones. This is apparent in a number of Melbourne’s buildings, notably the additions to the Town Hall constructed between 1926 and 1927. Entrances constructed on Swanston and Collins Street included Black and Grey Buchan Granite from Victoria as well as White Marble from Angaston, South Australia, while the Administration Building completed in 1910 incorporated white and red marbles from New South Wales. Similarly, the arcade and the lift lobby of the art deco Manchester Unity Building competed in 1932, is furnished in a medley of grey Buchan marble from Victoria, grey-pink marble from Caleula, New South Wales, and white Angaston marble from South Australia. Several commercial buildings followed suit in creating foyers and lobbies that contained a range of granites from across the nation (King and Weston 1997). These endeavours resonate with the simultaneous evolution of Federation architecture across Australia, a distinctive form that was an amalgam of Arts and Crafts and Edwardian styles from the UK, with greater emphasis on idiosyncratic verandas and balconies, together with the inclusion of animal, plant and heraldic decorative motifs signifying national identity. This ideological turn is particularly evident in the construction of the emblematic Shrine of Remembrance, for which all materials used were sourced within Australia. The stone used for the exterior of the huge monument, and for the sculptures designed by Paul Montford on each corner was the pale-grey, granite-like granodiorite quarried from Tynong, more than 60 kilometres south-east of Melbourne. A $45 million project

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in 2014 to expand the Shrine to commemorate the centenary of the First World War opened up a new quarry close to the original site to supply granite for the extension. Internal walls are fashioned from Kyneton sandstone, sourced in central Victoria, while columns are sculpted out of Black Buchan Marble obtained 350 kilometres west of Melbourne. The friezes inside the building sculpted by Paul Dadswell are wrought from Hawkesbury sandstone while the paving is cut from Caleula marble, both stones sourced from New South Wales. A microcosm of the historic patterns of stone circulation is found in the Melbourne General Cemetery, established in 1852 and discussed in greater detail in the following chapter. With bluestone unsuited to sculpting, most of the earliest memorials were constructed out of locally available and imported Tasmanian sandstone. Many of the early gravestones wrought out of Barrabool and Bacchus Marsh sandstones have decomposed into indistinguishability though those fashioned out of Harcourt Granite or ready-made tombstones imported from Sydney, Tasmania or the UK have proved to be more durable. By the 1870s, mass-produced Carrara marble memorials were imported from Italy, unadorned, homogeneous arch forms. After the Second World War, an influx of gravestones installed alongside paths was created from Harcourt and imported granite. Monumental fashions change and besides the enduring popularity of Harcourt Granite, commonly imported stone monuments include those formed from Black Absolute granite from South Africa, the ever-popular white Cararra marble, Paradiso gneiss from India, Balmoral Red Granite from Finland, Blue Pearl from Norway, along with numerous materials imported from China (King and Weston 1997). This too is changing, with an emerging demand for memorials composed out of unpolished and locally sourced stone, often of incidentally occurring shapes.

Bricks Besides being amply provided with the basalt that underlies large areas of the city, the expansion of Melbourne has been copiously supplied by extensive layers of local clay. These rich deposits are primarily of residual

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clay formed through the chemical decay of rock or the removal of soluble non-clay particles from a clay-bearing rock. In Melbourne, there are many residual deposits of Silurian and Tertiary clay shale, with brown oxidised kaolinite and lesser quantities of pallid kaolinite in the north of the city, both formed from the chemical weathering of feldspar or other silicate minerals, with smaller clay deposits resulting from weathered granites and older basalts (McHaffie and Buckley 1995). Along the course of Merri Creek are pockets of alluvial sedimentary reddish clay deposits amidst the basalt (Harper and Mannering 2018). Accordingly, the city has been well furnished with clay supplies of different chemical composition and colour, with some beds up to 30 metres deep, a resource that Melbourne has exploited in the production of bricks. As well as being cheap to produce, bricks are particularly durable and possess great compressive strength, as evidenced by their use for 6000 years and by the fact that on average, a brick will endure for 500 years. ‘Tradeable, unitary, replicated’ (Hamilton 2018: 164), bricks can release and absorb moisture efficiently, thereby regulating temperatures and humidity inside structures and providing effective insulation. In Melbourne as elsewhere, until 1870 bricks were largely handmade and pressed into moulds but subsequently, the dawn of mechanisation increased output tenfold. Drawing on the plentiful deposits of clay from Brunswick to Preston, and from Tooronga to Nunawading, 50 brickyards had been established by 1860, and with accelerated industrialisation through the introduction of steam-powered brick presses and imported kilns, productivity grew exponentially to supply the rapid expansion of the city. Subsequently, bigger operations opened, the largest being the Brunswick-based Hoffman Patent Steam Brick and Tile Company which could produce 15,000 high-quality bricks each day and created its own rail line in 1884 (Stuart 1987). The expense of transporting bluestone meant that bricks were increasingly preferred as a building material and this legacy resonates with the fact that Australia has long been the world’s largest per capita consumer of bricks. The vast expanse of suburbia that extends beyond the city’s centre is dominated by brick-built houses, shops and industrial sites. While the twentieth-century advent of highrise construction requires more steel and reinforced concrete that brick, the massive housing projects being built across Melbourne’s edgelands

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require huge quantities of materials, including an insatiable demand for bricks, most of which are supplied by two large outlets that manufacture bricks from clay sourced further from the city. As Harper and Mannering show (2018), the clay pits that have supplied Melbourne’s brick industry have progressively moved outwards from the centre over the past two centuries, displacing sites of extractive industry and stimulating the opening of new sources. As I discuss in Chapter 3, the legacy of these abundant clay pits once they became exhausted has been the creation of a medley of recreational spaces in Brunswick, Preston, Northcote and other suburbs. Because of the depletion of existing reserves of clay and suburban expansion into clay-rich land, McHaffie and Buckley (1995: 44) predicted 20 years ago that ‘there will probably be a need for new brickmaking centres to be established in the south-east of Melbourne within the next 20 years’. Indeed, Melbourne’s expanding brick-built suburbs are currently devouring much of the land containing the clay deposits needed to make these same bricks. With Victorian demand for brick clay expected to grow by a third by 2050, it is likely that brick producers will have to seek clay well beyond Melbourne’s environs, perhaps beyond the state. The consequences are that the city’s constitution may be augmented by bricks of a different hue to the colours that currently predominate (Heagney 2018).

Concrete More than half the world’s 500,000 teragrams (1 Tg = 1 billion kilograms) of concrete has been produced in the last 20 years (Waters et al. 2016) and it is currently the second most widely used substance on earth. Though tainted by its association with the malign social effects of some modernist architecture and low-grade housing projects, totalitarian Soviet regimes and the Nazi Atlantic Wall, this has rarely deterred concrete’s increasing utilisation. Moreover, concrete has recently been reappraised along with a renewed appreciation of the Brutalist architecture it has inspired, a re-evaluation that in Melbourne’s case is evidenced in a tourist pamphlet that provides details of iconic modernist buildings across the city (Harper and Weaver 2019).

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First used by the Romans, concrete is extremely variable in quality and constituency, with proportions of key ingredients and the diversity of lithic substances almost infinite, but on average, it is composed of a mix of 10–15% cement, 60–75% coarse and fine aggregate, and 15–20% water. At one concrete production site in Melbourne, at least 36,000 different mixes have been created, distinguished by diverse proportions and substances, testifying to its material multiplicity. This diversity is reflected in an ever-expanding array of products. Some mixes are composed of fine aggregates, others incorporate large pebbles, and while some are smooth in finish, others have been textured to resemble planks of grainy wood. Other finishes include blocks that are roughly scored, arranged into serially repeating patterns or exposed after hitting with hammer and chisel to give a worked appearance (Forty 2013). Polished concrete floors are increasingly popular and a growing range of coloured concrete is available. Melbourne’s increasingly diverse material fabric has been supplemented by large quantities of concrete, especially since the emergence of glass, steel and concrete construction techniques and their acceleration following the Second World War. This huge increase has called for new sources and networks of supply that have been superimposed on the old stone supply connections. The material used for the concrete that constitutes the bulk of Melbourne’s skyscrapers, large infrastructural projects and vast suburban expansion is obtained locally, with the exception of cement. The binding constituent of cement—lime produced in kilns—was sourced from limestone on Mornington Peninsula and around Walkerville, Gippsland, until the late 1920s. This is now largely imported from China, Japan, Indonesia and Taiwan. In recent times, concerns about the damage caused by substantial carbon dioxide emissions during the production of cement are encouraging experiments with coal ash, blast furnace slag and waste from demolitions to provide less harmful decarbonated alternatives. Yet the sand and stone aggregates that constitute the highest material proportion in concrete are extracted from quarries close to the city, as discussed in Chapter 3. Most sand is supplied by the enormous extraction site north of Bacchus Marsh, 50 kilometres north-west of Melbourne (Victoria State Department 2016). McHaffie and Buckley (1995: 39)

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observe that for sand, ‘well graded and rounded particles are important in achieving workability in concrete’. Fortuitously, the sand extracted here is possibly part of an ancient glacial moraine and contains rounded, white quartz pebbles. In constituting 10–15% of the granular substance, these pebbles afford the (upward) flow of pumped concrete necessary in tower block construction. Similarly, large bluestone quarries at the city’s edges supply the crucial stone aggregate required for concrete production. To gain a sense of the vast quantities of concrete required by a growing Melbourne, the Cement, Concrete and Aggregates group of Australia (2018) estimate that annually, each Victorian needs 8 tonnes of sand, stone and gravel for building and road expansion, and they further specify that high rise buildings use an average of 1000 tonnes of aggregate per floor and that each new house requires around 110 tonnes. In addition, the road-building industry also lays down around 14,000 tonnes of bluestone aggregate for each kilometre, with crushed basalt also still deployed for railway ballast and as filter material for dams. Recent large infrastructural projects include the East Link Road, various suburban shopping centres, and the metro and Westgate tunnels, requiring large amounts of both concrete and road aggregate (Fig. 2.3). To emphasise, though not evidently identifiable like the cut bluestone, sandstone or granite I have discussed, by far the largest proportion of lithic material used to produce Melbourne’s concrete—sand and aggregate—is locally sourced, as in most other places (Forty 2013). Though often conceived as placeless and homogeneous, with the exception of cement, concrete is often composed out of lithic materials that are close to sites of construction. Melbourne remains extremely well furnished with locally available concrete supplies, cheaper than those in Sydney, for instance, where supply is more difficult and of inferior quality. Proximal availability keeps construction costs down, reduces traffic congestion and is plentiful enough to provide material for the rapidly expanding city. However, these resources are becoming rapidly depleted such is the demand for building and road-making. Their viability is also threatened by urban encroachment, stringent environmental regulations and alternative land use plans, yet the massive expansion of the city will require vast amounts of concrete for many years to come.

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Fig. 2.3 Crushing Facility, concrete production, Deer Park

The Global Supply of Stone Besides the colonial imports of Tasmanian and New Zealand stone, numerous other, smaller-scale imports of stone have occurred since the founding of Melbourne, often connected to material attachments that are expressions of cultural identities. For instance, British granites were sporadically imported to adorn prestigious commercial buildings during the latter half of the nineteenth century. A far greater flow of stone from elsewhere has followed over a century later. The post-war years in Melbourne saw the extensive demolition of many of the city’s older structures, with the loss of many stylish earlier buildings, now much lamented. In the city centre, the superseding of previous laws that had restricted the height of buildings to 40 feet heralded the advent of large modernist towers constructed with steel, concrete and glass, as in many other cities.

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Consequently, stone was used sparingly and was primarily reserved for memorials and restorations of older buildings; local and national supply dwindled. When stone became popular once more, used to clad the huge structures erected during the 1980s city centre building explosion, most Australian quarries could not compete with cheaper imports. This renewed demand for stone centres on its use as a thin, highly polished veneer, usually dramatically coloured and patterned to adorn the porticos, vestibules, entrances and atria of large corporate buildings. The cost of importing stone from multiple global sources contrasts with the higher financial but lower ecological costs of using locally sourced stone. Imported granite, marble and other exotic stones are part of the vastly increased scale of material circulation through which huge loads are globally transported via giant container ships. Contemporary building stone is characteristically supplied from super-quarries, highlighting the historical closure of numerous small local quarries in favour of these gigantic operations, as economies of scale, national policies to increase export production and technological advances have drastically reduced price. For instance, labour costs for Chinese stone manufacture are both cheap and technologically advanced following investment in equipment such as massive saws that can cut multiple slices of stone simultaneously. Fewer regulations, less stringent health and safety measures, fewer worker rights and less exacting environmental standards further lower costs. Advances in global communications and logistics technologies further encourage the import of ‘exotic’ marbles and granites, providing instantly available information that details cost, styles, availability and delivery times from across the world. These smart networks are allied to networks of container logistics technology where small quantities of material can be imported by cargo ships that transport massive loads of highly varied commodities. As Chua et al. (2018: 619) explain, logistics refers to ‘a range of activities that had previously been handled in isolation - purchasing, manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, returns - [and] were brought together into the same calculative frame’. For stone, as for other commodities, logistics makes possible ‘the integrated coordination of myriad functions with the objective of maximizing profits across the supply chain as a whole’. Such networks are typically concealed and posited as

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technical solutions, with computing and use of big data reserved for the expertise of technocrats and engineers (Pickren 2018). They also have the effect of rendering all space within a globally constituted network abstract, interchangeable and equivalent. This fosters a calculative imaginary of placeless, homogeneous sites that accommodate and interlink manufacturers, technical specialists, shipping and road haulage companies, storage operations and retailers, and facilitate frictionless flows of goods, money and people. Such spaces of flows, part of wider economic, social and cultural processes of disembedding (Giddens 1990) and of the time-space compression that draws places ever nearer (Harvey 1989), are however, entangled in highly uneven geographies. Hyper-mobile capitalist processes of supply and production typically weaken labour, exploit differences in markets and government policies, and increase the carbon footprint through extending transport routes. Frequently, those who obtain these resources are oblivious to the potentially ecologically and socially harmful effects of operations at the supply site. Moreover, local supply industries depend upon the whims of decision makers from afar and may lose favour and become detached from networks. In these global scenarios, former long-standing links and the obligations that were wrought in such enduring relationships may evaporate in a whirl of oneoff connections and instantaneous decisions. The current export of marble and granite is dominated by China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Spain and Italy. In Melbourne, stone from numerous sources has been used to dress the proliferating towers and complexes that continue to congregate in the city centre. For instance, the Southgate Towers on the South Bank, completed in 1992, used red granite from Finland to bestow the distinctive pink-red sheen on their vertical, rectilinear forms. The many towers that have sprouted along Collins Street include the structures at 101, with granite supplied from Spain and Zimbabwe, and 120, which features a granite façade from Italy (King and Weston 1997). The use of foreign stone also extends to civic projects, with the new memorial dedicated to the emergency services in Treasury Gardens to be primarily composed out of Chinese gneiss. In 2017, 43% of stone imports to Australia were from China, 16% from Italy and 6% from India (Halliday 2017), and in response to this demand, stone suppliers around Melbourne typically stock both Victorian and imported materials.

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A recent example that illustrates the process through which such global arrangements are made is the refurbishment of the iconic I. M. Pei building, Collins Place, a huge complex of towering office blocks, a cinema, eateries, boutiques, a hotel and upscale apartments. The refurbishment required the creation of additional commercial space and the improvement of the lobby, and the client placed a premium on the use of ‘natural’ stone as a signifier of prestige. The company employed had to agree to the demands that the stone finish was of high quality, had a track record of effective use, met aesthetic and durability requirements, and was sourced from a single quarry. The architectural firm subsequently sought the advice of a geologist from their London office and employed the services of an architectural stone specialist with a vast knowledge of diverse stone use in buildings across the world and extensive contacts with suppliers. She detailed the possibilities that aligned with the design concept, focusing on lithic qualities and suitability for the large, evenly coloured and textured panels that were desired, and submitted a specification to ensure procurement process went smoothly, including a requirement that multiple visits to the quarries were undertaken to ensure quality of supply. Following these exhaustive investigations and procedures, two sample stone slabs types were presented to the clients and following demonstrations that proved their apposite density, slip resistance and strength, they were approved for use in the project. Ceppo di Gre, a conglomerate stone loosely translated as ‘rock with pebbles’, quarried on the shores of Lake Iseo in northern Italy, was selected for the floor panels. For the wall cladding, White Omani marble, a delicate, creamy limestone was procured, and subject to three distinctively different processes that produced honed, bush-hammered and line-chiselled finishes. The stone took 16 weeks to arrive in Melbourne once it was shipped from Oman. The variation of the colours of the imported slabs foiled the aesthetic requirement for even white tones and so the final cutting was carried out in Melbourne, which though it raised the cost threefold, ensured that these hues matched. Interestingly, the complex process through which the stone was supplied for Collins Place suggests that such global connections are not as homogenous and superficial as is often claimed, and a space of flows is

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not necessarily as flattened as it may seem. Decisions about which stone should be deployed involved the input of a variety of agents. And while flows of information sourced, procured and tracked the items being manufactured and transported, the operation also involved numerous travels to quarries and suppliers in negotiating the agreement and during the manufacturing process to ensure that specifications were being met. The agreed costs had to be adaptable as did the process of cutting the stone slabs. In this instance, the engagement with places, people and materials in places of stone supply were extensive and intimate. Nonetheless, as Matt Huber (2018: 150) points out, as with many other contemporary building stones, the place from which they originate is obscure, part of a wider process through which ‘worker / consumer lives are only socially reproduced through commodities whose ecological origins are opaque and unknowable’. The challenge to regional suppliers is compounded by the ‘importing of foreign sandstone to restore historic buildings built of Victorian sandstone’ and ‘the bringing of masons from overseas for major modern building works’ (King and Weston 1997: 10). While certain sources of Victorian and Australian stone have maintained a market share, such as Harcourt Granite, South Australian Austral black granite, Tasmanian sandstone, Hawkesbury sandstone and Victorian bluestone, the number of building stone suppliers has declined. In fact, earlier plans to market Australian stone on global markets are evident in the foundations and interior of the extravagantly designed Australia House in central London, which incorporates Angaston, Caleula and Buchan marble. These were not only used for their symbolic national qualities but ‘as a major marketing ploy’ to attract the attention of British and European stone importers, a strategy that did not succeed (Siddall 2019: 106). In response to the malign effects of dominant global stone supplies, Alison Henry (2006) argues that ‘(W)e need to decide whether we would prefer a small number of “super-quarries” restricted to the backyards of an unfortunate few, but causing significant environmental impact and exporting tons of stone well beyond their region of production’, or the reopening of abandoned quarries in the face of ‘local opposition from local residents fearful of noise, dust and heavy lorries’. Indeed, resistance seems to be growing as part of a renewed localism, echoing Kenneth Frampton’s renowned call for a critical regionalism in which often

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idiosyncratic material ‘elements derived indirectly from a particular place’ (1983: 21) mediate the universalising, placeless effects of global architecture. Here, Frampton refers to the ‘specific culture of the region – that is to say, its history – in both a geological and agricultural sense’ (my italics, ibid.: 26). Graham Lott (2008) concurs, asserting that stone must be used ‘not only to conserve our existing historic stone structures but also to build new stone housing, thus complementing and continuing a vernacular building tradition which has developed over several centuries’ in order to maintain ‘a unique regional architectural identity… and not allow this rich heritage in stone to dwindle away’. This shift towards the notion of geoconservation has been fuelled by the need to reopen disused quarries to provide stone suitable for the restoration of old buildings, but has also been given a boost by the extraction of old lithic material deemed newly stylish, as I now discuss.

Heritage Values Besides its extensive use as aggregate, bluestone has been reappraised as a key material symbol that distinguishes Melbourne from other cities and has become integral to its place-image. It is a central signifier of the city’s heritage, a process of reclamation that now saturates many aspects of the built environment, highly protected in contradistinction to the great neglect of other parts of the city’s historic fabric in previous decades (Lesh 2019). Formerly viewed as an essential, durable but unattractive substance, unsuited for decorative work, bluestone’s purely utilitarian qualities as an ideal material for the cobbles in the nineteenth-century laneways of Melbourne have been re-evaluated, culminating in their extensive conservation across the city. This is well captured in the guidance offered by the City of Port Phillip for restoring and preserving bluestone laneways, kerbs and channels (City of Port Phillip, n.d.). Following the recommendations of the seminal Burra Charter which identifies a range of criteria for assessing cultural significance, the council focuses upon the ways in which bluestone amply testifies to a range of different heritage-oriented virtues: it valuably signifies early settlement patterns and building technologies, exemplifies specific craft and historical

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artisanship, marks the evolution of infrastructural developments across the city, is a critical constituent in the city’s material culture and possesses a unique aesthetic significance. Besides governmental strictures and local heritage imperatives to ensure that the refurbishment and repair of laneways retain the original bluestone setts and kerbs, bluestone has also become newly esteemed as an infrastructural element for new areas of paving and kerb. This is most evident in the rolling programme to replace all tarmac and concrete pavements in the city centre with bluestone, a dramatic change from 30 years ago. This recent use cannot be disassociated from the incremental and larger-scale changes in the central activity area initiated in 1985 by a progressive city council. Until the implementation of the 1985 Strategy Plan, the city centre had been a moribund realm, with an impoverished retail and entertainment provision, tiny population, car-dominated streets and architectural heritage under continual threat from ill-considered development. There were no pedestrianised streets, little access to the river, disconnected blocks and a proliferation of leftover spaces. Since then, flagship projects have created the South Bank and extensive pedestrian access to the river, Federation Square, Docklands and the new riverside park of Birrarung Marr. This transformational process has primarily emerged through the adoption of modest but sustained approaches to urban design and planning (Adams et al. 2018). Ongoing efforts seek to develop laneways as lively venues for retail and recreational activities, provide efficient public transport and cycleways, champion footpath cafes and residential developments, extend statutory protection for heritage sites, plant trees and shrubs, encourage public sculptures, festivals, street art and cultural events, boost the occurrence of pop-up sites, and develop a host of micro-scale public spaces. Exemplary here is the introduction of standardised street furniture, lighting and signs. Over the past three decades, the council has extensively laid bluestone slabs on the city’s pavements, replacing ‘a patchwork of cracked pre-cast concrete tiles and patched-up asphalt’ that was laid down to cover the original bluestone surfaces in the 1950s and 1960s (Elliot 2018: 189). The surface of the bluestone, supplied from a quarry and stone-cutting operation in Port Fairy, adds consistency and toughness, retains its colour, resists oxidisation, is increasingly permeable to direct water flow for trees and reduces the quantity of rainwater that flows into

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the city’s storm water drains. The characterful texture of the stone is marked by intrusions of white magnesite and variable tiny holes produced by vesiculation—the patterns produced by cooling gases and the resultant bubbles, and it is smooth and even to walk upon, as I discuss in Chapter 6. The eventual aim is that all older areas of asphalt paving will be replaced by bluestone, and the specifications are quite exact. City of Melbourne Design Standards decree that paving slabs should measure 995 and 495 millimetres in area, with a depth of 40 millimetres, possess a sawn finish and a chamfer of 2 mm, and be sited atop specified successive layers of bedding mortar, reinforced concrete slab and compacted crushed rock. Where traffic is lighter, such as in laneways, smaller units measuring 495 × 245 mm are recommended. These are supplemented by bluestone kerbstones and sawn channels, reinforcing the council’s Operating procedure: bluestone in Melbourne’s streets and lanes (2017: 7) decree that bluestone has ‘become synonymous with the character of contemporary Melbourne and its laneway culture’. Bluestone is also increasingly used in the construction of original dwellings and offers greater potential than hitherto because of its increasing plasticity when shaped by contemporary stone-cutting technologies. Besides its widespread use in patios, pavements, driveways and poolsides, it is deployed in avant-garde architecture. The use of bluestone cladding in the imposing National Gallery of Victoria, constructed on St Kilda Road in 1967, was a significant episode in reappraising the material’s aesthetic and technical qualities. More contemporary constructions are exemplified by Williamstown Library (Fig. 2.4), completed in 2014, which uses bluestone cladding along an extensive area to the front, back and along one 100-metre side of the building. According to the architects, this is counterposed to a more ephemeral element on the library’s other side composed out of a contrasting translucent polycarbonate material supported by steel and wood struts. It is intended that while the bluestone provides an example of historical provenance and the solidity of the nearby sea defences, the polycarbonate wall chimes with the fluidity of the bay’s waters (Arch Daily 2015). Similar uses of bluestone as a cladding material in the designs of several private house developments perhaps herald a more extensive future deployment. These contemporary uses characterise Ian Hodder’s (2012) important contention that

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Fig. 2.4 Williamstown Library

historically, the utility of things may not be realised until new technology comes into being. New polishing and sawing techniques allow the affordances of bluestone to be shaped into thin cladding, level paving and smooth sculptural forms in ways that were previously not possible.

Recycling Stony Materials Besides these endeavours to rehabilitate and reappraise bluestone, the incorporation of stone into the expanding maw of heritage is evident elsewhere across the city. For instance, fragments of Harcourt and Phillip

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Island Granite from the late-lamented Colonial Mutual Life Building are arrayed across the lawns of Carlton Gardens as vestiges of a once more architecturally ornate Melbourne. The demolition of the old Colonial Bank in 1929 led to the preservation of the titanic figures of Britannia and Neptune above the lintel, now relocated at Melbourne University’s vast, modernist underground car park mentioned above. Also, the Bank of New South Wales, erected in 1858, was demolished in 1933 and its façade was removed wholesale, again to the university, constituting an early form of piecemeal conservation, where it was attached to the Old Commerce Building when that was completed in 1938. In 2013, this too was demolished and the neoclassical façade now even more incongruous, has been tacked on to the back of the School of Design building, completed in 2014, adding a stony component to the otherwise sleek steel, wood, glass and concrete structure. From the nineteenth century, materials from demolished buildings were resold, retrieving stone, bricks, slate, iron, wood, lead piping and roofing lead, with less valuable material discarded. Monumental masons would procure granite for reuse as headstones. For instance, Robyn Annear (2014) reports that the demolition of Melbourne’s Eastern Market in 1960 salvaged over a million intact bricks, aged components valued by the builders of new structures since they would not expand, a risk posed by newer bricks. In contemporary times, more emphasis is placed on sustainable recycling by creating a circular economy that turns consumption and production into a loop (Krausmann et al. 2017). Following the National Waste Policy endorsed by the Federal Government in 2009 that seeks to reduce waste on economic and environmental grounds, quantities of recycled brick, concrete and stone have increased in Victoria and are primarily crushed to constitute various forms of aggregate for use in road construction. Recycled concrete in particular is cheaper and offers a carbon footprint 65% lower than quarried material (Sustainability Victoria 2014). Old bluestone from demolished buildings is currently in high demand for domestic architectural projects and garden designs, while intact old bricks from wrecked properties and derelict brickyards are also valued as contemporary building materials. In fact, those bricks that were formerly discarded because they lacked the uniformity demanded by builders are

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becoming highly sought after because they imprint a building with individuality. Architects and housebuilders want to use old bricks for aesthetic reasons, while those repairing their houses in heritage districts must use bricks that match the original materials in appearance. 30 years ago, a brickyard in west Melbourne used to receive around 120,000 bricks each year, but current supply is around 25–30,000 (Fig. 2.5). Fewer buildings are being demolished because of the intensified preservation of the built environment, and the increasingly costly work of disassembly makes it less lucrative to retain them rather than crush them for aggregate. Because of the large number of brickworks that once operated in the city, Melbourne is endowed with a rich diversity of bricks, as discussed above. In the nineteenth century, the orange, pink, black and

Fig. 2.5 Vintage Bricks, Recycled brick yard

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brown Hawthorn bricks created polychromatic facades on local houses; these were superseded by pressed red bricks and after the Second World War, by cream bricks. Other products include those made by Fritzholzer, Spear, Gamble, Hoffman Oakleigh, Clifton, Butler, Northcote and Glen Iris companies, and included tapestry bricks, bull-nosed bricks, air bricks and curved sector bricks. In all cases, these old bricks are less standardised than those produced contemporaneously. Fashions change, and while 30 years ago the most popular bricks were the brown Hawthorns, a few years later cream and red bricks were most desired. Most sought after, but now rare, are old hand-made bricks impressed with thumbprints, possum and pet paw marks, or names and swear words. Equally desirable are the idiosyncratic clinkers, somewhat fragile bricks that were over-baked and have a burned, blackened appearance with irregularities and lumpy extrusions. Originally waste products that proliferated in Brunswick and Northcote, such specimens satisfy cravings to possess unique material products manufactured in an era before standardisation, with value also added because they disclose evidence of their production.

Conclusions A central contention of this chapter is that urban assemblages are constituted and reconstituted out of materials that are brought into cities from elsewhere. This process of using a range of resources from diverse origins has accelerated enormously, with Krausmann et al. (2017) detailing that such material used in buildings and transport infrastructure grew 23-fold between 1900 and 2010 and continues to surge, increasing the material complexity of the city. In focusing on stone as a material constituent of the city, I underline Doreen Massey’s (1993) insight that places are made up of flows and movements that are shaped by multiple connections with other places at numerous scales. The flows of matter to the city and the connections that are forged to make these happen—as with other flows—are simultaneously local and global. They are shaped by social, cultural and economic processes that are increasingly international in scale but also retain many local specificities and enduring consistencies.

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In exemplifying how cities are emergent, ceaselessly recomposed through such flows, this chapter has explored how Melbourne’s is continuously augmented by the importation of lithic material. There have been divergent sources of the city’s stony matter, from pre-colonial to colonial origins, from locally supplied sandstone, granite and basalt to symbolically national material, and from concrete to a renewed appreciation with traditional materials, as well as imported global stone from many sources. Along with the numerous other building constituents that have been deployed to incessantly build the city, these different lithic materials mingle together to form an increasingly complex yet wholly unique urban palimpsest. I have sought to emphasise the different locations, durations and modes of transport of these imported materials, and to identify some of the key influences and agencies that have organised, sustained and curtailed their flows into the city from elsewhere. These include pragmatic concerns about distance, accessibility, availability and cost. Developments in quarrying, stone-cutting and finishing, transportation, information and construction technologies have been especially critical. Also important have been the shifting values that have been attributed to the use of particular stony matter, including those informed by regionalist, nationalist, political, modernist and heritage predilections and fashions. They have been further shaped by the unfolding evidence of time: the durability or friability of particular stones and the extent to which their affordances can be accommodated by emergent modes of construction and recycling. The vicissitudes of their popularity, the ways in which certain stone supplies have been arrested, initiated or rekindled underpins Arjun Appadurai’s (1986) notion that objects have ‘social lives’, inferring that they cannot be fully grasped at any temporal juncture since they exist within a continuing process of production, exchange, usage and meaning. Michael Carolan (2007) discusses the ‘epistemic distance’ that results from how commodity chains and the flows that they constitute have become increasingly abstract, so that without any knowledge of where things come from, urban inhabitants are disconnected from the processes and places from which products derive. Yet at present, widespread fears that Melbourne, like other cities, is becoming increasingly placeless,

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more globally homogeneous in lacking distinctive signs of local identity, is assuaged by the continuing provision and revaluation of local stone. For the material composition of Melbourne continues to retain large quantities of locally sourced brick and bluestone, as well as considerable amounts of the still quarried Harcourt Granite and older buildings containing Heatherlie sandstone. Moreover, while the city is following global trends in sourcing a plethora of specialist marbles and granites from across the world, it is also increasingly constituted out of the concrete manufactured using local sand and basalt aggregates, and by the circulation of old bricks and bluestone. Accordingly, despite an increase in imported stone, as McHaffie and Buckley detailed 20 years ago, ‘construction materials form the great bulk and the most valuable part of the industrial minerals and rocks sector in Victoria’, and most of these materials supply markets in close proximity.

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Lott, G. (2008). The Building Stone Industry in Britain: Past and Present. http:// www.englishstone.org.uk/documents/dimension%20stone.html. Accessed 23 October 2018. Massey, D. (1993). Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place. In J. Bird, et al. (Eds.), Mapping the Futures. London: Routledge. McBryde, I. (1984). Kulin Greenstone Quarries: The Social Contexts of Production and Distribution for the Mount William Site. World Archaeology, 16 (2), 267–285. McBryde, I. (2000). Travellers in Storied Landscapes: A Case Study in Exchanges and Heritage. Aboriginal History, 24, 152–174. McHaffie, I., & Buckley, R. (1995). Industrial Rocks and Minerals of Victoria (Geological Survey Report 102). Melbourne: Geological Survey of Victoria. Moran, D., Turner, J., & Jewkes, Y. (2016). Becoming Big Things: Building Events and the Architectural Geographies of Incarceration in England and Wales. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41(4), 416–428. Norris, R., Norris, C., Hamacher, D., & Abrahams, R. (2013). Wurdi Youang: An Australian Aboriginal Stone Arrangement with Possible Solar Indications. Rock Art Research, 30 (1), 55–65. Pardoe, C., Fullagar, R., & Hayes, E. (2019). Quandong Stones: A Specialised Australian Nut-Cracking Tool. PLoS ONE, 14 (10). https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone. Accessed 28 November 2019. Pascoe, B. (2018). Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture. Melbourne: Scribe. Pickren, G. (2018). The Global Assemblage of Digital Flow: Critical Data Studies and the Infrastructures of Computing. Progress in Human Geography, 42(2), 225–243. Presland, G. (2001). From the Birr-Arrung to Willam-Meering (Yarra River to Mount William): A Journey Through Aboriginal Victoria. In C. Rasmussen (Ed.), A Museum for the People: A History of Museum Victoria and its Predecessors, 1854–2000. Melbourne: Scribe Publications. Presland, G. (2008). The Place for a Village: How Nature has Shaped the City of Melbourne. Melbourne: Museum Victoria. Sack, R. (2004). Place-Making and Time. In T. Mels (Ed.), Reanimating Places: A Geography of Rhythms. Aldershot: Ashgate. Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The New Mobilities Paradigm. Environment and Planning a, 38, 207–226. Siddall, R. (2019). Australia House: Stones a Long Way from Home. Geology Today, 35 (3), 102–106.

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Strang, V. (2014). Fluid Consistencies: Material Relationality in Human Engagements with Water. Archaeological Dialogues, 21(2), 150–153. Stuart, I. (1987). A History of the Victorian Brick Industry: 1826–1920. Australian Archaeology, 24, 36–40. Sustainability Victoria. (2014). Market Summary: Recycled Brick, Stone and Concrete. Melbourne: Sustainability Victoria. Tomlinson, J. (2000). Globalization and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Trigg, S. (2018). Bluestone and the City: Writing an Emotional History. Melbourne Historical Journal, 44 (1), 41–52. Urry, J. (2006). Preface: Places and Performance. In C. Minca & T. Oakes (Eds.), Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield. Victoria State Department. (2016). Extractive Resources in Victoria: Demand and Supply Study 2015–2050. Melbourne: Victorian Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources, and PwC. Vines, G. (1993). Quarry and Stone: Bluestone Quarrying, Stonemasonry and Building in Melbourne’s West. Highpoint City, VIC: Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West. Vines, G., & Lane, B. (1994). Industrial Land and Wetland: The Relationship between the Natural Environment and Industrialization in Melbourne’s Western Region. Melbourne: Melbourne’s Living History of the West. Walter, S. (2018). Victorian Bluestone: A Proposed Global Heritage Stone Province from Australia. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, SP486-1. Walter, S. (2019). Malmsbury Bluestone and Quarries: Finding Holes in History and Heritage (Unpublished thesis). Federation University, Ballarat, Victoria. Waters, C., Zalasiewicz, J., Summerhayes, C., et al. (2016). The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene. Science, 351(6269), aad2622. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad2622.

Part III Quartz

Quartz, a crystalline material composed of silica and oxygen, is the most abundant mineral on Earth. Yet this has not diminished its allure for since antiquity it has been used for trinkets, tools and tombs. It is most commonly encountered in its milky form. On the beaches of the Bellarine Peninsula, south of Melbourne, milky quartz has been smoothed by sea and sand over millennia to produce pleasingly tactile pebbles up to two centimetres in diameter. This texture conveys the endless roiling of the sea, ancient lithic origins and the power of moon and tides. The quartz was possibly carried to the sea from an inland source by an ancient river that once flowed into the ocean. Peter has been collecting these pebbles for many years and 25 years ago, on a trip to Rome, initiated a practice that has consumed him ever since. He had taken a number of the quartz pebbles with him, and upon visiting the Vatican City and wandering around the Basilica of St Paul, he secreted three of these treasures in the church’s interior amongst the lavish, carved marble textures, where they seemed to belong. Subsequently, while wandering through the ancient Roman Forum, Peter came across the remnants of the house of the vestal virgins, and into its still existing pool he deposited a further two stones.

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Since then, Peter’s travelling has not been extensive, but this has not hindered his endeavours to redistribute quartz pebbles from the beaches of the Bellarine Peninsula to auspicious places across the world. He has delegated this relocating of stone to friends who are undertaking trips abroad, who may choose places at which to place the quartz. As Peter details: One was thrown in the Thames in London to join the Viking swords of centuries ago, one has been placed in my ancestor’s suburb in East London. Dutch friends have placed a stone in a door of the Forbidden City in Beijing, China and another in the Kremlin in Russia.

Other stones have been placed in a Shinto stone garden in Kyoto, Japan, one on the sacred mountain in Ireland, Croagh Patrick, on which Saint Patrick is believed to have fasted for forty days in 441 AD, and another in Pella, Greece, birthplace of Alexander the Great. A quartz pebble has been deposited next to an ornate door in the medieval Croatian town of Dubrovnik, another in the hills overlooking the larger city of Split, while another has been dropped off at the Immigration Inspection Museum at New York’s Ellis Island. More pebbles have been left at sites in Berlin, Estonia and the Netherlands, amongst other places. The import of stone to Australia from elsewhere is being countered by Peter’s travelling quartz pebbles, striking spiritual, geographical and historical resonances with the places at which they are stowed, and adding to their geological composition.

3 Stony Entanglements: Quarrying, Demolition, Disposal and Remediation

Introduction Strikingly, as Matt Edgeworth (2017: 159) details, ‘the annual volume of human-induced flows of materials is at least three times greater than the amount of sediment eroded, moved and deposited by the world’s rivers’. As discussed in the previous chapter, the emergence of the modern city has entailed the importation of building material from within its boundaries, and later, from its hinterlands and from further afield. In Melbourne, while most material has been locally sourced, urban sprawl and the undesirability of dwelling adjacent to noisy, dirty sites has reconfigured the scales at which geographies of supply and disposal are organised. The insatiable demands of the rapidly expanding city have encouraged the gouging out of larger quarries in the landscape. Yet as cities such as Melbourne expand their boundaries, they also demolish worn out, outmoded and devalued buildings in older areas in order to accommodate new structures. Accordingly, in considering how the city is replenished and reconfigured, this chapter foregrounds the intimate relationships between the stone quarrying, demolition, disposal and remediation. © The Author(s) 2020 T. Edensor, Stone, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1_3

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As I explore in more detail below, different criteria of value are mobilised in deciding what should be erased from the landscape. As David Harvey (1985: 150) notes, capitalism continuously strives ‘to create a social and physical landscape in its own image and requisite to its own needs at a particular point in time, only just as certainly to undermine, disrupt and even destroy that landscape at a later point in time’. Decisions to demolish are also informed by governmental, aesthetic and practical considerations. Yet whatever the reasons for a building’s destruction, the rubble produced by the wreckers must be recycled or deposited elsewhere to accommodate the new and sweep away the residues of the past. As processes of demolition and construction accelerate, a more intensive search for places to deposit demolished material is undertaken. And here we turn full circle, for the voids plundered for stone and clay serve as already existent sites that offer spaces in which to dispose of unwanted material. Yet this is not the end of the process, for once they have accommodated the city’s building rubble, these sites must be rendered secure, safe and attractive, refashioned into terraforms that often seek to disguise their histories of both quarrying and landfill. These interconnected processes further disclose that cities are ‘complex adaptive systems’ that continuously change (Amin and Thrift 2017: 14). In exploring the practices through which lithic materials are obtained and removed, this chapter reveals how places beyond the urban boundaries become entangled in the always emergent city’s rapacious demand for new material supplies and sites of disposal. In Melbourne, these processes have ceaselessly created a continuously pocked landscape that has largely been serially filled in and remediated over time. I begin by examining the changing distribution of stone and clay sites of extraction from Melbourne’s origin to the present. I then discuss processes of demolition, looking at how shifting judgements about the value of buildings has produced uneven histories of material destruction in the city, and hence variable quantities of rubble. For instance, in central London, this is 5–8 metres thick, much more substantive that in the outer suburbs. Subsequently, I look at how practices of landfill have been

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subject to changing conventions and technologies, but in all eras have involved the use of former quarry sites in which to dispose of vast quantities of stone and brick from demolished buildings. Finally, I consider the varied destinies of the quarries that have pocked Melbourne’s landscape, demonstrating that their remediation is an integral part of the ongoing reshaping of urban space. I also explore how former quarries have taken many forms, with some converted into parks and recreational spaces, some built upon, while others have served as nature reserves, swimming pools, sites of creative experimentation or left to evolve without human intervention.

Opening and Closing Melbourne’s Quarries In Chapter 2, after identifying the numerous traces of Aboriginal quarries which persist in Melbourne and its environs, I discuss the emergence of Melbourne’s bluestone industry, at first through the working of the convict quarry at Point Gellibrand established in 1839 to supply ballast for ships, and later through other sites of extraction nearby, notably at Stony Creek. As Laura Harper observes, some ‘early colonial estates had their own quarry’ (2017: 79) and several expanded from small family concerns into larger operations. Soon, basalt quarries were worked in several locations close to the nascent city centre and subsequently spread along the Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers. Largely unfettered, the expansion of the bluestone quarrying industry continued unabated, with many small operations in central areas of Carlton and Fitzroy. These might be briefly worked, perhaps to supply the stone for a single building, and they largely focused on accessible surface outcrops which afforded easy extraction, with stone blocks ‘prised away by inserting iron wedges into the natural fissures and cracks’ (Vines 1993: 9). As the city expanded, residential dwellings took over the land in the inner suburbs formerly used for quarrying, and as Gary Vines (1993: 10) asserts, ‘the desire to remove the hazard of quarrying and quarry holes in the midst of a densely populated area forced the closure of existing holes’. From the 1850s, the industry moved further out to consolidate around

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Brunswick in the north and Williamstown and Footscray in the west. The many sites of extraction around Merri Creek exploited the prevalence of basalt cliffs with their shallow layers. By the 1860s, bluestone quarrying had also expanded in Footscray, and with a large majority of the suburb’s residents described as quarrymen, it was labelled ‘Stoneopolis’. Both large and small quarries pocked the landscape of the west. The trend to close down quarries to accommodate the building of the growing city, and to open up new operations beyond its ever-expanding periphery, meant that by the end of the nineteenth century, much of the quarrying in the north of the city moved to Coburg and Preston, and in the west, extended from Footscray to Braybrook, where large extraction sites were established. For instance, in 1886, Munroe’s large Footscray quarry employed 250 men, including quarrymen, stone cutters, labourers and masons. The scale of the operation—and the rapid growth of the increasingly wealthy city—is indicated by the average output of 300 tons of stone per day, requiring 55–60 rail trucks to convey the quarried material to construction sites (Vines 1993). Throughout the twentieth century, mechanisation reduced the workforce, but quarries continued to be established, increasingly further from the metropolitan sprawl. Further away from the city, in the Grampians, as discussed in Chapter 2, Heatherlie Quarry provided the first markedly durable sandstone for the city’s buildings but its distance from Melbourne increased transport costs and created technical challenges that militated against continued extraction. Yet such was the initial demand for stone that shortly after the crucial rail line was built to Stawell in 1887, the quarry employed over 100 men. A victim of economic and political vicissitudes, operations ceased in 1893 with the expiry of the Public Works contract, and though the quarry was later reopened several times for more minor extractions, it closed again in 1938, and since then, only small quantities of already quarried stone have been used for conservation work. The use of high-quality clay for the production of bricks similarly created large craters within the boundaries of the growing nineteenthcentury city, especially in the suburbs of Northcote, Fitzroy and Brunswick. By 1870, the scale of the demand is indicated by the fact that

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there were 75 brickyards in Melbourne. As clay supplies in Brunswick became depleted, clay pits opened in other areas such as Hawthorn. As with bluestone quarries, as the city expanded, many became surrounded by swathes of new residential dwellings and these occupants campaigned against the presence of large industrial operations in their midst. Living close to industrial quarrying generated concern about environmental safety, with occasional clouds of dust filling the air, explosions and rockfalls emitting loud noises, and deep holes and water-filled cavities constituting hazards. The working-class neighbourhoods that surrounded these clay pits, unable to move to more expensive, salubrious areas, were blighted not only by quarrying but by subsequent practices of rubbish disposal for which these large holes in the ground were used once extraction ceased. A notorious bluestone quarry in the north-eastern suburb of West Preston, labelled ‘Preston’s Volcano’ on account of the large quantities of smoke and stench that the burning of waste generated, exemplifies how quarries converted into sites of waste disposal were regarded as environmentally undesirable by local residents. Deaths caused by rockfalls or by falling off edges exacerbated concerns, as did the erosive impact on local roads of carts laden with bricks. As these quarries were closed down, filled in and swallowed up, quarrying operations moved to the urban periphery, alleviating environmental concerns. And yet most of these quarries would in turn be absorbed by urban sprawl. Though most quarries currently in use are further still from the city, ongoing tensions about the effects of extraction on property prices, local transport provision and environmental damage resonate with these earlier anxieties. Bluestone required for construction is still quarried in the environs of Melbourne, with the most important supplier the large stone-cutting facility near Port Fairy, 300 kilometres west of the city that provides the finished bluestone slabs and kerbs laid down as part of the rolling programme of pavement renewal in central Melbourne, discussed in Chapter 2. Since 1975, this has been Australia’s largest stone processing facility and also provides cladding, pool edging and kitchen surfaces for customers in Australia and overseas. Claimed by the manufacturers as basalt of exceptional purity devoid of secondary minerals, with exceptional colour stability, slip-resistance, durability and ease of working, the quarries from which the stone is sourced is located within two or three

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kilometres of the production site. Because the material extracted is primarily used for dimension stone, the use of explosives is not permitted. Instead, the mode of extraction involves drilling down from above to release the large rounded boulders that formed the basis of the cooled magma deposit. Cranes load these sizeable boulders onto trucks, and at the stone processing plant, drilled holes are filled with an expanding chemical compound that splits the stone into manageable sizes (Fig. 3.1). Smaller bluestone quarries around the Goldfield towns also provide building stone and are supplemented by local sandstone and quartzite

Fig. 3.1 Bluestone boulders, Port Fairy quarry

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sites of extraction. In addition, amidst thick woodland, two small quarrying operations on Mount Alexander supply Harcourt Granite, now a somewhat specialist material but still popular for monumental work, benchtops and garden ornamentation (Fig. 3.2). Yet though fewer quarries now supply stone for construction, large quarries within 33 kilometres of Melbourne’s city centre supply aggregate for road building and the vast quantities of stone and sand required for concrete. These include the extensive bluestone supply at Deer Park where the aggregate is crushed and processed at the huge adjacent concrete operation. These basalt materials are supplemented by aggregates from large quarries at Lysterfield and Wollert that supply the metamorphic Hornfels rock that is used for hard specialist concrete mixes, and Montrose Quarry that extracts durable igneous rhyodacite and

Fig. 3.2 Harcourt Granite Quarry, Mount Alexander

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rhyolite. There are also numerous smaller quarries that obtain the newer Pliocene basalts from lava flows in the Western District Plains, the Western Uplands and western Gippsland rather than the older Paleocene beds of basalt better suited for use as building stone. Also, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, much of the sand for concrete production derives from the huge sand mine north of Bacchus Marsh. There are also mining operations located in the sand belt, formerly part of a large coastal dune system lying across Gippsland and the Inner South East, though many have closed down. I now turn to consider a very different process in which stone becomes entangled: demolition.

Demolition: Destroying Lithic Structures Large dynamic cities such as Melbourne demand the extraction of vast quantities of material to create new built forms and infrastructures, yet while much of this additional matter is deployed to create new developments at the urban periphery, more central structures are also demolished so that new construction can be erected on the space they formerly occupied. Accordingly, the emerging city is shaped by decisions about what should be removed, what is obsolete, no longer fit for purpose, worn out or no longer considered tasteful or fashionable. Thus, the shifting form of the city depends upon subtraction as well as addition; replenishment relies on the demolition of buildings and the removal or recycling of the debris that eventuates. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, such decisions are always informed by questions of value, of social, political, economic, aesthetic or heritage worth (Cairns and Jacobs 2014). As Caitlin DeSilvey (2013: 154) remarks, practices of ‘wasting, disposal and divestment make visible the systems that we use to order our social world and make value’, though as discussed in Chapter 2 with regard to discarded bricks, that which has formerly been consigned to the rubbish tip may later come to be revalued. Political decisions have great impact on which structures persist or are consigned to demolition, with verdicts about the scope and form of local regeneration projects, compulsory purchase orders, and the costs

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of maintenance crucial to determining the fate of buildings. Such decisions are also frequently entangled with shifting judgements about heritage, aesthetic and cultural value. Certain demolitions may sweep away an unwanted past or reviled style of architecture, as with the destruction of modernist and brutalist structures that were regarded as outmoded, but in recent years are now being reappraised. Buildings are also situated within an economic sphere of value in which market-driven decisions consign buildings to abandonment or demolition. Capitalist tendencies towards ‘creative destruction’, the obliteration of economic orders and older modes of production clear the way for the creation of new wealth (Schumpeter 1994). Under conditions of globalisation, as investment has become more free-floating and production more flexible, the destiny of buildings may become more unpredictable, for as Dylan Trigg (2009: 124) maintains, ‘capitalist space is no longer obliged to rely on spatial permanence and thus the creation of place’. Such volatility is also influenced by economic cycles of boom and bust. In times of depression, there may be a lack of money to invest in the upkeep of buildings while in boom times, they may be demolished as part of creative destruction to accommodate new construction developments. Decisions to demolish may also be informed by evaluations that buildings are no longer useful for contemporary purposes and have become outmoded. For instance, large nineteenth-century purpose-built stone and brick factories as well as larger twentieth-century centres that housed vast production line systems may be rendered obsolete when industries relocate ‘more efficient’ production operations elsewhere, as has happened throughout the old industrial world over the past four decades. Unadaptable for use as offices, accommodation or retail businesses without extensive amendments, such structures often lie empty and slowly deteriorate if they are not demolished, perhaps due to deliberate policies of devaluation (Edensor 2016). Stewart Brand (1995) identifies ‘low-road’ buildings that are nondescript, general-purpose, low-rent structures readily adaptable to a wide range of practical functions and tasks. These might include a large, brick industrial building later converted into apartments, offices, workshops and artist lofts. Low-road buildings survive because they can be readily and inexpensively adapted to users’ shifting economic, social or

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institutional needs. ‘High road’ buildings, on the other hand, are signature buildings that may not be particularly adaptable but over time have solicited deep attachments, high esteem and desires to preserve them. Yet across cities, processes of demolition, building and slow decline tend to be uneven. In struggling businesses on marginal industrial estates and on run-down housing estates, the fabric of buildings shows numerous signs of ruination while in gentrifying or central business areas, processes of demolition and building may be more extensive. Typically, these factors feed into the emergence of an ever-changing urban landscape in which some old buildings are erased, new buildings take their place while other buildings persist. Decisions to demolish or not testify to the power of elites and authorities to shape urban space and successfully persuade others that certain buildings are appropriate historical signifiers of key architectural styles or historical events, while others are not. Melbourne’s rather volatile periods of demolition have been shaped by economic booms and busts, the schemes envisaged by the politically powerful, by trends in architectural styles and planning redesignations, and latterly, by notions of heritage. Certain demolitions have erased small areas whereas others, associated with more sweeping projects, have wreaked wholesale transformation. Yet processes of demolition and rebuilding have contributed to the redistribution of the city’s materiality at different rates of change over time. For instance, the post-war demolition of much of the city centre’s historical late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fabric was piecemeal, as preferred concrete and glass structures gradually came to replace many of the Melbourne’s older stone and brick buildings. In 1892, an extended building boom inspired by the rapid expansion of the city ceased. A period of only modest construction followed until the emergence of a new phase of economic prosperity in 1910, partially expedited by the increasing use of steel frames to produce lighter, taller, and more spacious buildings that allowed more light to penetrate interiors, creating structures that contrasted with the earlier, heavier stone-built structures. This increase in construction was curtailed by the First World War but surged once more in the mid-1920s and involved the demolition of many older buildings. Construction accelerated further throughout the 1930s and was accompanied by the development

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of speedier demolition technologies, but this dynamic process of erasure and rebuilding was once more curtailed by the advent of the Second World War. Subsequently, however, as Robyn Annear puts it, ‘from the mid-1950s the city was falling over itself in pursuit of progress’ (2014: xi). She describes a city centre that was full of cheap hotels, shops, bars and theatres, some older cottage dwellings, warehouses and workshops, in addition to commercial and civic buildings. A burst of destruction of these older structures was spurred on by modernist architectural and planning ideas, inciting efforts to prevent the erasure of heritage that inspired the formation of a Victorian branch of the National Trust, but these were largely unsuccessful. At this time, it was only possible to save a building if it met the criteria of architectural merit, with concerns about any historic associations conceived as irrelevant. Throughout this largely unhindered period of demolition, a litany of esteemed architectural icons was torn down in central Melbourne, including Melbourne Fish Market, the Menzies Hotel, the APA Tower, the Cavalier Tea Rooms, Queen’s Walk Arcade, the Eastern Market, the Federal Hotel and Coffee Place, Café Australia, the lofty Australia Building and the Oriental Bank. Many were replaced by somewhat generic modernist office blocks. In her work on the renowned demolition firm, Annear (2005) estimates that over the twentieth century, Whelan the Wrecker must have pulled down over 400 city hotels. The post-war onslaught of demolition is emblematised by the 1960 destruction of the massive, sturdily built, much-mourned Colonial Mutual Life Building, erected in 1890. Its unfashionable architectural qualities were allied to its inflexibility, with its ‘high ceilings, thick-set walls and cavernous lobbies and hallways’ (Annear 2005: 136) ill-suited to the contemporary need for plentiful office space. Though uncherished at the time, the building would surely have been preserved in later years as an archetypal emblem of the architectural style of ‘Americanised Renaissance’, with an opulent array of imported marble walls and flooring accompanying the plentiful use of local Harcourt and Phillip Island Granite. Yet Whelan the Wrecker was commissioned to demolish the building, and though its interior furnishings, decorative stone and wood were recirculated, the

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wrecking company lost money because its sheer material strength made the process of demolition far longer than was anticipated. Outside the city centre, 1960s extensive demolition focused on the compulsory purchase and flattening of blocks of ‘slums’ in the innerand middle-ring suburbs by the Housing Commission of Victoria, replaced by enormous rectangular high-rise apartment blocks (Costello 2005). Large swathes of Fitzroy, Collingwood, Richmond, Carlton and South Melbourne contained the 21 developments that replaced housing deemed decrepit and destitute, though as Hackworth (2016) suggests, there is a suspicion that technocratic desires to create such large scale housing projects exaggerate the scale of poverty and dereliction to facilitate the realisations of their visions. Of course, most of the currently proliferating luxury high-rise developments in central Melbourne are not associated with the resolution of urban blight but with land investment strategies that construe demolition as a vehicle to stimulate marketoriented regeneration. The rate of destruction surged once more in the 1970s, intensifying worries about the almost total erasure of Melbourne’s built heritage, as technocratic visions of progress continued to inform urban planning (Lesh 2019). These gathering concerns culminated in the provision of more effective legislation to conserve particular buildings. Subsequently, the Victorian Town and Country Planning Act of 1972 included the requirement to conserve sites of ‘architectural, historical or scientific interest’ (cited in Annear 2014: 242) and initiated the process of listing structures identified as possessing heritage value. Accordingly, many of Melbourne’s remaining nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings are now cherished (Lesh 2019). By the 1980s, wrecking had slowed with only a limited number of older buildings available for demolition, especially following further stringent conservation measures. Most destruction in this era focused on the erasure of obsolete industrial structures. Nowadays, older houses are rarely consigned to the wrecking ball and many have been subject to gentrification, their patina conceived as evidence of historical venerability rather than deterioration. Yet elsewhere, demolition has continued apace, to accommodate the aforementioned high-end tower blocks in the city centre, clear the way for the massive redevelopment of the South Bank of the Yarra, and erase old port

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structures to create a blank canvas for the creation of a gentrified Docklands. The massive ongoing Metropolitan Rail network expansion, the creation of the West Gate Tunnel and the recently initiated Suburban Rail Loop are infrastructural transport network developments that have required the demolition of some buildings and the removal of vast quantities of excavated matter. As Matt Edgeworth (2017: 158) notes, wherever there is ‘a created void in the ground surface, there is likely to be some accumulation of material elsewhere’. As with demolition waste, so that the new can emerge, this requires the removal elsewhere of smashed, crushed and fragmented material, deposited in voids, to reclaim land, as part of landscaping programmes or to produce embankments. In some places, this debris is pummelled into small granular fragments in situ to serve as a substrate for subsequent building. Elsewhere, rather than being jettisoned from place, rubble is deployed to reconfigure adjacent landscape features. For example, at the site of the demolished Royal Children’s Hospital in Royal Park, demolition waste has been used to create a giant mound covered in lush turf that offers a vantage point for sweeping views of the city. At other sites, piles of rubble are removed and taken to marginal urban sites where they are recomposed as mounds, forming what Tom Neilsen (2002) describes as the ‘superfluous landscapes’ of the city. Demolition processes of pulverising, rapidly transforming the size, constituency and shape of materials, render the resulting aggregation usable for landscaping and infilling voids of many dimensions and forms. Finally, as I discuss in Chapter 2, demolition material is now more frequently recycled than previously, especially metal, stone and brick components of a building. However, the vast majority of demolition rubble, concrete, metal, stone and tiles, is consigned to landfill. Consequently, most of the material that formerly constituted buildings returns to the ground from which it once emerged. In Melbourne, as I now discuss, sites of disposal are amply provided by the numerous former quarries scattered across the city. Many have been filled in with waste, some are presently being filled, while others that are still actively extracting stony material have been identified as future landfill sites.

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Quarries as Landfill: Disposing of Stony Waste Robert Macfarlane (2019: 8) asserts that what lies beneath the ground, the underland, serves the same three tasks ‘across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful’. It is to the latter purpose that this section attends, and though stone and brick building rubble is less harmful than many forms of organic and toxic waste, enormous amounts lie under the surface of a significant part of what Edgeworth considers the ‘archaeosphere’, around half of the world’s land not covered by ice that has been modified by humans. He observes that the substrate of discard provides a foundation on which cities perpetually rise: ‘cities are built on platforms of their own debris, rising up over time so gradually that city-dwellers hardly notice its vast presence’. This substrate varies in distribution and thickness. For instance, in central London, it is 5 to 8 metres thick, much more substantive than in the outer suburbs (Edgeworth 2017: 157). Adrian Forty calculates that ‘construction and demolition waste is estimated to contribute between 25 and 50% of all municipal solid waste in Europe’ (2013: 76)—and most of this goes into landfill. In Melbourne, building debris promiscuously mingles with other kinds of rubble in the big holes created by stone and clay quarrying. For quarrying leaves a void that needs to be filled in order to be reintegrated into the city’s fabric; quarries provide convenient, near at hand sites at which unwanted matter may be disposed. Some quarries are small, others large; some are shallow, such as those at which a single layer of basalt has been extracted, while others have been excavated to a great depth. Yet across the city, most of these variously sized holes have been progressively filled in over the past century and half, purchased for this purpose by municipalities and private concerns, and it is planned to plug the voids produced by current extractive operations once quarrying ceases. The unfolding of a distinctive urban landscape that is characterised by an abundance of infilled holes emerged due to a series of related issues. First was the need to fill in quarries that had been encompassed by housing development in order to erase the dangerous character of expanding suburbs, overhaul their industrial appearance and boost their market value. Second was the requirement to dispense with the waste of the city, including demolition waste, in convenient and available

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locations. Third, the resulting instability of the land following disposal of waste meant that few of these infilled quarries could be built upon. Critically, as Laura Harper (2017: 81) notes, quarries abandoned following brick production could not enter the speculative land market, since the ‘structural degradation and contamination caused by extraction’ was too expensive to ameliorate and develop as land on which to build. Fourth, suburban desires to provide residents with green spaces happily coincided with this inability to build on infilled voids; consequently, most quarries subsequently enclosed by suburban growth were converted into parks and sports grounds, as I will shortly detail. The unpredictable stability of infilled quarries was a consequence of the largely unregulated tipping of waste, with little record of what kinds of material were disposed, and the ad hoc fashion in which layers of waste were laid down prevented the creation of firm terrain. This mix of rubbish of uncertain provenance that mingles beneath the surface in a disorganised assemblage increased the potential for toxicity and subsidence. Accordingly, converting land formerly used for quarrying into parks was the safest solution. As Harper (2017: 77) explains, the emergence of these parks emerged not ‘as a result of a planned strategy but rather as the outcome of a set of practical decisions relating to the cost effectiveness of developing land with difficult characteristics’. The largest bluestone quarry in Brunswick was the huge Wales Quarry established in the 1860s. Over 51 metres deep, it ceased operating in the late 1950s and in 1965, was purchased by demolition company Whelan the Wrecker to deposit the building rubble created from their extensive demolition programme, notably from the older nineteenth-century buildings in the city centre and factories that had become obsolete. Once this great void had been filled with enormous quantities of bricks, concrete rubble and stone, another disused quarry site in Niddrie was purchased by the company in 1985, yet the local council subsequently prohibited waste deposal here and it had to be sold at a loss (Kolankiewicz 2018). In an example of this reverse recycling, Phillips Reserve, close to the Wales Quarry site, was formerly the site of a clay quarry, material from which may well have been used to manufacture the red bricks from demolished buildings that were subsequently piled into the disused hole that now lies beneath turf.

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Numerous other parks across Melbourne’s north and west inner suburbs were similarly sites of former quarries. In Brunswick, these abundant parks include the early example of Methven Park, established by the Council when the quarry was depleted and filled in at the turn of the twentieth century, and Fleming Park, the home of the East Brunswick cricket and football clubs, which was founded in 1919. More recently, the Centre for Education and Research into Environmental Strategies (CERES) was established on the site of a filled-in former bluestone quarry adjacent to Merri Creek. This site comprised toxic land that lay adjacent to a polluted river and a group of activists remediated this site, planting trees and laying many tonnes of soil to create an environmental educational centre, urban farm and social enterprise facility. In the west, former quarries and waste dumps range from small reserves to more extensive parkland. Bassett Reserve in West Footscray is a medium-sized park whereas the long Cruikshank Park runs along an area of Stony Creek that was the site for eleven separate quarrying sites. Early on, Yarraville Gardens and Whitten Oval were founded on former quarries, and later developments include Hanmer Reserve, Hansen Reserve and Barret Reserve (Vines 1993), amongst many others, including M. Zacour Park discussed below. The Fritsch Holzer brickworks continued to operate until 1970 when it was demolished, and the whole of 15-acre site, including capacious clay pits, was purchased and used as a municipal tip by the City of Hawthorn. After being filled with refuse and capped in the 1980s, the land was utilised as a council depot before being more substantively remediated to create the sprawling Fritsch Holzer Park, named to signify its historical industrial significance. Similarly, Clifton Hill’s Quarries Park testifies to its former industrial use. Parks and sports grounds also exist in Box Hill, Preston and Northcote, amongst other suburbs. Though most of the lithic rubble from Melbourne’s demolished buildings has ended up as the substrate for these numerous parks, it has been used in other contexts to stabilise and reclaim land, as Annear (2014: 12) testifies, reporting that such debris ‘helped firm up the West Melbourne swamp and give Coode Island its footing’. Other cavernous voids have found other uses. A huge clay pit used by Box Hill Brickworks served as a highly popular swimming venue, the Surrey Dive, that staged

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competitions and drew large crowds, in the early years of the twentieth century. Swimming ceased in the 1960s following a drought, when the pit was drained and the water used to irrigate the nearby park, and the site was subsequently filled in. More recently, quarry holes have been filled in by deploying more advanced techniques that render ground stable, providing sites for the construction of the large shopping centres of Northcote Plaza and Barkly Square in Brunswick. The massive Highpoint City in Maribyrnong has similarly been constructed on a former bluestone quarry. In the centre’s underground car park, elements of the former quarry face have been retained. These contemporary techniques of infilling and remediation are also rendering quarried land suitable for housing development. However, earlier attempts were less successful. Like the vast coal ash flood that surged through a river in East Tennessee depicted by Susie Hatmaker, much of the matter that coagulates in landfill sites is excessive and unknowable, ‘changeable, unstable, fluid, and volatile in its sheer mass’ (2014: 30) Moreover, as George Jaramillo (2017) explores, many mines and quarries have been used for the unofficial disposal of abject forms of waste that render them toxic or unstable. Such was the case with Yarraville’s ‘sinking village’, a disastrous development project in which houses were built upon a former basalt quarry (Kolankiewicz 2018), first used in the 1890s to provide ballast for ships at the nearby port. Once this twoacre quarry was exhausted, the nearby Colonial Sugar Refinery Company used the site to dispose of dissolved carbonated waste, a by-product of the process of sugar purification. In the 1950s, once filled with this substance and other unwanted matter, the former quarry was topped with clay and soil and used as a transport depot until the early 1970s, when the local council granted permission for the building of thirty houses on the site. Shortly after they were built and purchased by residents, cracks began to appear, and water and sewer pipes disappeared, heralding a more serious sequence of events following heavy rain. Walls collapsed, open sinkholes appeared and subsidence rendered houses uninhabitable. The houses were abandoned and after a prolonged legal battle, householders were awarded compensation. In 1979, all buildings were demolished, and the site was used as a car park. In 2012, the council converted the site into the M. Zacour Park, complete with lawns, playground and

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trees, leaving no trace of the village that sank. The episode testifies to the instability of these early landfill sites, filled with diverse quantities of unspecified and uncertain waste. Contemporary landfill practices, far more technologically systematic and designed to reduce instability and the escape of toxic matter, are expanding the uses of infilled land. In mixed landfill sites, a medley of materials may include organic waste, which as it decomposes produces methane and carbon dioxide. Current techniques endeavour to manage such gases which if they escape, can contribute to climate change and pose risks of explosion or asphyxiation. Further, methods to contain and remove leachate—liquid that forms when waste decays and may contaminate groundwater—are also employed. Typically, the sides and walls of landfill sites are lined with impervious material, though the clay pits have always offered benefits as disposal sites because of their already nonporous lining (Harper 2017), and when filled, a landfill site is usually capped with more clay and rehabilitated with soil and vegetation. Around the fringes of Melbourne, vast quarries still in operation have been assigned as future landfill sites, while other exhausted quarries are in the process of being filled. At present, large, formerly quarried sites at Wollert, Altona and Deer Park provide the city’s largest landfill facilities. Yet such is the quantity of contemporary urban waste that new landfill sites need to be identified, though controversy usually surrounds such assignations. At Leongatha, south-west of the city, a vast bluestone quarry was mooted as an appropriate landfill site but in 2017, a local campaign that highlighted the disruptive flow of numerous heavy trucks and the hazards posed by leachate escape succeeded in preventing the scheme from going ahead (Kershaw 2017). In 2018, a company with connections to organised crime that operated a large landfill site at Bulla in the north of the city were discovered to have dumped exposed asbestos, and several sub-surface fires were also identified along with waste dumped outside the tip’s boundary. Consequently, the state’s Environmental Protection Agency ordered the tip to be closed (Houston and Vedelago 2018). By contrast, a more environmentally conscious gas-powered electricity plant in Sunshine exploits the methane emitted from a rubbishfilled former quarry site as an energy source. Having been filled in with various forms of waste matter, and technical procedures enacted to make

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them safe, the final process concerns the aesthetic transformation of a site of quarrying and subsequently landfill: remediation and landscaping.

Quarry Aftermaths: Remediation Formerly quarried sites in urban settings are usually subject to the process of terraforming. Once the hole in the ground has been filled with waste or surrounding earth and stone, the resulting surface is landscaped, topped with soil and planted with vegetation. In most cases, quarries are remediated so that they realign with the configurations of the surroundings and reassigned as a park or construction site. Accordingly, evidence of stone and clay quarrying is often imperceptible except when discerned on a map or via an aerial view that discloses the space occupied by the former industrial operation, usually marked where building ceases and parkland begins. Methods of remediating and reusing quarried land have changed over time, reflecting economic, aesthetic, social and political conventions that advocate, permit and disallow particular modes of land use. In Melbourne, these historical processes are evident in the numerous quarries that were once in the urban periphery, have been absorbed by the growing city and subsequently converted into parklands. Most of these sites have been assiduously landscaped and covered with vegetation, sports fields and other amenities. Yet while older quarry sites were largely considered unsuitable for building, contemporary practices of remediation have expanded the possibilities for reuse. Nonetheless, in most cases, tendencies to ‘restore’ quarried landscapes to an imagined verdant past or convert them into parks or nature reserves persist. An unusual early example of terraforming a former bluestone quarry is the creation of Herring Island on the River Yarra. A neck of land caused by a horseshoe bend in the river was pitted with excavations and in 1928, the narrow strands between these quarry holes were cut through to eliminate the bend and create the island (Presland 2008). The Yarra’s only island, it has matured to become a luxuriant plot of land scattered with short walking paths and sculptural installations, offering a contrast with the regulated urban spaces that stretch from the river banks beyond the island. Coverted into a site of artistic display and refuge, Herring Island was not deliberately designed as a recreational space but has become so

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inadvertently. Most contemporary landfill sites are by contrast, subject to contesting aesthetic visions about how they should be landscaped. Legwaila et al. (2015: 57) contend that current terraforming imperatives focus on the creation of a ‘landform to support any envisaged post mineral extraction after-use’, and fashion ‘appropriate surfaces for the establishment of vegetation’. Reclamation also depends on depth of extraction, the availability of fill material and topsoil, the cost of the operation, land ownership and the character of the surrounding landscape. They identify five different techniques that predominate in contemporary quarry remediation: rollover slopes, backfilling, bench planting restoration, blasting and natural recovery. The creation of rollover slopes involves tipping and pushing material over the top edge of the quarry to cover quarry faces, although the authors consider that such inclines may look oddly smooth in contradistinction to a topography in which uneven slopes, depressions and knolls predominate. Alternatively, backfilling involves the partial or complete filling of a quarry void with waste rock topped with soil in order to restore the presumed original appearance of a site. Such projects require much material—and with most of Melbourne’s backfilled western and northern inner suburban parks, much of this was demolition waste. Once more, contend Legawalia et al., this ‘softening’ may produce a space that appears artificially smooth in contrast to the surrounding landscape. Bench planting involves the depositing of soil on benches or plateaus so that these areas may be planted in order to break up the horizontal features of the quarried landscape, creating a more obviously sculpted landscape. More ambitiously, blasting of quarry faces seeks to create new unquarried landforms that blend with stony features produced by quarrying. Finally, simply leaving the quarry to allow it to become colonised by plant and animal species through ‘natural recovery’ usually only applies to small quarries where extensive landscaping is not pertinent. Yet such sites tend to develop greater biodiversity and what Legawalia et al. consider to be a ‘higher aesthetic value’ than those mediated by human intervention. Indeed, the crevices found on quarry faces, often inaccessible to humans, attract a variety of plant and animal species that remain undisturbed. A mode of landscaping not referred to by the authors is that of flooding a quarry hole with water, which depends on the level of the water table and the depth to which extraction was carried out.

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A contemporary example of careful remediation is at a bluestone quarry formerly exploited by the large stone-cutting facility near Port Fairy mentioned above. Here, a small low-lying area was used to store the topsoil that was removed during the extraction process and this was subsequently spread over the surface of the quarry hole after it had been backfilled and levelled. The work has gone further in creating a small area of wetland to encourage wildlife and this has been surrounded by the planting of native wattle trees. Another of the firm’s quarries is nearing exhaustion and will be landscaped by producing a gentle slope, resewn with native plants and grasses, and returned to farmland. Remediation has already commenced with the planting of native trees around the quarry’s perimeter and these will be supplemented with others as closure approaches. It is likely that there will be no obvious evidence that this was once a site of industrial extraction. An earlier, much larger project is the extensive remediation and landscaping of a former bluestone quarry site at Newport Lakes, a 33hectare country park in Melbourne’s west. Victoria Kolankiewicz (2018) discusses the changing plans that unfolded during the repurposing of the site and the hotly contested response to these schemes from local, amenity and political groups. Nearby residents had long complained about the environmental effects of quarrying, and this was subsequently amplified by the local council decision to use the large holes that remained following the cessation of quarrying for landfill. The City of Williamstown used one heavily quarried void, Pavey’s Hole, to dispose of their rubbish as did neighbouring councils of South Melbourne, Footscray, Richmond and Altona, all of which were running short of landfill sites. From the mid-1980s, the north-west quarry hole was also utilised as a tip, and there were persistent demands from some local politicians to fill in all the remaining cavities with waste. Infilling was completed in 1995 and Pavey’s Hole was capped with 1.8 metres of clay, planted with trees and shrubs and transformed into Pavey’s Park. Subsequently, the remaining two large holes were drained and filled to make them shallower and hence less dangerous, and then filled with water. At the edges of one lake, vertical quarried faces were retained to acknowledge the site’s former use and break up the rather featureless levelling effects.

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A renowned horticulturalist was employed to coordinate the landscaping project. He directed the softening of quarried rock faces with rollover slopes in other areas of the site and organised extensive planting of local indigenous varieties as well as an arboretum of North American pines, European trees and ornamental Australian trees. This remediation project has transformed this site of extraction into a park that supports over 200 species of plants and 160 species of birds, a popular recreational space that also provides playgrounds, picnic area, barbecue facilities and paths, and hosts the annual Newport Fiddle and Folk Bush Dance. Further unrealised plans have envisioned alternative uses for the site including a housing development, community farm, orchard, campsite, golf driving range, rifle range, and an ‘Alpine’ landscape for grass skiing, water slides, white-water kayaking and rock-climbing. The quarried holes that made the design of Newport Lakes possible, the extant quarry faces and the stepping stones sourced from some of the large quarried stones that remained augment the arboreal scene and provide evidence of historical quarrying. The decision to retain the distinctive remnant of a bluestone quarry face has also been taken at a current development at the aforementioned Niddrie Quarry, where a large hole has been filled in to create a lake and housing has been built in the shadow of a large cliff, an integral feature of the designed landscape. According to Shaun Rosier (2018: 611), developments such as these resist tendencies to homogenise space through disguising industrial traces and exploit ‘their ability to produce powerful and moving aesthetic experiences’. Rather than reinstating a pastoral aesthetic, such contemporary approaches to remediation regard certain traces of industry as both historically alluring and dramatic. As different technologies of remediation emerge, other alternative uses for landfilled quarries are now deployed. For instance, Laura Harper (2017) details the destiny of 25 former inner suburban clay pits. She notes that three were used for landfill, eight have become parks, three are now the site of large shopping centres, four have been occupied by industrial facilities or colleges, while until recently, seven remained unused. Yet between 2009 and 2016, four of these long-dormant spaces have been transformed into medium and high-density housing. Whereas the cost of the requisite kind of infilling operation was formerly prohibitive, rising

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land values and increases in population density have made this viable. As Harper further considers, quarries on the outer edge of Melbourne have also vastly increased in value as the city rapidly expands, and they can be profitably sold as real estate for building; indeed, so economically lucrative are some sales that this may sometimes supersede the business of quarrying. Accordingly, whereas previously, local councils and the state were required to intervene to remediate the voids that remained once quarrying ceased since they possessed little market value, quarry companies now may sell them for healthy profits or undertake remediation work themselves to provide land for development. The increasing tendency to remediate quarry sites to make them suitable for building is well-exemplified at a huge limestone quarry at Lilydale on the outer fringes of the city that was formerly a key source of building stone for Melbourne, operating from 1878 until its closure in 2015. A 162-hectare site that incorporates the old quarry has been purchased by a property development consortium that plans to invest two billion dollars in constructing a mixed-use scheme intended to house around eight thousand residents. The project involves advanced geotechnical engineering to fill the more than 100-metre-deep hole so that it is suitable for building. Overburden mounds formerly produced by extraction will provide most of the infill and this will be densely compacted to obviate any future instability (Quarry News 2019). The economic benefits of reusing land formerly used for sand, clay and stone extraction means that in Melbourne, quarries are less likely to be left alone, yet this is not necessarily the case further away from the city. The effects of Melbourne’s demand for stone upon the landscapes of rural settings are evident in the agricultural land that surrounds the small town of Malmsbury around 85 kilometres from the city. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the underlying, distinctively light grey bluestone of the area was in high demand because of its more pliable and workable qualities and was extracted from around 60 quarries to the east, south-east and north-east of the town. These range in size and most are quite shallow, with few quarries deeper than 20ft. Quarrying in Malmsbury proliferated from the middle of the nineteenth century to the eve of the First World War; thereafter, only sporadic extraction was undertaken. Unlike in the city, where quarries tend to be filled in and remediated, most of these old quarries remain evident. They are, as Susan Walter (2019: 1) observes, ‘an

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untidy jungle of piled overburden, unwanted stone and thorny weeds’, some with small vestiges of shelters, drilling marks in stones and cobbled roadways. Many of Malmsbury’s disused quarries can be identified from a distance. Some stand out as small aggregations of boulders in the midst of fields while others are discernible as small copses containing tall pines and eucalypts that are accompanied by shrubs, gorse bushes and long grasses. Few have been filled in and folded back inconspicuously into the landscape. Some are filled with water and serve as swimming holes or as locations for watering livestock (Fig. 3.3). The landscaping industry has expropriated some of the loose boulders that remain while a few

Fig. 3.3 Disused quarry, Malmsbury

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other former quarries have been used as dump sites for farm waste, one becoming the Malmsbury Tip, filled in with excess soil from local construction. In being entirely abandoned as productive sites, the loose piles of stones offered an attractive home for vermin that would be difficult to catch amongst the disordered piles of debris, and many were formerly bounded by rabbit-proof fences to prevent access for the rodents. Neither subject to heritage listing nor official designation as landfill sites, nor identified as spaces of recreation, historical significance or environmental value, the majority of Malmsbury’s quarries remain features of the pastoral landscape into which they gently subside. There have been no artful attempts at deliberate rewilding or smart design that blend the industrial with the rural, as with the innovative design of the celebrated Duisberg Landschaftspark, Germany, where the large area occupied by a defunct steelworks is being recolonised by vegetation (Hemmings and Kagel 2010). Instead, these are sites of rural ruin which are both ‘emblematic of transience and of persistence over time’ (Roth 1997), small hybrid parks of unmanaged interstitial wilderness in which the material traces of past human endeavour mingle with non-human colonisation. The nearby Kyneton bluestone quarry is also unremediated and exemplifies the potential ecological value of such sites. The cliff faces and the loose piles of stones that litter the bottom of the quarry have proved to be a fertile terrain for the unfettered growth of vegetation, in contrast to the surrounding instrumental agricultural land use where excess foliage may be cleared and poisoned. The quarry is the only site in the area that hosts the Necklace Fern (asplenium flabellium) and the Fuzzy New Holland Daisy (Vittadinia cuneata var. cuneate). Climbers also frequent the site to ascend three short routes and along with one of the currently worked Harcourt Granite quarries on Mount Alexander, an equally picturesque setting, it is identified as a potential location by Film Victoria (n.d.). Unremediated quarries also offer a venue for subcultural or illicit practices that may be forbidden if performed at more surveilled urban spaces. Once abandoned, certain marginally situated quarries are officially categorised as brownfield sites and may be regarded as abject, dangerous, useless spaces, forms of terra nullius devoid of function

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but awaiting redevelopment with the advent of a more propitious economic climate. Along with other abandoned industrial sites, such realms have attracted a medley of appellations (DeSilvey and Edensor 2013), including ‘terrain vague’ (De Sola Morales 1995), ‘dead zones’ (Doron 2000), ‘anxious landscapes’ (Picon 2000) and ‘ambivalent landscapes’ (Jorgensen and Tylecote 2007). Such terms frequently elide the potential for play, social interaction and creativity that these sites offer, ignoring the possibilities for use between closure and envisioned future developments stoked by often tenuous expectations (Hudson 2015). Yet a host of activities do take place at disused quarry sites, which may be used as unofficial settings for fly-tipping, cycling and motorbiking, dog walking, car-parking, dogging, bonfire building, raving and fighting. Water-filled quarry holes provide locales for model boating, swimming and fishing, while unpoliced terrain offers opportunities to create impromptu artworks or inventive and site-responsive design (Harper 2017). Indeed, an open-ended, design-led approach is precisely what has been adopted at a quarry some distance from the city, where an imaginative, critical and creative approach to engaging with a legacy of extraction is located. Next to the small settlement of Beech Forest in the Great Otway National Park, around 200 kilometres west of Melbourne, a 86,000square-metre sandstone quarry was worked from the late nineteenth century, but operations ceased when the crushed aggregate it supplied was reclassified as no longer suitable for road construction. The remnant skeleton of an old office building remains adjacent to the entrance road, while in the former quarry, piles of rock and heaps of finely crushed, sludgy aggregate are strewn across the flat surface, with large tyre marks imprinted on soft ground. Patches of grass grow here and there and two small, reed-lined ponds that reveal evidence of deeper excavations are full of potable, crystal clear water, serve as swimming pools and host a multitude of breeding frogs. The quarried land is surrounded by steep wooded slopes except at the point where a channel has been cut through the surrounding rocks to drain away excess water. The sounds of wind, frogs and cockatoos punctuate the arboreal silence (Fig. 3.4). The quarry has been purchased by a group named These Are The Projects We Do Together , who seek to encourage alternative and openended modes of remediation that challenge economistic strategies as well

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Fig. 3.4 Beech Forest Quarry

as those that envision restoration to a formerly ‘authentic’ or ‘natural’ state. Here, there are no propositions that articulate specific objectives and end points but rather, multiple interactions are encouraged, as articulated in the slogan: ‘Make a Clearing. Ask Questions. Take Care’. Since the purchase of the site in 2017, a range of diverse performative, social, theatrical and educational projects have been undertaken. Initially, a ‘Field Guide’ was devised to map key features of the quarry and situate it within the larger Otways landscape, identifying geological and geomorphological specificities, and including sketches of flora and fauna, as well as specimens of archival material from the days of quarrying. Following this, 30 people participated in a blackberry picking and cooking session

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that made use of the abundant fruit. Other exploratory investigations have included a wood-harvesting project that focused upon the trees that surround the quarry and a workshop that explored the potential of using transects to identify material traces of key historical moments of transformation. In developing non-mainstream ideas about remediation, student proposals for the site’s reuse have sought inspiration from the 1960s and 1970s subcultural and counter-cultural design innovations, while various architectural and environmental workshops have solicited a wide range of future visions. Future talks, workshops and architectural interventions are planned. More pragmatically, a small accommodation block has been designed and this will be supplemented by an amphitheatre at which performances and events can be staged. In August 2019, a 300-metre-long line was strung across the quarry to host a projection screen upon which an experimental tribute to Talking Heads 1980 album, Remain in Light, was projected. The elegiac lyrics to the song ‘Once in a Lifetime’ were sporadically intoned over slow-moving drone footage of an ephemeral, billowing white screen that bisected the richly textured quarry floor. The lyrics interrogate how quarrying became sedimented in everyday routines of extraction for more than a century and conjure up the alternative pasts that could have eventuated in the formation of an entirely different place, while positing the potential for the emergence of an as yet undetermined, unpredictable post-industrial future. The managers of the Quarry conceive distinct phases through which the project will evolve, moving from clearing the site and observing to asking questions, and from working together to living together. They renounce any ambition to restore this site of extraction to its predisturbance state, decrying a goal that in its privileging of surface appearance disguises the impossibility of restoring the multiple layers of materials, fauna and flora that have been removed. They critique what they call ‘a tired heroic narrative of re-engineered “solutions”, of metrics, monitoring and measure’, practices of remediation that conceal the distinct histories, geologies, ecologies, landscape configurations and potentialities of quarried sites. In calling for imaginative and experimental approaches from artists, designers, government organisations, educational institutions, architects and designers, they seek to stimulate visions

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of alternative afterlives for these ravaged landscapes without privileging any of them.

Conclusions In exploring four interlinked processes of quarrying, demolition, disposal and remediation, I have investigated how lithic material is extracted, shifted, reassembled, jettisoned and reshaped as part of the ongoing material transformation of the city and key processes through which urban material flows are managed. As I have emphasised, the establishment of quarries and landfill sites has typically been contested, and recent trends have ensured that both have been redistributed to the margins of the city. Indeed, it is increasingly difficult for industries to be granted a license for quarrying. For instance, an application to open a large quarry on undeveloped land next to the popular tourist destination, Arthur’s Seat, on Mornington Peninsula some 80 kilometres south of the city is currently subject to heated contestation. At an adjacent location, permission to use a nearby former quarry site for waste disposal was rebuffed. The quarry is estimated to contain 70 million tonnes of granite for extraction, a quantity that could satiate some of Melbourne’s huge demand for lithic building materials. However, local campaigners note that the proposed site provides a biodiverse habitat for the grey goshawk, powerful owl, swamp skink, glossy grass skink and southern toadlet, and that quarrying will violate restrictions on development (Carey 2018). The state government is seeking to relax planning laws to ensure that local interests cannot always thwart the needs of the construction industry and the ongoing expansion of the city. At present, as a quarry manager told me, before a new licence can be granted a cultural heritage study must be performed to ensure no indigenous artefacts are damaged or lost, while the Department of Sustainability and Environment also inspect the area to identify any native flora or fauna that may require protection. Furthermore, the Mines Department will overview the application to explore what restrictions need to be placed on quarrying and assess proposed rehabilitation measures following its cessation. Following this, the roads authority investigates

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the access and egress from the site and the effects of large trucks on existing travel routes. Finally, the local shire may attempt to obtain a planning permit, triggering the opportunity for the community to voice their opinions before anything can go ahead. Where quarries are granted permission to begin extraction, a list of stringent stipulations is often imposed. A recently opened bluestone quarry at Birregura, 140 kilometres to the south-west of Melbourne that was heavily contested by local farmers and residents, has to consent to 87 conditions imposed by the State Government, including the monitoring of underground water quality and limits on the number of trucks allowed to access the site each hour (King, 2017). Locals continue to demand even more exacting restrictions on speed limits and a call for the owners to adopt a scheme to plant native trees. Demolition has also become more contested, replete with limitations on what may be demolished and restrictions on how operations must proceed. The rather unconfined destruction of yesteryear has been curtailed by values shaped by concerns about aesthetics, cultural diversity and heritage that are increasingly attached to diverse buildings, that thereby become subject to regimes of preservation and renovation. Yet certain areas of the city such as old industrial districts and docklands remain relatively unprotected and demolition through large development projects is still undertaken. Building rubble thus continues to constitute a high percentage of the waste consigned to landfill. As categories of waste become more delineated and diverse, with specialist methods of disposal focusing on particular landfill sites, building rubble may mingle with other rubbish, occupy its own resting place or contribute to land reclamation. These contemporary processes supplement a vast array of sites at which rubble has disappeared below ground in Melbourne; it primarily remains quarries that accommodate waste. As I have emphasised, quarrying is intimately conjoined to disposal, and the compendium of infilled sites of extraction provide hidden evidence of the history of the city. Yet what lies beneath is easily ignored. Unseen and imperceptible, we persistently fail ‘to attend to the sunken networks of extraction, exploitation and disposal that support the surface world’ (Macfarlane 2019: 13). By adopting a stratigraphic perspective to think about what lies

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under our feet, we could acquire a more comprehensive understanding of the city’s ongoing emergence. The layering of matter below the surface has been deposited in various ways, according to diverse techniques and as part of different kinds of operations: as landfill and waste disposal, through the laying of infrastructural pipes, cables and shafts, and in building on top of pre-existing structures. Shannon Dawdy emphasises that through an archaeological exploration of what she calls the ‘social stratigraphy’ of the city, the ways in which the ‘human and non-human elements of the landscape are conformed, layered and deep’ (2016: 45) can be disclosed, though they are usually concealed and forgotten. Though archaeological explorations of Aboriginal quarries have been undertaken, no similar investigations of the numerous quarries strewn across Melbourne’s landscape since the mid-nineteenth century have been carried out, though they would surely reveal a diversity of infilling techniques and deposited material that has changed over the past two centuries. This ongoing making of the city can, Lesley Instone (2019: 365) suggests, be considered as ‘a geological process itself, in terms of the earthmoving, building materials and construction of cities as well as in the turbulent possibilities of destruction from the movements, trembling and fracturing of the earth’s crust’. Quarrying, demolition, landfilling and remediation all transform the material substrate of place. Stone is shaped and crushed, smashed and buried, included in terraforming landscapes. Underground, lithic materials continue to evolve. They fragment and dissolve, coagulate and blend with each other and with other substances, leach out of their underground confinement and enter streams and rivers. Eventually, they may become compacted, perhaps laying the conditions for their future evolution into compressed and conglomerate forms of sedimentary stone, created by human and non-human processes, a geological trace of the era presently termed the Anthropocene. In the visible world however, the culmination of filling in quarried holes with waste has resulted in the prevalence of a host of distinctive kinds of urban space that also testify to changing planning designations, practical solutions, strategies of concealment and modes of terraforming. Such measures to bury, make safe and hide might be termed as part of what David Matless (2017) refers to as the ‘anthroposcenic’ ways in

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which humans have managed the effects created by building, demolition, erasure and terraforming activities in the landscape. In former times, some of these quarries were simply left, constituting unsightly hazards for local residents, while most were infilled and converted into valuable green spaces in former industrial areas of the city. Subject to supposedly safer and more stabilising techniques of infilling, many such sites have recently become valuable land, newly esteemed as apposite sites for building the expanding city. The filling in of the holes it creates, the covering over of the evidence of this infilling through terraforming, and the redesignation of function has tended to efface the traces of quarrying. As I have discussed, recent sophisticated modes of landfilling and landscaping allow such vestigial evidence to be retained in the form of large boulders or quarry faces that are now considered to add allure to terraformed spaces. These strategies are part of a broader range of approaches that also include the filling of quarry holes with water, the creation of ecologically rich habitats or leaving quarries to evolve with minimal human intervention. Yet none of these measures can return the land to the way it was before quarrying commenced for both quarrying, infilling and terraforming make great physical, chemical and material changes to the surface and to subterranean geological and environmental systems. Such changes haunt the city that would rather forget them, as I will explore in the final chapter.

References Amin, A., & Thrift, N. (2017). Seeing Like a City. Cambridge: Polity Press. Annear, R. (2014). A City Lost and Found: Whelan the Wrecker’s Melbourne. Melbourne: Black Inc. Brand, S. (1995). How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. London: Penguin. Cairns, S., & Jacobs, J. (2014). Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Carey, A. (2018, July 14). State Government Weighs Proposal for Giant Quarry in Green Wedge Zone. The Age. https://www.theage.com.au/ politics/victoria/state-government-weighs-proposal-for-giant-quarry-ingreen-wedge-zone-20180713-p4zrde.html. Accessed 5 February 2019.

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Costello, L. (2005). From Prisons to Penthouses: The Changing Images of High-Rise Living in Melbourne. Housing Studies, 20 (1), 49–62. Dawdy, S. (2016). Patina: A Profane Archaeology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DeSilvey, C. (2013). Object Lessons: From Batholith to Bookend. In N. Johnson, R. Schein, & J. Winders (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. DeSilvey, C., & Edensor, T. (2013). Reckoning with Ruins. Progress in Human Geography, 37 (4), 465–485. De Sola Morales, I. (1995). Terrain Vague. In C. Davidson (Ed.), AnyPlace. Cambridge: MIT Press. Doron, G. (2000). The Dead Zone and the Architecture of Transgression. City, 4 (2), 247–263. Edensor, T. (2016). Incipient Ruination and the Precarity of Buildings: Materiality, Non-human and Human Agents, and Maintenance and Repair. In M. Bille & T. Sorensen (Eds.), Assembling Archaeology, Atmosphere and the Performance of Building Spaces (pp. 366–382). London: Routledge. Edgeworth, M. (2017). Humanly Modified Ground. In D. DellaSala & M. Goldstein (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene. London: Elsevier. Forty, A. (2013). Concrete and Culture: A Material History. London: Reaktion. Hackworth, J. (2016). Demolition as Urban Policy in the American Rust Belt. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48(11), 2201–2222. Harvey, D. (1985). The Geopolitics of Capitalism. In D. Gregory, J. Urry (Eds.), Social Relations and Spatial Structures (pp. 128–163). London: Macmillan. Harper, L. (2017). The Urbanism of Material (Unpublished PhD thesis). Monash University, Melbourne. Hatmaker, S. (2014). On Mattering: A Coal Ash Flood and the Limits of Environmental Knowledge. Environmental Humanities, 4 (1), 19–39. Hemmings, S. and Kagel, M. (2010). Memory Gardens: Aesthetic Education and Political Emancipation in Lanschaftspark Duisberg-Nord, German Studies Review, 33(2): 243–261. Houston, C., & Vedelago, C. (2018, July 23). Tip Linked to Gangsters Shut Down by the EPA. The Age. https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/ tip-linked-to-gangsters-shut-down-by-epa-20180722-p4zsy1.html. Accessed 14 June 2019. Hudson, J. (2015). The Multiple Temporalities of Informal Spaces. Geography Compass, 9 (8), 461–481.

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Instone, L. (2019). Making the Geologic with Urban Nature Cultures: Life and Nonlife on the Victorian Volcanic Plains Grasslands of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Geoforum, 106, 363–369. Jaramillo, G. (2017). Fragmentary Landscapes: Explorations Through the Detritus of the Peak District. Landscape Research, 42(6), 663–676. Jorgensen, A., & Tylecote, M. (2007). Ambivalent Landscapes—Wilderness in the Urban Interstices. Landscape Research, 32(4), 443–462. Kershaw, T. (2017, May 12). Mega Landfill Binned. The Great Southern Star. http://thestar.com.au/blog/mega-landfill-binned/. Accessed 13 May 2019. King, C. (2017, June 8). Quarry Approved at Birregurra After Long-Running Planning Dispute. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-0608/quarry-approved-at-birregurra-after-long-running-dispute/8600348. Accessed 6 June 2019. Kolankiewicz, V. (2018, January 31–2 February). Making Something of a Hole in the Ground: The Re-use of Basalt Quarries in Melbourne’s Western Suburbs. In Proceedings of the 14th Australasian Urban History Planning History Conference 2018. Melbourne, VIC: Australasian Urban History Planning History Group. Legwaila, I., Lange, E., & Cripps, J. (2015). Quarry Reclamation in England: A Review of Techniques. Journal of the American Society of Mining and Reclamation, 4 (2), 55–79. Lesh, J. (2019). From Modern to Postmodern Skyscraper Urbanism and the Rise of Historic Preservation in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth, 1969–1988. Journal of Urban History, 45 (1), 126–149. Macfarlane, R. (2019). Underland: A Deep Time Journey. London: Hamish Hamilton. Matless, D. (2017). The Anthroposcenic. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42(3), 363–376. Neilsen, T. (2002). The Return of the Excessive: Superfluous Landscapes. Space and Culture, 5 (1), 53–62. Picon, A. (2000). Anxious Landscapes: From the Ruin to Rust. Grey Room, Fall, 64–83. Presland, G. (2008). The Place for a Village: How Nature has Shaped the City of Melbourne. Melbourne: Museum Victoria. Quarry News. (2019, January 5). Historic Site to Become “Walkable” Suburb. https://www.quarrymagazine.com/2019/01/05/historic-site-to-becomewalkable-suburb/. Accessed 12 July 2019. Rosier, S. (2018). Operationalising the Sublime: Bringing the Sublime from Abstract to Concrete. In P. Rajagopalan & M. M. Andamon (Eds.), Engaging

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Architectural Science: Meeting the Challenges of Higher Density: 52nd International Conference of the Architectural Science Association (pp. 611–618). Melbourne, VIC: Architecture Science Association (ANZAScA), RMIT University. Roth, M. (1997). Preface. In M. Roth, C. Lyons, & C. Merewether (Eds.), Irresistible Decay. Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute. Schumpeter, J. (1994). Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Routledge. Trigg, D. (2009). The Place of Trauma: Memory, Hauntings, and the Temporality of Ruins. Memory Studies, 2, 87–101. Vines, G. (1993). Quarry and Stone: Bluestone Quarrying, Stonemasonry and Building in Melbourne’s West. Highpoint City, VIC: Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West. Walter, S. (2019). Malmsbury Bluestone and Quarries: Finding Holes in History and Heritage (Unpublished thesis). Federation University, Ballarat, Victoria.

Part IV Foundation

As an enduring symbol of stability and immutability, stone is used to strengthen foundations, solidify supporting pillars and buttresses, and create substantial plinths. This durability is exemplified by the foundation stone, an emblem of structural integrity. As with other cities, Melbourne possesses many nineteenth and twentieth century buildings that were initiated by the laying of a foundation stone, the reference point for the subsequent positioning of all other stones. Typically set in a prominent location on a building’s exterior, foundation stones are inscribed to record the date of construction, the name of the architect and the public notables who ceremonially laid the stone. The dedicatory inscriptions on Melbourne’s foundation stones register officiating local politicians, high office holders, entrepreneurs and other worthies from a select, white, male elite, but not those who laboured in a building’s construction. Until the 1970s, many grand and prestigious buildings continued to be inaugurated by foundation stone laying ceremonies, with a specially manufactured and engraved ornamental silver trowel brandished by a VIP in the ritual application of mortar. Such rites have recently declined but in the ninteenth century, great crowds would gather at auspicious building projects to be addressed by local clergy or politicians. Thousands attended the laying of the foundation stones of the Town Hall in

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1867, presided over by the Duke of Edinburgh, and similar numbers flocked to witness inaugural ceremonies at the Royal Exhibition Building in 1879 and St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1880, both officiated over by Victorian governors. In ancient times, these ceremonies involved the placing of animal or human sacrifices under the stone and later, offerings of grain, wine and oil, while medieval churches might contain saintly relics. Resonant modern practices primarily derive from the nineteenth century custom of commemorating the era of a building’s foundation through the placing of a time capsule underneath or in a hollow compartment inside a stone that typically contained coins, newspapers and documents. For instance, a phial was placed in the cavity of the foundation stone of the demolished Colonial Mutual Life Building that enclosed a British sovereign, half-sovereign, crown, half-crown, two shillings, one shilling, sixpence, fourpence, and threepence, as well as a copy of a daily newspaper. The prescriptive conventions that specify the contents of time capsules rather limit their interest to historians, yet the traditional placing of coins provided a source of unexpected income for building workers, who were tempted to pilfer the contents before capsules were sealed into stones ahead of laying ceremonies. Indeed, time capsules discovered in several of Melbourne’s foundation stones following the demolition of the buildings to which they belonged have been found to be devoid of the currency that is itemised in official documents. Most, however, remain unopened. Largely unnoticed, Melbourne’s numerous foundation stones continue to testify to the founding of the building and to the men who oversaw their inauguration.

Part IV: Foundation

Fig. 1 Foundation stone, Town Hall

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4 The Maintenance and Repair of Stone Assemblages

Introduction In this chapter, I consider how stone in Melbourne, as in other cities, is subject to practices of repair and maintenance that ensure the persistence of the city’s lithic materiality. I begin with a discussion about how we might account for maintenance and repair as practices integral to the stable reproduction of places and then introduce the building upon which my analysis focuses, the extraordinary Newman College. I follow this by identifying how the particular material qualities of stone and the effects wrought upon it by a host of non-human agencies determine the ways in which it deteriorates, and thus attract the attention of conservationists, heritage bodies, architects and repair specialists. After identifying the factors that have caused stone deterioration at Newman, I focus on the measures that have been taken to renovate this decayed fabric and the aesthetic and technical considerations that have informed their adoption. In the previous chapter, I discuss how stone buildings have been demolished and may be precarious, threatened by changing values and aesthetics, yet these may also be mobilised to ensure that stone buildings endure. Indeed, despite its continuous emergence and internal vitality, stone remains ‘the most durable element of the archaeological © The Author(s) 2020 T. Edensor, Stone, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1_4

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record’ (Hurcombe 2007: 146). It is typically more enduring than many other elements of the built environment, possessing properties of density, longevity, manipulability and colour stability (Winkler 1994). Other virtues that make stone suitable as a building material include resistance to scratching, indentation and abrasion, compressive strength, a capacity to absorb heat and cold, and resistance to acid rain. And for sedimentary rocks like sandstone, density and durability are often produced through the quality of the pore cement which strengthen the binding of the grains as it seeps through the stone. Yet whatever the qualities of a particular kind of stone, Smith and Pˇrikryl maintain that ‘using (stone) in construction, especially in a polluted urban setting… will invariably shorten its lifespan’ (2007: 2). Once it has been inserted into a building assemblage, it inevitably transforms at variable rates. Some kinds of stone are more enduring than others according to their own properties and to the agencies of the other materialities, chemicals, social practices, weather and non-human entities that surround them. Accordingly, although all buildings require attentive upkeep, certain buildings are more susceptible to the agencies of decay, need more attention than others and demand a range of technical solutions to ensure their ongoing stability. Stone especially alerts us to consider how, as Mark Jackson reminds us, ‘as transient subjects enmeshed and entangled in material processes of becoming, we are subject to processes and grounds that precede and thus bind us’ (2013: 12). In exploring how stone is enrolled into practices of repair and maintenance, I focus upon a usually unheralded realm of human activity, yet one that is essential to the sustenance of the city.

Thinking About Repair and Maintenance Practices of maintenance, cleaning, inspection and treatment are often highly regular, sometimes never-ending, and if they cease or are inadequately performed, ruin accelerates. An army of urban cleaners move across offices and factories during the night to sweep away the detritus of the day that if left unchecked would exercise ruinous agencies. Heating engineers, pest-controllers, lighting designers, electricians,

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plumbers, tilers, glazers, air conditioning workers and lift repair workers are summoned to restore systems that have failed and threaten comfortable inhabitation and ultimately, the integrity of a building. These programmes operate according to different temporalities. For instance, Ignaz Strebel (2011) identifies the daily routine block checks performed at high-rise flats in Glasgow where concierges habitually carry out such mundane maintenance practices as closing windows left open, ensuring that disposal chutes are clear and removing rubbish, all measures that prevent more extensive threats. Such routines are typically part of building management systems, anticipatory programmes that are put in place to prepare for contingencies and shifts in material conditions, and keep records of interventions and scheduled activities (Adamcyzk 2019). At a different temporal scale, the Church of England has a systematic programme of quinquennial inspections where architects specialising in the materials and construction of older structures are appointed to investigate a building’s fabric, identify repair requirements and organise any necessary programmes of restoration (Edensor 2011). At the largest and longest scale, millennia-spanning endeavours are undertaken to repair and maintain certain infrastructures, as with the Aboriginal stony aquaculture complex around Budj Bim Gunditjmara (Gibson 2017). These scheduled procedures must intersect with the temporal processes of wear and tear, as Stewart Brand (1995) discusses. He identifies how the different architectural components of a building decay or become distressed at different rates. The interior layout typically changes every three years as building use is amended, while infrastructural elements, including plumbing, wiring, elevators and heating systems usually wear out between seven to fifteen years. Roofs and exterior wall sheathing are commonly replaced around every 20 years due to debilitation, changing technologies and architectural styles, whereas when a building’s foundation and weight-bearing fabric starts to become ruined, it may be approaching its demise. Indeed, Brand asserts that few structures last beyond 60 years unless they have been especially valued as of architectural or historical significance. As Denis and Pontille suggest (2018), rather than conceiving of maintenance and repair purely as a realm of technical expertise, it should be honoured as an indispensable and inevitable part of living with uncertainty, vitality and change, of living in a world in which

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multiple non-humans exert their agencies. Indeed, as part of everyday life, at many scales and in many settings, enormous endeavour goes into the production of stability, reliability and orderliness so that the tendency is ‘to have things come together in discernible arrangements’ (Sack 2004: 248). This might also be expressed as work that aims at ‘capture and containment, the organisation of forces with a degree of consistency such that they are apprehensible as bodies, subjects and objects’ (Latham and McCormack 2004: 718). The continual, vigilant upkeep of the material world continuously excludes matter out of place, keeps things in place and enlists a compendium of techniques, procedures and institutions. Though such practices are mobilised differently in particular cultural contexts (Gregson et al. 2009; Spellman 2002), a world without practices that ensure material and spatial consistency would be scarcely bearable or understandable. Repair and maintenance are mobilised by different regimes and actors, some institutional, others more casually organised. For instance, Chantal Carr (2017) identifies both inventive, improvisational repair and the specialist skills applied during rigorously scheduled procedures at a large steel plant. Similarly, Jessica Barns (2017) distinguishes between state organised annual maintenance of Egypt’s infrastructure, involving the highly visible, programmed mobilisation of a selective team of experts and the more contingent repairs collectively undertaken by farmers. Most western practices of repair and maintenance require the intervention of various specialists to deal with degeneration, whereas in more make-do cultures, diverse actors contingently deal with problems of breakdown and decay in situ (Denis and Pontille 2017). Yet in western settings, in repudiating tendencies to discard and replace worn objects, oppositional, more sustainable and ethical practices of repair and maintenance are increasingly being adopted (DeSilvey and Ryan 2018: 196). As Denis et al. (2015: 9) emphasise, ‘repair is at the heart of a continuous process that includes patching up, reconfiguring, interpolating, and reassembling settings from previous forms of existence’. If maintenance and repair are not systematically and regularly undertaken, buildings are threatened by ruination, some at a more rapid rate than others (Edensor 2016). In considering this further, the ultimate fate of a building depends upon human decisions about whether they ought to endure or not. Some

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structures are assiduously maintained to ‘keep up appearances’ whereas less valued sites are neglected. Such decisions depend upon local governmental regimes and their selective allotment of resources, and on the cultural capital of residents and businesses and the extent to which they have access to sufficient resources. Assessments about whether buildings have outlived their usefulness, should be repaired or are beyond repair, ought to be subject to continual maintenance, possess or lack esteemed aesthetic or symbolic qualities, or have retained or lost their function, vary over time and space. Such decisions are often volatile and unpredictable. As I discuss in the previous chapter, policies of devaluation, abandonment and demolition often epitomise capitalist tendencies towards ‘creative destruction’, the obliteration of economic orders and older modes of production to clear the way for the creation of new wealth (Schumpeter 1994). Elsewhere, bureaucratic and institutional cultures determine the fate of stone structures, as with many of the tombs in the older graveyards of Melbourne that are losing their shape and substance. As I discuss in Chapter 5, while the Greater Melbourne Cemeteries Trust is responsible for maintaining the cemetery grounds, facilities and gardens, relatives are responsible for maintaining memorials. Since many of these are long dead, numerous tombs are unkempt and untended, some disintegrating and delaminating, losing the engravings that identify the person buried below, others lapsing into almost complete indistinction, piles of crumbling masonry, concrete and brick. This suggests that these degraded memorials are of lower value than other stone structures in the city. Similarly, disused power stations, unfinished office towers, domestic dwellings, old industrial sites and obsolete hospitals have lingered for many years in parts of Melbourne, some now demolished, others continuing to lie derelict, inhabited by urban explorers, homeless people and graffiti artists.

Newman College In investigating how building stone is subject to processes of maintenance and repair, I focus on Melbourne’s distinctive Newman

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Fig. 4.1 Newman College

College, a Roman Catholic college affiliated to the University of Melbourne (Fig. 4.1). Though an architectural composition unique in form and aesthetically arresting, it has suffered a range of material and structural failings. Because the building has been highly valued since its completion in 1918, it has been subject to repeated repair and maintenance.

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The design of Newman College was a collaborative endeavour between Walter Burley Griffin, primarily responsible for the building’s conceptualisation, and his wife and architectural practice partner, Marion Mahony Griffin. The structure includes a long L-shaped design of two accommodation blocks organised with cloisters around a lawn that was later supplemented by another accommodation block to create a quadrangle. The striking rotunda is topped by a large dome that is adorned with a lantern-style crown out of which rises a thin central spire surrounded by twelve pinnacles. This houses a dining hall. A decorated gothic chapel was erected adjacent to the main structure in 1942. Newman College is an eclectic creation, emerging out of Griffin’s earlier work at the studio of Frank Lloyd Wright but greatly diverging from Wright’s Prairie style. It is a distinctive hybrid architectural amalgamation, including diverse inspirations from ancient, medieval, gothic, art deco, oriental and modern styles. Stone is deployed in distinctive fashion: a long, linear, rustically sculpted base and parapet are sandwiched by twostoreys of windows set within segmental arches and triangular columns composed out of stone with a contrastingly smooth finish. These divergent textures are described by Jeff Turnbull (2018: 339) as ‘an architectural metaphor for evolution … conveyed through the architectonic of exfoliation… (that suggest how) … old protective layers are shed as the younger layers push through’. Besides these metaphorical allusions, the contrast between dressed and roughly hewn stone (Fig. 4.2) is critical to the aesthetic impression of Newman College and integral to its ongoing repair and maintenance, as I will discuss. Turnbull (ibid.: 83) considers how Griffin selected the Barrabool sandstone, which was ‘employed for its soft grateful colour’. He quotes Griffin to demonstrate how he sought to create a harmonious scene in ensuring that the colour of the Barrabool stone would interact with ‘the material of the neighbouring colleges - freestone in small units of a warm greenish shade, blending with an ample verdure, sets the key for this building’. Turnbull (ibid.: 110) also observes that Barrabool sandstone reflects different moods and aesthetics in response to the changing patterns of diurnal and seasonal light. In bright sunlight, Turnbull observes, ‘the stonework is opaque and warm reddish yellow’ whereas in shade it adopts a ‘damp sheen and a dull brown-green hue’. In addition, the roughly dressed stone,

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the angular columns and inset window arches are dynamically transformed by the shifting patterns of Melbourne’s distinctive play of light and shadow (Edensor and Hughes 2020). The mellow tones of the sandstone throughout the building undoubtedly contribute to the aesthetic potency of Newman College. Griffin believed that the sandstone would secure the building against water penetration, notably with the splayed window and their characteristic ‘cat’s whiskers’ decorations that vertically and diagonally extend from windows, yet these have proved to be problematic in failing to shed water effectively, as I will explain.

Fig. 4.2 Stone with rustic finish, Newman College

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Since 1999, Newman College has been distinguished as an A-Grade building on the Victorian State Government Heritage Register, and in 2005, it was placed on the National Heritage List. On the Victorian Heritage Database Report’s Statement of Significance it is identified as important because of its association with Walter Burley Griffin and as one of the best examples of his architecture in Australia. Moreover, it is held to demonstrate ‘distinctive aesthetic features which are very highly regarded by architectural communities at national and international level and by the Victorian community’. The college is also esteemed because of the unique design of the ‘reinforced concrete dome’, as well as the ‘distinctive use of stone and concrete, of ornament and the controlled use of space’.

Building as Assemblage As discussed in Chapter 2, an assemblage can be constituted at multiple levels—a stone in a building is itself an assemblage of different elements, a building is a larger assemblage, and a city is a yet larger, more complex assemblage made up of multifarious parts. Before I discuss the properties of stone and in particular, Barrabool sandstone, I thus enlarge upon the concept of the assemblage as a means to investigate how the destiny of stone—and indeed any element that becomes a constituent in a building—is always liable to be shaped by its companion elements as well as the agencies in the wider environment that swirl inside and around it. As discussed in the introductory chapter, the assemblage is a dynamic concept that foregrounds how things that are brought together to form a collective entity are always emergent; they change, decay, disappear or are reassembled and restabilised. An emphasis on becoming, and the ways in which this occurs under dynamic conditions in which complex relationships are continuously forged, maintained and abandoned, disavows any stabilised sense of being. An assemblage is formed out of the relationalities between its different constituent parts; each part and the assemblage as a whole continuously emerges out of the synergies, attachments and detachments between and beyond them.

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The notion of the assemblage is useful in an examination of a building, a structure into which an array of materials deriving from many geographical locations is brought together by diverse specialists using a variety of technologies and techniques. Cement, concrete, brick, wood, steel, copper, plastic, ceramics, plaster, glass and stone are assembled together along with pipes, wires, ducts, roads and waterways that connect it to outside networks. These discrete elements have different life spans and durabilities, but as we all know, the buildings in which we live and work require reliable maintenance and repair in order for them to be inhabitable. Regular events such as fuses and light bulbs blowing, elevators failing, roof tiles becoming detached and paint peeling require periodic attention and these practices are accompanied by even more frequent forms of maintenance such as sweeping floors, cleaning surfaces and washing dishes. In terms of attending to the inevitable deterioration of buildings, schedules are planned, or alternatively, problems are dealt with contingently when they become suddenly apparent. Buildings are thus assemblages of heterogeneous materialities which through their different becomings solicit and (re)produce circulations of matter, labour and knowledge. J. D. Dewsbury (2000: 487) asks about the ‘speed of flux that is keeping (a building) assembled’ and astutely notes that though such a structure may appear to be permanent, it is instead ‘ephemeral nonetheless: whilst you are there it is falling down, it is just happening very slowly (hopefully)’. As Jane Jacobs (2006: 11) insists, buildings are always ‘being “made” or “unmade”’. Over their lives, buildings may be used for many different purposes, as numerous structures in Melbourne exemplify. They may be aesthetically reappraised according to contemporary tastes as have many bluestone buildings or be demolished like the Colonial Mutual Building. They might undergo exhaustive programmes of renovation as with the Victorian Parliament Building, or thoroughly amended like the Customs House, which now serves as the exhibitionary space of the Immigration Museum. They might be recontextualised in space by the erection of adjacent structures as with many of the older buildings in the city centre which though once standing out prominently, are now dwarfed by looming modernist towers. Buildings may be cannibalised—as has been the case with the recycling of bricks from demolished houses and

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the extraordinary aquacultural complex of stone housing, walls and eel traps of the indigenous Gunditjmara people—plundered by settler colonial farmers to mark out their fields. They might also be extended, as with Melbourne Town Hall, with the portico on the Swanston Street frontage added in 1887 and its adjoining administrative building completed in 1910. Alternatively, like Cook’s Cottage before it was disassembled and imported to Melbourne, they may be truncated. These examples exemplify how, as Ingold and Hallam (2007: 4) point out, buildings are ‘continually modified and adapted to fit in with manifold and ever shifting purposes’ or drawn into new heterogeneous associations and networks (Bouzarovski 2009). Their material textures decay and disintegrate, and understandings about their purpose, design and symbolic qualities are superseded. Tim Ingold (2004: 240) appositely captures these continuously emergent processes: a building is a condensation of skilled activity that undergoes continual formation even as it is inhabited, that it incorporates materials that have life histories of their own and may have served time in previous structures, living and non-living, that it is simultaneously enclosed and open to the world, that it may be only semi-permanently fixed in place…

In exploring the emergent susceptibilities of the assemblage towards stability and entropy, Manuel de DeLanda distinguishes between the properties of an entity (the qualities it possesses and takes with it to another context) and its capacities (its potential to affect and be affected by other entities with which it comes into relations). Properties are not determined by the relations an entity finds itself in any particular location or contexts but move with it, whereas capacities ‘depend on a component’s properties but cannot be reduced to them since they involve reference to the properties of other interacting entities’ (DeLanda 2006: 11). A substance or thing chosen to stabilise an assemblage may perform consistently for a while, along with its co-constituents. It may linger without evident change. However, it may subsequently act against the coherence of the whole because its emergent properties may no longer accord with the rest of the assemblage, or it might become detached or dissolve

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because it is catalysed by other agencies from within or outside the assemblage. Such disruptions might threaten its ongoing viability as a suitable component. This foregrounds how the relations with which an entity is brought into contact are invariably situated in particular environmental and temporal contexts. The particular properties and capacities of a component in a building mean that it can both affect and be affected by multiple other entities. To emphasise, though entities may be harmonious constituents as part of a continuously stable assemblage for a while—perhaps a very long time—this will unfailingly change. Ingold and Hallam (2007: 4) characterise this process of emergence, through which a building assemblage will ‘stand in an environment that could not have been envisioned when it started. It will take materials, which have properties of their own and are not predisposed to fit into the shapes and configurations demanded of them, let alone to stay in them indefinitely’. The multiple becomings of the elements within an assemblage ‘collide with each other, overlap, and interfere’ (Farias 2010: 14) and thereby form a multiplicity which has to be managed, demolished or allowed to lapse into indistinction (Edensor 2005). Thus, the figure of the assemblage promotes a focus on ‘the material, actual and assembled, but also on the emergent, the processual and the multiple’ (Farias 2010: 15), acknowledging both the continuities and changes that characterise the becoming of all forms of urban materiality. Typically, most buildings are subject, for varying spells of time, to territorialisation through which order and fixity are established (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). A stabilised assemblage depends on the materials out of which it is made, the suitability of the construction techniques used to build it, a consistent pattern of use over time, a collective agreement that it is of sufficient value to retain and critically, to the enactment of regular practices of maintenance and repair. Where this is not the case, where buildings are consigned to the wrecking ball, regarded as outmoded, unfashionable or of low heritage value, deterritorialisation occurs as buildings are demolished or abandoned and left to decay. Whether abandoned or cared for, all buildings are subject to ruination, yet this proceeds at different rates depending upon their material composition (Edensor 2016). As alluded to in the previous chapter, the old foundries, engineering workshops and capacious warehouses that served

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as the basis for nineteenth-century British industrialisation were built out of thick steel infrastructures, weighty stone, layers of concrete and millions of bricks. Like the sturdy, brick-built Victorian cotton mills, many of which remain a feature of the urban landscape of North-West England, they tend to fall apart slowly, as do the stone woollen mills of Yorkshire. Such structures are costly to demolish, possessing the architectural attribute of ‘obduracy-in-obsolescence’ (Cairns and Jacobs 2014), but with the demise of the textile industries across North England, their lack of adaptability delimits reuse. Many such buildings produce a somewhat illusory sense of enduring stability over time. Indeed, as Dawn Lyon (2012: 47) contends, once buildings ‘appear on the landscape, it’s difficult to remember the place without them. Their presence becomes part of a new spatial “taken for granted”, alongside the abstraction of all the labour that put them there’. This endurance sustains the illusion that the world is ‘characterized by perfect order, completeness, immanence and internal homogeneity rather than leaky, partial and heterogeneous entities’ (Graham and Thrift 2007: 10). However, as David Harvey (1996: 261) asserts, though the process of place formation involves a will to carve out ‘permanencies’, despite their apparent solidity such material elements are always subject to ‘perpetual perishing, since they are contingent on the processes that create, sustain and dissolve them’. In recognising these processes, Jane Jacobs conceives of buildings as ‘events’ (2006), moving away from accounts that foreground key moments in their design and construction to foreground how they are always undergoing transformation and amendment. Despite their entropic tendencies, vigilant human intervention endeavours to secure many buildings; like other things, ‘enormous effort is put into making objects achieve independency and anteriority’ (Farias 2010: 13). The medieval cathedrals of Europe have been treated to stone restoration and repair for centuries whereas many modern industrial buildings and high rise apartment blocks have often been casually demolished or left to decay. In the context of the whole city, we can conceive of how this is part of its ongoing reproduction and involves the maintenance of a supply infrastructure that ‘keeps stocks up and moving, capabilities replenished, and services flowing’ (Amin and Thrift 2017: 3). Indeed, the changing

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connections and networks that ceaselessly reconstitute the city discussed in Chapter 2 can be traced upon the interventions, replacements and erasures that are etched into the fabric of buildings and the city as a whole. Assemblage thinking helps us identify the intersecting temporalities that meld in the ongoing reconstitution and material composition of buildings (Dittmer 2014). As Nadia Bartolini (2013) remarks, building elements that have emerged at greatly different times are continuously jumbled and recombined together in recomposition, according to a host of different factors. My focus is on the ways in which these processes are marked on Melbourne’s stony fabric, and in this chapter, on Newman College. Irrespective of the conscientiousness of repair and maintenance, as Cairns and Jacobs (2014) pithily assert, buildings must die, for all are incipient ruins, potential failures whose security as discrete entities is continuously under threat from a range of forces that may render them subject to decay and erasure. Jacobs and Merriman similarly insist that architecture is ‘an ongoing process of holding together’ (2011: 212). Alan Weisman (2007) reveals the central importance of such maintenance by imagining what would happen to Manhattan if human life was suddenly wiped out, for the erosion of the city would commence immediately in its absence. The incessant operation of the electricity-driven pumps that keep New York’s subways water-free would instantly cease, the subways filling within two days and the flow of water rapidly undermining roads and pavements. Lack of heating and road maintenance would allow ice to fissure tarmac, concrete and stone, assisted by numerous plants that would put down roots in the cracks and layers of detritus gathering in a world bereft of street cleaning. Lightning would create widespread fires and exposed steel foundations would rust. While humans remain to selectively maintain and repair their built environments, these agencies are held at bay.

The Agents that Assail Stone In considering the non-human agents that swirl around stone, I now focus upon how the Barrabool sandstone of Newman College fares in the habitat of Melbourne. For before any consideration of the cultural,

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social, economic and institutional factors that affect the destiny of stone, it is critical to grasp the multiple impacts of geology, chemistry, plants and animals, weather systems and physical forces. Doreen Massey (2005: 139) contends that place is a setting for negotiations between human and non-human actors that ‘form configurations, conjunctures of trajectories which have their own temporalities … where the successions of meetings, the accumulations of weaving and encounters build up a history’. A building, as a kind of place, is certainly a material site with an entangled history of such relations, part of the ‘flux and flow of the urban’ at which various human and non-human engagements unfold ‘simultaneously but at different timescales’ (Dittmer 2014: 491). In thinking about these diverse temporal unfoldings, it is essential to emphasise again that stone is situated within an extremely long time span in which geological, chemical and physical agencies have changed and continue to shape the destinies of lithic materials and the buildings of which they become part. This temporal complexity is particularly epitomised and compounded by the ways in which, as Smith et al. claim, ‘all stones carry within them stress histories or legacies of previous conditions that have affected their composition and structure’. Elaborating, the authors explain that, Stone has a long memory. In nature, debris of all sizes typically carries with it morphological and stress histories that reflect formation (often at high temperatures and pressures), subsequent exposure at the Earth surface, and an often complex and superimposed history of weathering, erosion, transport and deposition’ (ibid), that might include prior salt penetration, stress cracks caused by quarrying or earlier patterns of wetting and drying. (2008: 447)

Besides bringing these embodied histories with them to the assemblages in which they become situated, it is also important to consider how the temporalities of the agencies that affect stone are frequently unpredictable. For instance, Smith et al. (ibid.: 452) describe how ‘non-linear behaviour is particularly common on sandstones, which do not decay gradually, but instead experience seemingly unpredictable, episodic and sometimes catastrophic breakdown’ caused by a medley of changing

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agencies, internal decay and sudden events. This material unpredictability contrasts with other stony matter, such as the extremely durable Roman concrete that was applied in marine settings and was so skilfully composed that elements within it crystallised and hardened over time in response to the chemical effects of seawater (Davis 2017). To emphasise, these unpredictable processes of change, produced by internal properties or outside catalysts, mean that stone, like other forms of matter, varies in its rate of decay and relative stability. Its destiny depends upon the particular agencies that exist in particular contexts and combinations at specific times. In considering the above, individual stones, like every other thing that we identify as solid and separate, ‘are objective illusions’ for all objects are ‘made up of the spin of microscopic particles which will eventually split, decay and transform’ (Yussof and Gabrys 2006: 447). To emphasise, like all material assemblages, stone ‘is not a fixed essence; rather matter is a substance in its intra-active becoming – not a thing but a doing; a congealing of agency’ (Barad 2003: 828). Though often impossible for us to discern, this notion of continuous emergence is important, as Jane Bennett (2008) discusses with regard to metal, which though it appears lifeless is characterised by an ‘immanent, quivering activity’ or vitality. Despite appearances to the contrary, stone similarly possesses ‘incipient tendencies or a certain capacity to self arrange, tendencies that are variously enacted depending upon the other forces, affects or bodies with which it comes into intimate physical contact’ (ibid.). Having foregrounded the material aggregations upon which multiple non-human agencies interact, I now consider how these have impacted upon the evolution of Newman College since its completion in 1918. I briefly look at the properties of the Barrabool stone which constitutes most of the exterior cladding of the college. I then look at the various agencies which have transformed much of this stone over the past century, focusing on the geographical location of the building, weather and other non-human agencies. After this, I examine the human decisions that have been taken in constructing and repairing Newman College that have also led to its continuous transformation, changes that have often solicited further repair and maintenance.

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Barrabool sandstone is a greenish-brown, even-textured, Lower Cretaceous sandstone that has been quarried and worked since the 1850s and is soft and easily carved. The sandstone is highly variable in quality depending on the location from which it is quarried; some stones are highly susceptible to deterioration, with a tendency to shed layers in thick slabs. As discussed in Chapter 2, it has been used in the construction of St Paul’s Cathedral and The Scots Church, as well as smaller buildings in Melbourne and Geelong. In the nineteenth century tests that were undertaken to choose a suitable stone for the new Victorian Parliament Building, Barrabool sandstone was placed third in preference behind Bacchus Marsh and Bullen sandstone, before the final selection of Heatherlie Sandstone. Barrabool sandstone contains feldspathic material, siltstone, mudstone and shale with thin conglomerates and prominent calcareous concretions. Geologically speaking, its composition is made up of between a third to a half of volcanic rock fragments, up to 15% volcanic plagioclase, similar proportions of metamorphic rock fragments and quartz, and smaller quantities of a range of other elements including apatite, zircon and magnetite (Lardner 2000). It possesses less compressive strength than many other sandstones and is quite porous. This porosity allows the dissolved elements from within the stone, the soluble salts, silica, carbonates and iron oxides, to be mobile throughout the material and after having migrated to the surface, they dry to form a hardened surface layer that causes the area behind to become weaker and yet more porous. Any removal of the crusty layer exposes this susceptible zone to attack. The most obvious agent in the transformation of the material fabric of a building is the weather, which varies enormously. For instance, Tim Winter (2004) explains how plentiful rain and humidity wreak havoc on the constitution of Cambodia’s Angkor Watt temple complex and provide rich conditions for bacteria, plants and other agents to work away at stony matter. And whereas buildings in Northerly climes are susceptible to rapid erosion through plentiful rain and freeze thaw action, in dryer, warmer Mediterranean climates, structures may last for millennia, as the numerous vestiges of ancient Greek and Roman buildings exemplify. In an Australian context, Gillon and Gibbs (2019) detail how the site-specific agencies of salt-laden winds and abrasive sand at new coastal

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housing complexes in New South Wales inform which building materials are chosen, determine their rate of decay and shape practices of repair and maintenance. Melbourne possesses quite volatile weather patterns, with sporadic heavy downpours, and rapid changes in temperature from very hot to cool. While the extreme temperatures that cause stone to deteriorate are rare, marine salts and atmospheric pollutants have a moderate impact on lithic matter. Most of the damage to stone at Newman College has been caused by the effects of plentiful rainfall, exacerbated by variable quantities of sulphuric acid and nitrates present in the atmosphere that expedite the dissolution of the soluble elements in the Barrabool stone. The impact of water, however, is not solely a matter of latitude and longitude; the geometry of the building is also critical. Patterns of airflow and the positioning of aspects that attract plenteous sunlight might increase the rate of drying after rainfall, while sheltered areas protect some areas from rain and the abrasive impacts of wind. Conversely, areas that are shaded dry out more slowly and certain gradients, angles and exposed elements will be lashed by rain and wind more frequently, making more likely the effects of biodeterioration discussed below. These complex microenvironments vary from building to building, underpinning how approaches to maintenance and repair must always be sitespecific. Relatedly, the form and structure of the building also influence the impact of weather(ing). Rainwater collects in particular hollows and saturates the stone adjacent to ‘splash zones’, and around leaking gutters and pipes. Accordingly, particularly poorly designed areas of buildings may encourage the damage caused by water. In 1981, when the present architectural personnel embarked on their relationship with Newman College, the most urgent task was to arrest the water ingress that resulted from a serious structural flaw in the parapet, where there was no means of attachment between the outer layer of stone and the brick beneath. Water flowed into this gap between the two layers and caused the upper tier of the building to buckle. Originating in the original construction of this exposed part of the building, this problem required immediate remedial structural attention, namely the provision of some infill and to prevent further water saturation, the cladding of the parapet with copper.

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The effects of water ingress have been more recently addressed in minimising the effects of the elements of the window design that fail to shed water adequately. The upper storey windows are set in the smoothly dressed stone above which overhangs the rough, rustically formed stone that reaches to the roof. The arched stone section above the window inclines outwards to meet the rustic section, and at either side is abutted by decorative, pointed pilasters that diagonally protrude beyond the rough wall above. The architectural team call these ‘the cat’s whiskers’, yet though they are an original, attractive decorative detail, in the absence of any protective features such as a string course or cornice, they collect water. This has subsequently caused damage to the surrounding stone. Given the architectural significance of these features, any interventionist construction has been avoided, and as with the parapet, the cat’s whiskers have been capped with copper to maintain the original aesthetic effects intended by Burley Griffin. As the principal stonemason and conservator contended, this minimal solution in response to a unique architectural heritage construction was ‘the price one pays for (working on) an A Grade listed building with a highly differentiated design’. I will return to the responses of repair and maintenance specialists to imperfect techniques of building construction shortly, but first consider the impacts of other non-human agents in assailing stony fabric. For besides considering the chemical and physical transformations wrought by the agencies of water, ice and air, it is important to acknowledge that a building assemblage is also a habitat , not merely for those humans that live and work within it but for a myriad of non-humans who are drawn to its surfaces to feed, reproduce and seek shelter and safety. These creatures exploit the succouring qualities of chemistry, temperature, humidity and light, often within specific micro-habitats of the building that afford nourishment and accommodation to particular species. Organic matter collects on the roof and gutters, composting to form a layer of soil. Seeds, dropped by birds and released from surrounding vegetation, germinate on the roof and in crevices on the building facade. Roots invade the foundations and work their way between brickwork and roofing material. Spiders spin webs that stretch across areas of masonry, chrysalises linger under sills before they mutate into butterflies, and opportunistic plants put down roots down in any crack. Fungus, moss and moulds exploit patches of damp matter. Birds, rodents,

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insects, arachnids and fungi all play minor roles in the continual emergence of a building. These agents are ready to exploit the materialities, structures and decay that may offer felicitous conditions for their sustenance. Consequently, this calls for the intervention of various specialists to undo the damage they cause, for recurrent maintenance is required to prevent the colonisation of a building by a host of non-humans, which in combination with the agencies of water, ice and wind would reduce a structure to rubble. The effects of other life forms on urban materiality epitomise Hinchcliffe and Whatmore’s (2006) assertion that we should acknowledge the co-production of space by non-humans as part of a ‘recombinant ecology’. In the case of stone, the most visible evidence of nonhuman agency are the patterns created across surfaces by biofilms, single or multi-species populations of micro-organisms that adhere to each other and lithic surfaces (Cezar et al. 2002). They are especially evident in areas where rainwater pools and drips, and around ledges, leaking gutters and pipes. These complex consortia of algae, cyanobacteria, heterotrophic bacteria, fungi, lichens, protozoa, mosses and plants emerge according to many different conditions, including the properties and capacities of the stone they colonise. Some biofilms cause considerable damage, releasing destructive acids and penetrative endolithic micro-organisms exploit structural irregularities for their growth, notably colonising moist fissures. Particular geographical and environmental conditions influence the growth and diversity of biofilms. For instance, algae constitute the highest levels of biomass on buildings in Europe, whereas cyanobacteria are dominant in Latin American biofilms, primarily due to climatic differences (Gaylarde and Gaylarde 2005). At Newman College, though the lower courses of the Barrabool sandstone are adorned with a variety of lichen, biological colonisation has not significantly expedited stone deterioration. The growth is not sufficient to undertake remedial action and is regarded as a testament to the transformative effects of ageing, with the architect surmising that Burley Griffin would have been pleased to see the emergence of these organic patterns. This resonates with contemporary assessments about the appearance of biological growth on stone, where only thick, extensive

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colonisation is generally thought to require removal. The latent potentialities of other materialities have also had little effect on Newman’s stony matter, most notably, the potentially destructive agency of salts; in other buildings, rising moisture draws salt deposits from the ground below into stone where it crystallises to rapidly produce cracking, exfoliation and crumbling. Perhaps salt is not present in the ground below the college but if so, the resilient bluestone lower course would likely prevent its intrusion. I now focus on how stone decay is shaped by the ways in which a building has been constructed and repaired. I have already discussed some of the failings in the use of stone at Newman College, namely the leaving of the gap between brick and stone in the parapet, and the insertion of the ‘cat’s whiskers’, and now identify other causes of stone decay and deformation that have called for remedial action. First, material transformation is influenced by how stone is finished differently. Stone can be dressed in several ways. At Newman College, as I have mentioned, it has been chiselled and rubbed to a smooth finish in certain areas, and rock-faced with a pitching chisel in other parts to bestow a contrastingly rugged, natural look. A key task of repair and maintenance has been to retain this textural contrast between smooth and rough areas of wall, in keeping with Griffin’s aesthetic and symbolic intentions. It might be thought that the rock-faced stone would be more susceptible to deterioration through the action of water ingress because it has a greater surface area. Indeed, there is much delamination of this stone but because it is already rugged looking, most of this shedding of small pieces is barely noticeable and the stone retains its rustic appearance. More critically, the integrity of most of this stone is not imperilled. This is partly due to the rough tooling employed in the shaping of these blocks, where chiselling loosely at the stone ensured that flakes sheared off at points of weakness. In exploiting the inherent constitution of the stone, it was shaped into a form that rendered it less vulnerable to subsequent decay. Most delamination is only surface deep, and in many areas of the building, these stones have not been repaired or replaced. On the other hand, much of the smooth stone that surrounds the windows between the layers of rustically dressed stone has suffered considerable delamination to the aesthetic detriment of the facade.

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Much of this delamination has eventuated from the improper placement of much of this smooth stone in the building assemblage. With Barrabool sandstone, it may be difficult to discern the bedding plane and much of the cut stone has been positioned in the building incorrectly. Layers of sedimentary stone should run horizontally—be edge-bedded — to match how it was originally formed on the sea bed, a position that will ensure that it is stronger. If it is placed vertically in a building, or face-bedded , as much of the stone in Newman College has been, it is more susceptible to the delamination wrought by the effects of water and the subsequent migration of dissolved constituents. The face-bedding of these smooth stones has greatly exacerbated deterioration over the past 100 years, depending on the aspect of the building that is faced. For instance, there has been severe degeneration on the exposed south-facing entrance wing, where rain and wind have assailed the façade and 80% of the stone has had to be replenished. The identification of which stones may crumble or endure is complicated because of the fact that the material was originally quarried from different sites that were of variable quality. However, in most places, though susceptible to visible decay and lamination, most stone components have retained their structural integrity and rarely need to be completely removed. Most of the Barrabool sandstone is thus not a catastrophically poor material; it possesses some durability, compressive strength and porosity. The majority of the material that has been replaced has only been cut back a few centimetres to allow the fixing of a thin veneer of new stone, thereby avoiding larger programmes of replacement that might have had serious consequences for the building’s structural stability. However, certain stones are fragmenting much more rapidly than others, losing form and texture, revealing that the testing and selection of the original stone was insufficiently thorough, and included some very friable stone. This unreliability in stone quality contrasts with the condition of the material in the chapel, which was completed at the later date of 1942. Here, more carefully chosen Barrabool sandstone has suffered little deterioration. The insertion of material that cannot be successfully accommodated within Newman’s building assemblage over time is also characterised by the insertion of metal pins into the stone, implanted to secure a screen that extended along the length of the cloisters to maximise shelter from

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sun and rain. However, as water has gradually percolated through to reach it, the steel within has rusted and expanded, cracking the stone. Subsequently, following remedial infilling, pins have been reattached to the outside surface so that damage to stone will not occur. These examples display how almost inevitably, the assembling of different materialities together in a building will ultimately have consequences as their properties and capacities impact upon each other. But this may be unpredictable and unforeseen, lie dormant, be gradual in impact and suddenly explode into volatility. The steel pins held the assemblage together for a while but subsequently broke stone apart over a longer time span. Problems caused by the inclusion of inappropriate elements within Newman College are supplemented by earlier attempts at repair, which have accelerated stone deterioration. The application of impervious mortar in certain parts of the outward-facing wall as part of repair attempts in the 1950s has caused stone to become saturated; having no escape route, water has eroded stone more rapidly. In some areas of the college, this has had to be replaced with a more permeable mixture; in other regions the problem of waterlogging has been less severe and has been left alone for the time being. Helen Lardner (2000) also submits that some sandblasting, presumably deployed to ‘clean’ the stone surfaces of grime and biofilms, has damaged some of Newman’s lithic surfaces. In referring to the condition of stone fabric in the UK, Ian Maxwell (2005) asserts that ‘an incalculable amount of permanent damage has been caused to the country’s building stock’, with abrasive cleaning producing indentations and a blunting of detail. Eric Robinson (n.d) declares that sandblasting should not be applied to softer sandstones because it can destroy the protective ‘skin’ which cut stone acquires when allowed to mature between extraction and placement in a building. This applies to Newman’s Barrabool sandstone, although sandblasting has not caused substantive damage. In recent times, sandblasting has largely been replaced by gentler cleansing solutions that use a mixture of air, fine inert powder and smaller quantities of water. Methods of restoration include brushing and rubbing, washing and steaming, the use of wet and dry abrasives, chemical procedures involving the application of liquids or poultices to draw out harmful bacteria or salts, sealants to prevent moisture loss and coats

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of preservative to arrest further decay. Consolidants are also increasingly used to infuse lost chemicals in stone and stabilise weathering processes (Garrod 2005); however, they are unsuitable for Barrabool sandstone, where they would clog the pores of the material, increasing water saturation. Here, it is evident that repair technologies rarely offer ideal solutions but are superseded as new techniques are championed, improve on former damaging practices and become more complex and multiple.

Technical and Aesthetic Considerations: Replacing Stone, Repairing the Dome Having explored how non-human agencies have affected the stony fabric of Newman College and prompted repair solutions, some of which have been unsuccessful and required further interventions, I now focus on aesthetic considerations and technical solutions that have been adopted in response to the deterioration of the building’s stone. First, I discuss the challenges posed by using material that chimes with the colour and aged appearance of the original stone before examining the two lithic materials that have been deployed to replace damaged stone. Second, I provide a brief account of the ambitious solution to a much larger problem, the absence of the domes’ spires. These technical and aesthetic decisions, taken over the past three decades, have complicated the building assemblage of Newman College, shaped its future and reaffirmed the widespread local understanding that it is a building worth preserving for posterity. As I have stressed, buildings continuously change, and these ongoing transformations draw in a host of sometimes competing ideas about how a building should retain its character. Should a building be restored according to an exact historical style, adapted to conform to contemporary designs or are environmental concerns about sustainability of greatest importance (Yarrow 2019)? Should mending be ‘visible’, testifying to the vicissitudes of time and showcase work that seeks to prevent further decay (Rosner 2017), or should repairs seek to purvey a sense of authentic design by concealing such labour? Such questions underpin

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how repair and maintenance are invariably entangled with aesthetic values as well as technical judgements. The legion of repair workers, supervisors, architects and administrators who have repaired parts of Newman College over the past 100 years has radically transformed its original materiality by their numerous interventions. Their approaches to repair have been informed by contemporary fashions, technologies, institutional guidance and cultural norms. Two key aesthetic priorities govern decisions about which stone should replace that which has deteriorated, namely a desire to achieve colour matching and notions about how to honour the aged appearance of a building. Many repairers seek to closely match the colour of the original material, to avoid a scarring ‘with the harshness of new stone’ (Bristow 1998: 13). Yet this is not straightforward for over time, stone accrues different tones that deviate from its original complexion. Accordingly, even when new blocks of the same kind of stone are inserted, it is unlikely that they can match the appearance of the surrounding stone because they will not be exposed to the same historical conditions of weathering, and the new stone will always be playing ‘catch up’ (Smith et al. 2008). Where replacement stone is of a different provenance, it is even more likely that it will likely take on a different hue over time. Whatever the intentions of repairers, as Vans (2009) declares, ‘(H)owever skilfully it is carried out, the insertion of new stone into a weathered wall is likely to have a substantial impact on its appearance’. This foregrounds how every stone in a building has its own unique history. Concerns about colour matching are also accompanied by those that focus on texture in ensuring that new stone does not clash too profoundly with the weathered appearance of the material that has been in situ for many years. This draws attention to contested notions about whether buildings can be regarded as ‘pleasantly weathered rather than dirty’ (Maxwell 1992: 5). Formerly, the reproduction of a pristine, ‘authentic’ appearance was usually advocated. This has been challenged by Smith and Pˇrikryl (2007: 2) who complain that ‘it is rare that significant buildings are allowed to “grow old gracefully”’ and compare the ‘removal and cosmetic replacement of non-life-threatening blemishes to human cosmetic surgery’ in the ‘presentation of facades that are forever young’. In contemporary times, a patina that reflects age and history is

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more commonly valued, although desires to achieve this can also prove controversial, as I discuss shortly. It has been necessary to replace some of the heavily decayed roughly tooled stone blocks in Newman College with a sandstone that matches the tones and textures of Barrabool sandstone. The rolling programme run by the present repair company initially deployed dense, hard Beaudesert sandstone imported from Queensland. However, in recent years, high-quality material from this source became depleted and the quarry closed down. Replacement stone is now supplied by a quarry 50 kilometres south-east of Launceston, Tasmania. Though largely of high density and toughness, careful stone selection remains critical. When Beaudesert sandstone was first used, it was an unproven stone of variable quality, and in the absence of scientific testing procedures, stone selection was undertaken by individual masons who used their expertise to identify the most appropriate stone by vision and touch. Subsequently, a vigorous testing and quality assurance process has been developed to identify premium grade stone. The Tasmanian stone is still visually selected from beds of varied colour and texture by skilled masons but is also subsequently tested by the well-practised sodium sulphate test. This involves the cutting of stone samples into small test cubes which are immersed in a saturated sodium sulphate solution and then dried out to simulate the ageing process. The rule of thumb is that if only 10% or less of the material is lost through this process, then it is judged suitable for use. Like the Beaudesert supply, the reliability of the Tasmanian resource cannot be guaranteed and, in the future, sources for replacement stone may once more be sought. Both Queensland and Tasmanian replacement stone have proved to be good textural and colour matches with the Barrabool sandstone and it is difficult to tell them apart, though over time they may diverge in colour. While the search for replacement stone at Newman College, especially for the roughly cut courses, has sought alternative quarried material, the replacement of the severely delaminated smooth stone has required a different solution. The material used for this lithic substitution has been ‘artificial stone’, a composite of crushed stone with appropriate mineral pigments, manufactured to match the desired colour and texture of the masonry it replaces. It possesses properties of compressive strength,

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porosity and durability that usually exceed those of the quarried and dressed building stone it replaces. Though widely used, some stonemasons disparage this material as inauthentic, referring to it as ‘stone in a bucket’ or ‘stone in a tin’. The first application of the artificial stone, between 1997 and 1998, replaced much of the smooth delaminated stone on the highly ravaged south-facing façade of Newman which was cut back to a depth of 50 mm. This ersatz stone has decayed a little but has largely retained its integrity. However, its extremely uniform colour diverges from the varied textures and colours that typify natural stone. It looks artificial. This is because of the agency of weather: the unexpectedly substantial rain that assailed the façade in the three months following its installation was so unrelenting that it soaked the material and bleached it of much of its colour. This rain thwarted the aim of producing an aesthetically integrated repair. Nevertheless, the College authorities and the Heritage Council of Victoria were delighted with the outcome (Fig. 4.3). Following their dissatisfaction with these earlier applications of artificial stone, in 2007, the architects embarked on an extensive search for a suitable rendering that would better adhere to the Barrabool sandstone, offer a more convincing textural and colour match and remain durable over time. Finally, an artificial stone material produced by a German company operating in the USA was selected and deployed, once the Heritage Council of Victoria had given their consent. This cementitious mixture, containing alumina and tiny glass beads, and of higher porosity and equal strength to the stone it replaced, is produced under controlled conditions off site. Consistent and stable thus far, it has added to the increasingly complex materiality of the building assemblage. Once the global search for appropriate material had concluded, the chosen artificial stone was subject to ongoing and rigorous testing, a practice that still continues. The mix is tested for its durability and tendency to stabilise without cracking, and most stringently, to investigate the lasting qualities of different colour treatments. Some colour mixes have been shown to drain and run whereas others prove more stable. Besides chiming with the existing tones, the aim was to avoid the singular colour of the artificial stone on the south-facing wing and achieve greater variation across surfaces in mimicking the colour diversity in natural stone. A small

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Fig. 4.3 Uniform surface, artificial stone, Newman College

section of wall in the courtyard is still utilised to examine the stability of colours. A few years ago, the architectural conservation company established a more extensive testing area, what they term the ‘wailing wall’, in a little visited part of the college. On this surface, a plethora of materials and applications were trialled over a sustained period. Unlike the earlier application of artificial stone, the new material was only inserted to a depth of 25 mm and was installed on the more sheltered east-facing wing where only 20–30% of the sandstone needed to be replaced. However, besides the difficulty of achieving appropriate colour matching, it also proved problematic to adhere to the surface of

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the building because of the high clay content of the Barrabool sandstone onto which it was attached. A five-month development process through which the architectural team worked closely with the manufacturers was necessary, an unforeseen development for which a budget had not been allocated, but it proved successful in achieving a strong connection between artificial and natural stone. It remains to be seen if over time, the materiality of the artificial stone will evolve in unexpected ways and in a manner that clashes with the appearance of the original stone. Regular inspections will continue to document any flaws. Overall though, the architectural and conservation team are extremely pleased with the use of the much improved and tested artificial stone. They point to its high level of porosity, greater tonal range in colour, textural similarities to the Barrabool stone, and effective adhesion onto the older stone, and more pragmatically, its lower cost than most natural stone. Critically, they also contend that the use of replacement natural stone would have required much deeper excavation into the façade, a more invasive approach that might have imperilled the building’s structure. They also value the capacity to mould the stone into precise shapes and to produce an accurate and sharp finish. It appears as if this use of both quarried and artificial replacement stone has been successful at Newman College. It is often difficult to distinguish the replacement material from the original stone, whereas the earlier use of artificial stone for the south-facing wing is all too apparent. However, there have been aesthetic contestations over the appearance of the repaired material. Victorian Heritage and other conservation authorities were highly satisfied with the earlier replacement of deteriorating Barrabool sandstone with the inferior artificial stone on the south wing. They contended that the conspicuously bleached artificial stone made it clear which parts of the structure were new and which were of older fabric. By contrast, the quality of the more recent work, where colour matching and replacement stone has made it more difficult to discern new from old material, is perturbing to some in the heritage authority. This lack of distinction, they argue, diminishes the material authenticity of the building, thwarting easy identification of the original stone. Those carrying out the repair work, however, offer a completely different verdict. They highlight the retention of a stylistic authenticity or an

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authenticity of design, maintaining that the appearance is closely aligned with the architect’s intentions and aesthetics. Their interventions, they assert, honour the form and design devised by Walter Burley Griffin. The most remarkable story of the repair of Newman College concerns the restoration of its most extraordinary feature, the refectory dome with its spire and twelve apostles, or pinnacles, that surround it. The spire was originally wrought out of concrete with the pinnacles fashioned out of Barrabool sandstone. However, these unique features did not last very long; all were removed in the 1940s following substantial decay and worries that their weight was impacting upon the dome’s structural integrity. Subsequently, a truncated spire was placed on top of the dome, topped by a cross (currently situated on the ground adjacent to the chapel). Later, the dome’s original terracotta pantiles were covered with copper cladding to provide improved waterproofing. The dome retained this drastically amended appearance until 1987, when work commenced to create the spire and pinnacles anew in accordance with the design of the original building. This project required substantive research since existing archival designs and plans were inaccurate. Educated guesswork was required in the absence of any precise information. Once a design was agreed upon, attention turned to the technically difficult production of the spire and pinnacles. Fortunately, other skilled technicians were enrolled into the process of repair, two groups entirely unconnected with architectural renovation whose contribution emerged from contingent connections and coincidental meetings. The first felicitous encounter emerged during a visit to the Mirage aeroplane factory in the west of the city. The factory possessed large printing equipment that was able to print a single design that would act as the template for the spire, and they agreed to help out. The second stroke of luck emerged from a chance encounter at the nearby General Motors Holden automobile plant where pattern-making apparatus was available to create a scale model. Again, the company agreed to collaborate in the production of a model, which when complete, greatly accelerated construction. The spire and pinnacles were subsequently fashioned out of reinforced concrete and erected to once more adorn the dome, where they remain to date (Fig. 4.4).

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Fig. 4.4 Refashioned spire and pinnacles, Newman College

So successful was the outcome of the project that the college authorities and state organisations were persuaded of the expertise of the conservation architects involved. Thus convinced, they agreed to more substantially fund ongoing interventions and laid the basis for the current programme of maintenance and repair. There is no sense that maintenance and repair have ended or that any everlasting solutions to stone decay have been discovered. Upkeep and renovation will be required for the foreseeable future, as elements of the building deteriorate. Likely future work will include the replacement of as yet untreated delaminating stone and the replacement of the internal iron pipes that carry rainwater from

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the roof to the drains; increasing leakage from these pipes is causing substantial areas of dampness to spread, promoting further stone decay.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have foregrounded the idea of the assemblage to emphasise the ongoing emergence of a building and focus on how this is influenced by the evolving qualities of the stone out of which it composed, the non-human agents that assail the structure, and the often fateful human decisions that have been made in construction and repair, the consequences of which unfold over time. This is exemplified through a singular focus on the repair and maintenance that continues to be performed at one unique building, Melbourne’s Newman College, practices that contingently respond to processes of stone decay that eventuate from several causes. To conclude, I draw out some key issues that have emerged through the analysis. Firstly, to return to the discussion of the circulation of stone explored in Chapter 2, processes of repair and maintenance are always liable to enrol new associations, new connections with places, people and materials. At Newman College, a shifting array of stonemasons, quarry workers and suppliers have been linked to renovation, as well as heritage bodies and college managers. Repair has enrolled new sources of stone from Queensland and Tasmania, and artificial stone from the USA. And new technological approaches have been accessed in the course of finding solutions, some contingent, as with the temporary relationships made with the aircraft and car factories in the recreation of the dome. Secondly, the same team of architects and stonemasons has conveniently been working on Newman College for many years and expertise has accumulated. This has to a certain extent, stabilised the building assemblage. In such circumstances, as Robert Beauregard (2015: 542) states, ‘a modicum of certainty is established in people’s lives because actors become entangled and the resultant assemblages are able to withstand disruption’. The continuous consolidation of local, embedded knowledge and communal bonds underscores how college administrators, state heritage bodies, workers, architects and local government perform collective procedures that foster the reproduction of social and

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political relationships. This is especially critical since these agents underpin the assignment of the college’s heritage and architectural value. Through processes of repair and maintenance, Newman College is restabilised by a social, political and economic consensus that reiterates particular values and ideals about architectural conservation. These interventions have produced a consensual translation through which it has been agreed that the college is worth maintaining and preserving, and should remain an iconic, enduring element of Melbourne’s built environment. This contrasts with numerous other, less valued buildings, urban areas and fixtures that are not regularly repaired and maintained. The signs of disregard and decay at such sites reveal the uneven ways in which places are valued (Edensor 2016), with certain sites abandoned, others distressed, and some allowed to slowly disappear (DeSilvey 2017). Thirdly, the process of conservation of the stony fabric of Newman College discloses the situated nature of repair and maintenance. This challenges over-arching, over-general notions of heritage and conservation as inherently conservative, part of a dominant mode of administering power over space (Hewison 1987; Smith 2006). Thomas Yarrow (2019: 4–5) contends that conservation is not singular or sweeping but is a concept whose meaning must be located and interpreted… by specific professionals and clients, in relation to particular buildings, documents, regulatory frameworks and tools of various kinds… as well as through the quotidian challenges posed by specific material and spatial agencies

This foregrounds how conservation, maintenance and repair are highly situated processes through which diverse groups and individuals are assembled to attend to the decay of a building, each potentially mobilising different aesthetic, political and technical forms of expertise, which may align, diverge and be contested. These different entanglements of people in the maintenance and repair process disclose how, ‘buildings are defined, categorised and shaped in complex networks over time’ (Tait and While 2009: 726) by a range of different actors with divergent investments (Sormani et al. 2019). Surveyors, architects, engineers, planners, building firm, architects and engineers ‘put forward competing claims from different occupational stances’

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(Lyon 2012: 57). They may disagree over the choice of materials, techniques and aesthetic appearance, and yet a process of debating, investigating, seeking opinions and reflecting upon completed work accompany the articulation of different objectives, tastes and practices during the repair process (Strebel et al. 2019). These discussions and reflections underline my earlier assertion that repair is a contingent endeavour that solicits a ‘multiplicity of ontological enactments’ (Denis and Pontille 2018: 242). It is not characterised by seamless technical progress but by an abundance of contested views and a history of abandoned techniques, so that adapting and improvising towards inevitable breakdown is a ‘means by which societies learn and learn to re-produce’ (Graham and Thrift 2007: 5). As Jones and Yarrow (2013: 23) assert, ‘conservation emerges as an inherently complex process in which practitioners grapple with the stability and instability of the monuments and buildings they work with’. Indeed, the professionals and artisans who repair and maintain Newman College acknowledge that there is no single approach to the problems they encounter. They recognise that there are a multiplicity of technologies, aesthetic decisions and compromises from which to choose solutions and from which to learn. This is evidenced by the ongoing, systematic practices of testing stone quality and colour fixing, and by thoughtful reflection. The ‘wailing wall’ is thus an essential and integral component of their ongoing work, a site of experimentation and improvisation, discussion, learning and encounter. Finally, the ‘wailing wall’ highlights how repair and maintenance at Newman is ongoing and incremental, with the regular occurrence of impediments to progress, sudden breakthroughs, the discovery of new technical solutions and materials and the mobilisation of different aesthetics. Each development may be championed by different participants, leading to debate and temporary consensus. This process becomes ever more complicated since as Graham and Thrift claim, the number of components in buildings ‘has been proliferating, becoming more complex and becoming composed from an ever greater range of materials’ (2007: 3), as we have seen with the artificial stone, the replacement quarried stone, the copper coverings and the variations in mortar. Yet the growing

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compendium of technical and material solutions also reveals how ‘repair invokes the potential for modification, transformation and creative addition that can render something operative in new ways’ (Reeves-Evison and Rainey 2018: 2), inspiring new approaches and fostering novel forms of expertise. Moreover, continuing assessments and adjustments are typically required as new issues arise, as with the hitherto unidentified rusting iron that cracks masonry and the realisation that some earlier mortar replacement was impermeable. In such cases, a building ‘affords, surprises, renders possible, suggests, facilitates, and influences other actors and possible actions’ (Yaneva 2008: 18). The life expectancy of a building assemblage depends on a number of factors, including material durability, adaptability as fashions of use change, the environmental conditions that swirl around it, and the efficacy and regularity of maintenance and repair. Newman College has proved adaptable, and since it has continuously been assessed as of enduring value, it has been subject to consistent repair and maintenance. Though it has been constructed out of an unpredictable sandstone, and the spires on the dome quickly crumbled, an ongoing consensus about the high value of the building has inspired the finding of solutions to these problems. Repair practices have the potential to develop knowledge about stone and skill in working with it that might otherwise become obsolete as new materials and construction techniques emerge, and stone use diminishes. A director of the stone company emphasises the high levels of skill needed to repair stone at Newman College, the consequent development of scientific and technical expertise, and an understanding of older building techniques. He concludes that if Newman College had been built out of a more dependable stone ‘we’d not have had such a wonderfully long relationship with the building. Barrabool stone is, indeed, a great material for the conservation of skills!’

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Part V Tree

Sterile these stones By time in ruin laid. Yet many a creeping thing Its haven has made In these least crannies, where falls Dark’s dew, and noonday shade. Walter de la Mare, The Corner Stone A host of non-human life-forms live on stone. Insects and arachnids dwell and hunt from crevices, pigeons and birds of prey nest on cliff like ledges of city buildings, lichens colonise surfaces, mosses exploit cracks between stones where dampness resides, and some of these lively agents weather stone, leading to its denudation. Plants too, seek out places at which they might grow, sending down tenuous roots to draw up nutrients and moisture from lithic matter. Lithophytes, ferns and orchids establish a foothold on stone walls and surfaces. At the RMIT campus in the centre of the city, at Building 11, once part of the old Melbourne Gaol and incorporated into the university in the 1930s, the extraordinary occupation of a stone wall by a far more sizable organism has taken place.

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A mature Port Jackson Fig tree, Ficus Rubiginosa, perhaps 80 years old, straddles both sides of a four-metre-high bluestone wall, its thick, numerous aerial roots anchoring it in the ground. Seven or eight branches spring out from the top of the wall, amply provided with nutrients and water from the roots buried deep in the soil, the part of the tree with the greatest biomass. Above, its oval, shiny green leaves provide thick shade and its small yellow fruits attract birds and bats in spring and summer. While it was establishing itself decades ago, the resourceful fig would have hydroponically extracted water from the air before sending down roots to the earth. The tree is a wholly unexpected sight but it is curious that it ever had the chance to grow, for if it had been noticed when it first occupied a crevice in the wall, the sapling would surely have been removed in the interests of maintenance. Now, tree and wall are intimate companions. The wall would tumble without the tree and the tree may not survive without its study stone support. But if the tree grows bigger, or when it dies, will it cause the collapse of the wall? Yet the tree has its own temporality of growth, seasonal fluctuations and death, whereas the wall belongs to a different temporal frame; we can surmise that the venerable wall will be restored after the tree has disappeared.

Part V: Tree

Fig. 1 Port Jackson Fig Tree, RMIT University

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Introduction Stone has been integral to the commemorative impulses of humans, a key constituent of memorials across history. It has been used to mark significant events, memorialise esteemed people, design sites of sacred significance and glorify deities. Because of its durability, stone constitutes a vast repository of historical and cultural commemorative heritage: prehistoric stone circles and dolmens, Egyptian pyramids, Roman colossi, Greek obelisks and intricately carved South American monoliths endure as relics of ancient cultures. Medieval market crosses, tombs and milestones persist, along with Indian temple complexes, Easter Island heads and the sturdy walls of Great Zimbabwe. Gravestones mark the burial places of the elite and ordinary alike, and across the twentieth century, stone has been fashioned into numerous war memorials, monuments to state power and independence struggles. Its widespread availability, typical durability and plasticity have made stone the pre-eminent material for those who wish to stabilise and spatialise the past. This chapter focuses on the deployment of various forms of stone in the increasingly variegated commemorative landscape of Melbourne. Mark Holsworth (2015: 9) contends that ‘the city’s public sculptures are © The Author(s) 2020 T. Edensor, Stone, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1_5

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not world class and Melbourne does not have many sculptures by famous artists’. Nevertheless, the city’s numerous stone and non-lithic memorials tell of ever-changing, multiple and contesting expressions of material commemoration. Melbourne thus possesses a complex memoryscape, with clusters of memorials from different eras that commemorate diverse identities, styles and ideals. As Sabine Marschall (2009: 2) remarks, memorials are devices through which ‘groups can gain visibility, authority and legitimacy’, and throughout history, social groups have competed to commemorate selective ideas, people and events. Exemplifying Pierre Nora’s contention that memory ‘takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects’ (1989: 9), most urban environments are replete with material reminders that the powerful have endeavoured to impose selective meanings and sentiments across space, mobilising ‘ideological and political discourses that authorize their creation’ (Crownshaw 2014: 220). Accordingly, official memorials serve as ‘points of physical and ideological orientation’ (Johnson 1995: 63), sites of ‘intensity’ that crystallise power relations (Lefebvre 1991). By their mundane presence, memorials also mark everyday points of congregation and passage, punctuating axial boulevards, dominating squares, adorning sites of civic and political authority, and providing familiar landmarks (Kostof 1991). As Kevin Lynch (1960) contends, they are vital nodes in urban space, enduring material landmarks that facilitate the cognitive mapping of inhabitants across time. Yet these prominent material forms are typically subject to contestation. For while central Melbourne is furnished with several powerful, enduring memorials and sites of commemoration, as Shanahan and Shanahan (2017: 116) emphasise, the city is continuously in a ferment concerning its relationship with the past. They maintain that from its early nineteenth-century origins, diverse communities have negotiated and contested commemorative features ‘by memorializing, curating, visiting, vandalizing and repairing its remains, relics and ruins’ and by erecting new memorials. Such contestations and challenges are particularly intense in the current era. I start the discussion by focusing on the colonial stone memorials installed from Melbourne’s early days to the Edwardian era, and then

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consider the 1930s Shrine of Remembrance and other war and nationalist memorials. I then explore how these archetypal stone expressions of commemorative power have been supplemented by a range of other memorial forms, indigenous, vernacular and critical, before briefly focusing on the most common form of stone remembrance, the gravestone. Finally, I investigate how these stony urban installations can be further critically interrogated by the very different indigenous practices and conceptions through which stone is associated with memory.

Colonial Commemoration In European and post-colonial cities, the nineteenth-century era of commemoration is usually evident in a plethora of stone and bronze figures installed on stone plinths in squares, parks and streets. Erected through funds raised by groups of citizens or authorities, they remain an integral element in the mundane fabric of urban space. They articulate an imperative to produce coherent symbols to generate a sense of shared identity for growing urban publics, as states or colonial powers sought to reinforce their authority over space. Their persistence ensures that the ideological impress of empire continues to echo across formerly colonised spaces such as Melbourne. Here, they form part of a wider colonial infrastructure that installed military, legal, bureaucratic and political systems of rule as well as authoritative, symbolic signifiers of neoclassical architecture, street names, public parks and squares, a banal colonialism that extended from colonial centre to periphery. These colonial sculptural forms were primarily installed in the three decades preceding the First World War. They were mostly fashioned in the classic realist style derived from Ancient Greece and Rome, exemplary symbols of European civilisation and British imperial identity that were deployed to extend claims of cultural inheritance and improve public taste and morality. In Melbourne, they are scattered throughout the city centre. Some are cast copies of renowned works from elsewhere (Holsworth 2015), reinforcing colonial links, with the same statues appearing in many sites. Towards the end of the nineteenth century,

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romantic and pre-Raphaelite renditions and the more realist representations of the ‘new sculpture’ (Beattie 1983) augmented classical expressions yet these stylistically diverse memorials continued to reinforce symbolic meanings about imperial power, tradition, loyalty and consummate heroic achievement. In imposing these sturdy material visions on public space as everyday reminders of colonial power and identity, the solidity and weight of stone conveyed the impression of an immovable authority. As Melbourne rapidly grew and accumulated vast wealth, the city’s elite deemed that the city required an adequately impressive realm of recreation, leisure and commemoration to chime with this elevated status. Though scattered throughout other central areas of Melbourne, the heroic figural memorial reaches its apogee in the Kings Domain and Victoria Gardens, areas that constitute parts of the large Domain Parklands on the South Bank of the River Yarra. Here, a host of British Kings and Queens, statespersons and military heroes are commemorated in bronze and stone. These weighty memorials are emplaced in a cultural landscape encoded with the ideological and aesthetic conventions of colonial power, radiating elite preoccupations with producing public spaces that could improve the moral, health and spiritual condition of the masses, including imperatives about what, who and how to remember. The parkland contains the viceregal residence of Government House situated on the highest point, sweeping paths, lakes, plentiful trees and gardens, rockeries, gullies and an observatory, all superimposed upon older uses, as I shortly discuss. A marble likeness of Queen Victoria (Fig. 5.1), a ubiquitous monumental presence across the UK and its colonised realms, is present in Victoria Gardens. In 1901, her death heralded a spell of mourning in Melbourne. Yet, the lack of a memorial to the imperial queen in such a wealthy, large city was regarded as dishonourable by many amongst the social elite. After winning the public competition to create a memorial, sculptor James White’s Queen Victoria Memorial was unveiled in 1907. Sculpted out of Italian Carrara marble, with columns of Caleula marble from New South Wales and a large stepped plinth forged out of Harcourt Granite, it rises to a height of nearly 11 metres. As Gerard Vaughan (2013) details, the monument followed the lineaments of the third-century Temple of Venus at Baalbek (now in Syria), a revered

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Fig. 5.1 Monument to Queen Victoria

classical form that had inspired numerous other British and European sculptures. The memorial embodies other prevalent symbolic conventions: either side of a robed and veiled Victoria, carrying sceptre and orb, and wearing the Small Imperial Crown, are archetypal imperial lions and on each face of the ornamental plinth, four allegorical female figures represent Progress, History, Wisdom and Justice. The monument captures

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the spirit of imperial loyalty that was articulated by an address that six hundred Old Victorian Colonists delivered to the Duke of Edinburgh, nearly 40 years before the monument’s erection: We can confidently assure your Royal Highness that, however attractive republican institutions may be to young communities generally, Victoria is in the main free from any such predilection … [our] material interests will be best protected by the perpetuation of an intimate connection with the great Empire over which Her Majesty rules – an empire the language, laws, customs, and institutions of which it is their privilege to inherit. (Vaughan 2013)

This, as Vaughan contends, conjures up ‘the ideas, aspirations and motivations of the first generations of Anglo-colonial settlers’, ideals embodied in Melbourne’s monument to the monarch. Nearby, in the King’s Domain, are several other royal and colonial figures, most cast in bronze and bestowed with large cubic stone plinths. These include two similarly designed equestrian statues—of King Edward VII, unveiled in 1920, and of the Marquis of Linlithgow, governor of Victoria from 1889 to 1995 and first governor general of Australia from 1901, unveiled in 1911 (Ridley 1996). Standing upon massive Harcourt Granite plinths, they loom over onlookers. A more elaborate memorial commemorates King George V, a bronze figure unveiled in 1952, 16 years after his death. The monument is sited on a bluestone base with steps and the figure is placed on a geometric Harcourt Granite plinth beside a 17-metre-high tower of sculpted sandstone. Even at this later date, it is flanked by cliched symbols, a heraldic sandstone lion and unicorn, and a symbolic bronze figure of Britannia. As in so many other Western cities, these material reminders conjure an era in which particular people were routinely commemorated, their memorials paid for by philanthropists or through public subscription, a practice that has largely vanished from the contemporary city but continues to haunt it. This lithic and metal horde exemplify the cherished aesthetics and ideological values of British colonial power. In contemporary times, however, these sentiments are often profoundly outmoded, wholly

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forgotten or incomprehensible. They may be metaphorically or aesthetically untranslatable, while public knowledge about the person commemorated is often minimal. Moreover, we may rarely notice these structures in our everyday routines despite, or perhaps because of their ubiquity. Such obsolescence is exemplified in Marina Warner’s (1993) discussion about how a post-revolutionary elite sought to materialise particular ideals in the statuary along the Champs Elysees in Paris. Though intended to communicate an enduring testament to revolutionary values, the classical allusions encoded in the memorials are unfamiliar to most contemporary onlookers. This inability to secure meaning over time is also epitomised by the socialist realist monuments of post-socialist Bucharest that remain despite the absence of the political and social conditions under which they were erected, and which gave them legitimacy. In the park in which they have been collected as a tourist attraction, the past remains ‘unmastered’ by earlier totalitarian endeavours to fix its meaning (Turai 2009). The desires of elite groups, political bodies and states to imprint enduring meanings upon urban space are often thwarted by forms of knowledge, aesthetic styles and political contingencies that supersede the conventions that informed their erection. Yet in Melbourne, as in many other settings, these memorials remain part of the furniture of the city. Despite the disappearance of the tastes, styles, cultural values and motivations that once made the memorialisation of these particular people customary, in their sacrosanct inviolability, these statues continue to trouble the present. According to Angela Dunstan (2016: 3), this inscrutability is not merely a twenty-first-century impulse; she argues that for the Victorians themselves, many sculptures were ‘hauntingly present but rarely interrogated, monumental yet mundane, and, above all, disconcertingly difficult to read’. This impenetrability is multiplied for contemporary urbanites. Yet despite this aesthetic and epistemological obsolescence, commemorative figurative sculpture is nonetheless a peculiarly haunting mode of representation, still, silent, largely monochrome and lifeless, a static model of a person, once living and vital but now deceased. Stone statues thus constitute a peculiar reminder of the mortality of all individuals as well as the death of those they commemorate.

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Moreover, although these memorials were created in a historically distant era with its distinct set of values, styles and politics, they typically retain the regard of city planners, conservationists and heritage professionals, an organisational force that militates against their removal. For some key decision-makers, their symbolic value and historical import remain salient: the values they embody continue to haunt the present and have not yet been exorcised. There is also, perhaps, something about their stony or metal materiality, suggestive of immobility and permanence, that deters their erasure: their weighty stone plinths make them appear as if they are solidly and permanently embedded in the landscape (although some memorials have been moved to diverse destinations across the city centre). This prepossessing material import is undergirded by their positioning on the plinths from which they overlook the everyday passage of pedestrians. Skilfully rendered to assume a likeness of the humans on which they are modelled, removal might seem improper (Edensor 2019), and this affective impact is further entrenched by the charismatic persona that is conjured, redolent of resolution and authority.

Commemorating Military Sacrifice and Nation These stone plinths and the statues that they support have been dwarfed by a much mightier lithic memorial, the colossal Shrine of Remembrance, built between 1927 and 1934, and funded by public donations and Victorian and National governments (Inglis 1998). Located in King’s Domain, south of the colonial memorials, this giant structure has successively been supplemented by a huge variety of smaller cairns, obelisks and monuments of many styles as particular groups claim their presence in the Shrine Reserve, a space designated for the commemoration of military sacrifice and victory. Throughout the twentieth century, national commemorative strategies largely turned away from the display of symbolic figures and increasingly sought to align personal with public memory and mourning, especially following the First World War. Subsequently, a proliferation of new memorials pervaded national, regional and local space as governments and communities attempted to come to terms with the trauma

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of the long conflict. In this broader global context, Australia is noteworthy for the scale and size of the commemorative structures erected to mark participation in the First World War, the loss of 60,000 servicemen, and especially, the sacrifice of Anzac troops in the Gallipoli campaign, an event widely mooted as a generative moment of Australian nationalism (Holbrook 2014). Comparably imposing structures to the Shrine are present in other large Australian cities, as well as avenues of honour and numerous smaller memorials. As part of the post-Federation drive discussed in the previous chapter, it was deemed essential that for a memorial such as this, Australian—and especially Victorian—stone must constitute the materials. Accordingly, the 6000 tonnes of silvery, durable granite that lines the vast plaza, steps and walls of the shrine is from Mount Tynong. The Shrine is designed in neoclassical style with grand Doric columns, massive portico and steps. Classically oriented sculptural groups on the terraces, designed by English sculptor Paul Montford, are described by Ronald Ridley (1996: 155) as ‘each consisting of a boy leading two lions which draw a chariot in the form of a ship’s prow, on which stands a female personification before a winged throne… (representing) Patriotism, Sacrifice, Justice, and Peace and Goodwill’. Such symbolic forms would scarcely feature in contemporary memorial forms and are probably illegible to most contemporary visitors. In the Shrine’s large interior space, a further 12 relief panels designed by Paul Dadswell honour the different branches of the services, and unlike Montford’s forms, are realistic representations devoid of symbolism (Scates 2009). The dominant position of the Shrine in the surrounding landscape and the architectonic use of stone contribute to its massive, enduring presence. The memorial testifies to the process by which a powerful coalition of diverse parties came to impose a colossal structure that dwarfs all other monuments in Melbourne, and anchors Swanston Street, the main north-south axis, suggesting thereby that this memorial to the Anzac troops is the pinnacle of national commemoration. Though other conflicts, including the Vietnamese and Korean wars, are represented by memorials in the Shrine Reserve, the Shrine undergirds the reified centrality of Anzac commemoration in the national mythscape.

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Indeed, the political significance of the Anzac campaign has been reinforced over the past few decades but this has been accompanied by the rise of anti-militarist, indigenous and gendered critiques of this monolithic centrality in national(ist) ideology and historical narrative. These critical accounts align with Cynthia Enloe’s (1998: 51–52) contention that official remembrances have tended to be biased against representations of women’s war experiences, and that it is men ‘whose ideas and actions had been crucial shapers’ of commemorative practices. Similarly, as Henry Reynolds (2013) argues, there can be no reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians without an acknowledgement of the victims of this lengthy conflict. Yet official commemoration of the massacres perpetrated during the Frontier Wars remains conspicuously avoided, though as Paul Daley (2018) points out, there are many community-oriented, unofficial monuments to the dead. In addition to its massive stony presence, the Shrine has become a focus of regular commemorative events that include half-hourly services of remembrance each day and culminate in annual Anzac Day Dawn Service, underpinning the tendencies for monuments of this scale to stage the ‘rituals, festivals, pageants, public dramas and civic ceremonies [that] serve as a chief way in which societies remember’ (Hoelscher and Alderman 2004: 350). The Dawn Service takes place on 25 April and follows a regular format featuring music and speeches. At the Melbourne Shrine, the huge forecourt accommodates tens of thousands of people who gather in the early morning (Sumartojo 2015). The staging of these ceremonies of remembrance utilises the stony solidity, durability and scale of the Shrine complex. At different times, thousands stand in silence on the hard floor of the smooth forecourt, walk across its expanse to climb the many stairs that access the interior and look out on the surrounding parklands from the commanding balcony. Through these ritualised actions, bodies comport themselves in response to the hard textures of the granite, sensing its distinctive materiality, texture, mass and appearance, experiences enmeshed with the embodied performance of commemoration (Connerton 1989). Moreover, the immense stony solidity of the Shrine symbolically resonates with the weight of the huge trauma that pervaded post-First World War Australia, its vast bulk also reminding present-day citizens of the weightiness of this grief.

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As I have mentioned, the Shrine Reserve contains hundreds of separate monuments. There simple plaques on stones, commemorative trees, shelters and cairns dedicated to different military campaigns, organisations, units and leaders. Others are more elaborate, with figurative memorials to individual Australian military heroes also populating this increasingly crowded memorial landscape, with ever more groups wishing to mark their presence within this dominant national narrative (Doss 2012). This growing number of memorials further reinforces the symbolic significance of war through the accumulation of material forms, but also perhaps, diminishes the force of each memorial for visitors to this precinct. To stand out amidst this proliferation, distinctive styles and symbols seem necessary. One particular monument in the Shrine Reserve especially illustrates how stone can be symbolically deployed. The Australian Hellenic Memorial (Fig. 5.2), installed in 2001, honours the Australian and Greek men and women who fought in the Battle of Crete during the Second World War, with 841 fatalities. It is saturated with symbolic resonances. The memorial is formed with 12 three-metre-high Harcourt Granite columns that mark out a rectangular space surfaced with polished bluestone tiles upon which are a bronze urn on a marble plinth and an oikos. The Oikos was a key symbol of belonging adopted by ancient Greek city states, a composite concept that signified family, the family’s property and their dwelling. Here, it denotes an inclusive community of Greeks and Australians who fought and perished, and the Greeks that subsequently migrated to Australia. It articulates that these commemorated people belong to both nations, and to this place of memory. The Oikos is composed from two stones, an upper limestone portion from Crete and a bluestone base from Victoria, signifying that Australia supported Greece during the conflict. It also symbolises the island-ness of Crete, set amidst the shiny waters of the Aegean Sea epitomised by the polished bluestone on which it stands, as well as the post-war migration of Greeks to Australia. This bringing together of types of stone to produce symbols of alliance and geography is supplemented by a further emblematic signifier of the resistance of the Greeks to Italian and Nazi occupation. In the centre of the memorial is a crypt that houses significant historical documents that testify to the events that brought the two nations together in

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Fig. 5.2 Australian Hellenic Memorial

wartime and the bonds that were strengthened through migration. Here is an urn, filled with black pebbles, that serves as allegory of the ancient Athenian democratic custom of voting for or against key political issues, with white pebbles signifying support for a proposal and black pebbles opposition. The black pebbles represent the emphatic opposition to the Italian invaders in the Second World War. Moving beyond the military memorials in the Shrine Reserve, the Australian War Graves burial ground (Fig. 5.3), located in the midst of the massive Springvale Cemetery, 14 miles south of the city centre, is also concerned with the commemoration of the casualties of war, and it

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Fig. 5.3 War Graves, Springvale Cemetery

also reflects Australia’s colonial and post-colonial identity in its design. The burial ground contains over 600 interments of servicemen who died during the Second World War, mirroring around 2500 other sites established following the establishment of the intergovernmental Commonwealth War Graves Commission, formerly the Imperial War Graves Commission, in 1917. Six independent member states, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa, are jointly responsible for installing and maintaining the graves of those combatants that

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died in the two World Wars. The scale of the Second World War persuaded the Commission to adopt a new approach towards the commemoration of war dead. Significantly, this signified the mobilisation of an ethos that ensured that all war casualties are commemorated individually and equally, irrespective of class, military or civil rank, race, ethnicity or belief. Accordingly, the form of the design, inscription and layout of the graves in each cemetery must conform to an undeviating aesthetic. At Springvale, following strict specifications, a low hedge contains the geometrically precise, six parallel rows of headstones surrounded by floral borders within a large, immaculately manicured lawn. Each small headstone, 76 centimetres high, contains a crest of the service, rank, name, unit, date of death and age at death, inscribed with a standardised MacDonald Gill form of upper-case lettering, sometimes accompanied by a more personal dedication. Despite intentions to produce a homogeneous space, the design of cemeteries inevitably articulates culturally specific expressions. In those cemeteries that contained more than 40 graves, the wholly standardised Cross of Sacrifice , designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield in 1918, is an overtly Christian symbol. Mounted on an octagonal base, and ranging in height from 14 to 32 feet, the memorial was intended to echo the crosses found in English medieval churchyards. Attached to the cross is a bronze longsword facing downwards. Though in cemeteries where most of the dead are Indian or Chinese, or in certain Muslim settings, the cross may be absent, it is installed in a large majority of war grave cemeteries, including Springvale. Indeed, the sword has been criticised for representing chivalric codes, celebrating military action or as an emblem of medieval crusades. In larger cemeteries of over 400 burials, the cross is supplemented by a similarly standardised memorial, the Stone of Remembrance devised by architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens. Unlike the Cross, this memorial is shaped without any reference to specific religions and is inscribed with the phrase ‘Their Name Liveth for Evermore’. Yet there is no Stone of Remembrance in Melbourne. While the majority of Commonwealth War Graves are fashioned out of Portland Stone, those in Australia cemeteries are largely composed out of the similarly white Ulam marble from Queensland. While stone has been enrolled into this cross-national, colonially tinged endeavour to produce similar memorial forms that echo the strict precision of military parades, any universalising desires are mediated by local contingencies, cultural tastes,

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political sensibilities and available materials, denying total global homogeneity. These nationalist sites of commemoration supplement a range of other memorials to figures that are foregrounded as having contributed to the emergence of both Australia and Melbourne. Around the State Library, along Spring Street, in Treasury Gardens, and on Swanston Street are a series of bronze and marble statues that were created in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, including fated explorers Burke and Wills, and navigator Matthew Flinders, as well as assorted politicians, judges and philanthropists. These expressions of nationalist commemoration, inflected with colonial values and heroic tributes to pioneers and explorers, also include two other monuments to Burke and Wills, a small, rough bluestone cairn in Royal Park at the site from which their ill-fated journey embarked, and the aforementioned mighty Harcourt Granite tombstone in the Melbourne General Cemetery. A more recently installed Antarctic glacial boulder is sited outside the Royal Society of Victoria which commemorates explorer Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition. Following colonial memorial traditions, all these long-lasting memorials are anchored to place by weighty stone and bronze. Though these memorials and those in the King’s Domain remain intact, in other circumstances, commemorative forms may be repeatedly vandalised or neglected. They become threatened when they symbolise a historical event, discredited regimes or persons that come to be regarded as politically unacceptable. Current examples include the Rhodes Must Fall campaign that demands the removal of statues of colonial icon Cecil Rhodes, in Cape Town and Oxford, and the vociferous campaigns for the removal of memorials dedicated to the Confederate States of America that are accused of perpetuating ideas of white supremacy, racism and slavery. In recent years, certain of Melbourne’s memorials have also been subject to critical scrutiny and re-evaluation. The bronze statue of Sir John Batman, colonial explorer and entrepreneur, commissioned by Melbourne City Council and unveiled in the surprisingly recent year of 1979 has been particularly controversial. It supplements an earlier memorial to the same figure erected

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in 1882. Batman, who died in 1839, was a key founder of the settlement that became Melbourne, having traded the space on which the city is built with the local Kulin people in 1835. The controversial treaty granted 600,000 acres of land in exchange for 40 blankets, 30 axes, 100 knives, 50 scissors, 30 mirrors, 200 handkerchiefs, 100 pounds of flour and 6 shirts. Batman’s brutal treatment of local aborigines in other dealings was also notorious. The earlier bluestone monument to Batman is located in the car park of the Queen Victoria Market. In 1992, a new inscription was placed on its base which reads, ‘When the monument was erected in 1881, the colony considered that the Aboriginal people did not occupy land. It is now clear that prior to the colonisation of Victoria, the land was inhabited and used by Aboriginal people’. Later, Melbourne’s Aboriginal consultative group protested that this was too feeble a statement and subsequently another plaque was attached in 2004: The City of Melbourne acknowledges that the historical events and perceptions referred to by this memorial are inaccurate. An apology is made to indigenous people and to the traditional owners of this land for the wrong beliefs of the past and the personal upset caused.

Art critics have considered the 1979 statue of Batman to be ‘uninspiring’ and ‘old fashioned’, signifying that Melbourne remained ‘introspective, isolationist and conservative’ in the late 1970s (Holsworth 2015: 68), and its existence later prompted critical action. In October 1991, a crowd of Aboriginal activists and supporters gathered around the statue. One member of the party ripped up a copy of the original treaty and then staged a mock trial, accusing Batman of war crimes, theft, trespass, rape and genocide, with the assembled throng shouting ‘guilty!’ as each charge was read out. A sign for each crime was placed around the statue’s neck and his hands coloured red to signify the bloodshed for which he was responsible. Since then, there have been many calls for the statue’s removal, and indeed it has been taken down while a large construction project is undertaken. Whether it will once more be erected is uncertain. There is also ongoing controversy around Australia Day, 26 January, initiated in 1994, and marking the date in 1788 that the First Fleet

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arrived at Port Jackson, New South Wales, and subsequently raised the Union Flag at Sydney, following James Cook’s claiming of the territory for the British Crown in 1770. As I have mentioned, Cooks Cottage was defaced by graffiti, as was the first major memorial erected to Cook in St Kilda in 1914, supported by a granite pedestal on which is engraved a list of the crew of HMS Endeavour. On the eve of Australia Day 2018, the monument was daubed in pink paint with the words ‘No Pride’, and the following year it was decorated with the slogan, ‘A Racist Endeavour’, a pun on the name of Cook’s ship. To conclude this section, I consider how the city disseminates ideas about the commemorative use of stone beyond the realm of the urban. Here, I focus on a programme to establish a series of contested stone memorials in rural space, the strident campaign of the Melbourne-based Victorian Historical Memorials Committee in the 1920s to establish a series of memorial cairns that celebrated the routes undertaken by the early inland explorers of the state. This city-based group sought to create authoritative monuments to national progress and peaceful triumph over a land conceived as devoid of any antiquity. For as Rula Paterson (2015: 67) demonstrates, this rural realm was claimed to be bereft of any ‘markers of past civilizations such as temples, palaces, urns and busts’, despite the destruction and plunder of Aboriginal artefacts during this period. In the metropolitan imagination, the rural was the realm in which the nation was conquered and shaped, and accordingly, the committee sought to pay a national and local debt to these ancestral pioneers by installing stone cairns across the state. This directive policy of commemoration ignored complex local historical narratives and identities, foregrounded only certain explorers, neglected the critical role of Aboriginal guides in pathfinding and elided the violent massacres of indigenous communities perpetrated by several pioneers. Aesthetically and symbolically, local stone was deemed best suited to these memorials, modest in scale and composed of a rough materiality that aligned with the supposedly rugged nature of the explorers and the idealised masculinity of archetypal rural figures ‘the pastoralist, the bushman and the digger’ (ibid.: 68). The committee specifically commemorated the expeditions taken by the pastoralist and mass murderer

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McMillan and the geologist Strzelecki, ignoring the commercial imperatives that inspired their adventures, the Aboriginal guides and the role of local pastoralists, while contending that all killings of indigenous inhabitants were humane and lawful. Paterson shows how in several cases, locals resisted such interpretations, preferring to supply their own sentiments, altering their designs to include recognition of Aboriginal people or local participants or simply refusing to erect the cairns. Endeavours such as this cairn-building project testify to desires to superimpose colonial memorials to explorers, pioneers and statesmen across colonised space, revealing what Elizabeth Furniss (2001: 286) refers to as ‘a framing of history through themes of discovery and firsts (that) is so deeply ingrained in a Western historical sensibility that it may at times appear almost natural and inevitable’. The inability to imagine landscape otherwise was guaranteed by the always already established perspectives that rendered the land terra nullius, a ‘natural’ realm devoid of agricultural productivity and in need of taming. The reproduction of this landscape imaginary and the foundation myths with which it became inextricably associated, Kali Myers (2013) avers, were consolidated and disseminated in literature, poetry, song, photography and newspaper reports. It was also underpinned by the paintings that romantically depicted grand scenic vistas and the toiling bodies of white farmers, bushmen and explorers who moulded it into productivity, but not those of the banished indigenous inhabitants or the violence that caused their displacement. The ideological reproduction of a landscape empty of any meaningful traces of its indigenous inhabitants through such representations produced a realm in which memorials to explorers and founders could be unironically installed. Myers calls for the urgent need to un-make these memorials as testaments to an ‘accepted knowledge, to destabilise contemporary Australian society, and to call for a more inclusive Australian landscape’ (2013: 48). In historicising these monuments, mythic colonial memories can be parochialised as emerging from within a specific ideological and aesthetic mindset.

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Decentring the Memorial So far, I have focused on official memorials that incorporate stone into their design. However, in recent times, such authoritative, institutional and organisational modes of commemoration have become decentred, with no prevalent contemporary conventions established for erecting memorials comparable to these nationalist, elite and elevated designs. Such customs are outmoded, and notions about who and what is worthy of commemoration and in what style are now widely contested. This shift in commemorative practices forms part of what David Atkinson (2008: 381) terms the ‘democratisation of memory’. From the latter half of the twentieth century, this ongoing process heralds the decline of the ‘top-down’ production and dissemination of memories by experts who reproduce particular narratives and assumptions about the past. This has resulted, according to Atkinson (2008: 385), in the supplanting of a singular ‘official’ history by a ‘polyphony of voices that start to weave together a complex, shifting, contingent but continually evolving sense of the past and its abundant component elements’. This resonates with the contemporary commemorative scenario in Melbourne, where a diverse, expanding array of memorials articulate multiple sentiments, evoke a variety of people, events and histories, and are constructed in many different styles and forms. This includes the proliferation of memorials created by ‘ordinary people’ at which ‘alternative constructions of identity and narratives of place’ are part of what Iain Robertson (2016: 10) terms ‘heritage from below’. In developing greater diversity in design, many post-1945 memorials move away from figuration and towards abstract forms, often drawing onlookers into affective, sensual and embodied encounters. These less didactic memorials rarely include figures that stand high on a plinth above the throng, gazing into the middle distance with an expression that connotes nobility of mind and purpose. While representations of individuals endure in reconfigured ways, as I shortly discuss, many recent commemorative forms align with wider artistic trends that foreground the spatial relationships between the viewer, the memorial and location. As Stevens and Sumartojo (2015: 3) claim,

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Contemporary memorials increasingly take wider, lower landscape forms that are closely integrated with everyday urban public space. They incorporate natural elements and encourage close multi-sensory engagement. Abstract and figural elements are often used in combination; sculptures tend to be less didactic than in the past.

Many contemporary memorials solicit physical encounters, providing lithic and metal compositions that invite bystanders to recline, clamber and stand upon them. I now consider the different aesthetics, identities and desires that the contemporary stone memorials of Melbourne articulate. I briefly focus on the accommodation of a range of vernacular and unpredictable commemorative forms in public space, before discussing the inclusion of those who have hitherto been unrepresented, and the advent of memorials that critically deconstruct older monumental traditions.

Vernacular Memorials A range of diverse memorials erected by fans, artists and the bereaved are burgeoning across urban space. Such forms are initiated and created by those who want to commemorate, mourn and record their own values in their own way, and include roadside memorials, street art, statues to celebrities and ordinary people, and political statements that honour particular cultural trends and events. Such memorials, Mark Holsworth (2015) observes, have been accused of supplanting the installation of more ambitious sculptures with whimsical and infantile forms. Yet the insertion of such vernacular memorials signifies a more inclusive understanding about who and what should be remembered, and they resound with the creative energy of the street art that has come to signify Melbourne’s much-vaunted cultural vibrancy. Though the desire to commemorate a living or deceased statesperson, military figure or philanthropist in the form of a statue is no longer a common impulse, contemporary sculptures of popular entertainers, musicians and sporting stars are becoming numerous. In Melbourne,

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as elsewhere, these include the realist sculptures of the ‘sporting legends’, selective Australian athletes, footballers and cricketers that surround the vast Melbourne Cricket Ground, and the busts to famous Australian tennis players at Melbourne Park, the national tennis centre (Holsworth 2015). The Elvis Presley Memorial Garden installed at Charles Robinette’s grotto (discussed elsewhere) in Melbourne General Cemetery incorporates a shiny black headstone and a changing array of personal artefacts. And in Alexandra Gardens, a small bluestone drinking fountain erected in 1974 remembers a popular black swan, named ‘Cookie’, who was killed by three men. The James Joyce Seat of Learning (Fig. 5.4), an easily overlooked monument to Ireland’s famous writer sited in front of the State Library, includes a lithic element endowed with almost sacred significance. Dubliner Brendan Kilty sought to honour Joyce’s memory after one of the writer’s childhood homes was demolished in 1989. Kilty spent $4000

Fig. 5.4 James Joyce Seat of Learning, detail of bluestone and brick top

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in purchasing 18 truckloads of bricks from this former home, inspired by the idea that they would form the essential component of 63 similar memorials around the world. The peculiar design refers to the high stools upon which Irish monks sat while writing illuminated manuscripts and consists of steel legs engraved with the writer’s name, topped by a flat, polished bluestone seat in the centre of which is embedded a brick from Joyce’s boyhood home. Similar seats exist in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Toowoomba in Queensland and Camden in New Jersey, USA, but the remaining 59 planned seats have not been installed, and perhaps never will, Kilty having recently been declared bankrupt. The Seat of Learning highlights both the unpredictable, capricious processes out of which many contemporary memorials emerge and the different global currents through which ideas about commemoration circulate beyond local and national contexts. It also exemplifies how the symbolic and affective attributes of local and imported stone can be combined.

Commemorating the Formerly Ignored Iain Robertson (2016: 7) points out that structures that claim a relationship to the past can be ‘both a means and a manifestation of counter hegemonic practices’. These counter-monuments explicitly question dominant historical narratives, reflect ambivalence about national histories or seek to open new routes to debating and understanding the past. They have also been accompanied by subaltern political gestures to memorialise forgotten or neglected figures and events, to inscribe public space with their presence. Such installations may eventuate after stubborn, long-standing campaigns, spurred by the emergence of ‘identity politics and government policies of multiculturalism’ (Hamilton 2011: 16). In fact, the commemorative orthodoxies of the privileged have often been supplemented by other politically significant memorials. One of Melbourne’s best-known memorials is the distinctive Eight Hours Monument, erected in 1903 to celebrate the fruitful campaign to establish the eight-hour working day in Victoria, first granted to stonemasons in 1856 and a key international episode in the history of the labour movement.

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The shaft is sculpted from Harcourt Granite and is topped by three ‘8s’, and the three words signifying the division of the day ‘Rest, Labour, and Recreation’, with a globe at the summit to announce its worldwide significance and the internationalism of the labour struggle. From its inception, the memorial has been challenged by local conservative politicians but has survived intact (Holsworth 2015). Moreover, earlier memorials to heroes of several other nations are identified by Holsworth (2015): to the Scottish poet Robert Burns, Irish Nationalist hero Daniel O’Connell, Italian busts of Dante and Marconi, a Greek monument to the ancient Spartan King Leonidas, Chinese leader Sun Yat Sen, and Polish geologist and explorer General Strezlecki. These register the multicultural nature of Melbourne, yet memorials dedicated to other figures, events or symbols from other migrant groups are yet to appear. These memorials have been supplemented by the 2019 erection of a bronze sculpture of the late, but now rehabilitated Australian sprinter Peter Norman, who won the silver medal in the 200-metre sprint at the 1968 Mexico Olympics and stood in solidarity with gold medal winner, Tommie Smith, and bronze medal recipient John Carlos, as they performed their iconic protest against racial inequality on the winners’ podium. These important correctives to historical forgetting have been accompanied by the recent commemoration of Aboriginal histories, characters and cultural expressions across Melbourne. While official memorialisation has typically erased Aboriginal existence (Pinto 2019), the widening of political and aesthetic modes of commemoration has encouraged creative approaches to reinstall presence, and testify to indigenous practices, myths and tragedies. These include the complex at Birrarung Marr adjacent to the Yarra River which includes a winding path in the shape of an eel, a semi-circle of shields representing each of the five groups of the Kulin Nation, and a meeting place bordered by ten huge bluestone boulders carved with animal petroglyphs. Upstream, at Enterprize Park is Scar: A Stolen Vision, comprising 30 river red gum poles carved by Aboriginal artists to mark the site where Batman negotiated his dubious treaty (Pinto 2019). Eminent pastor and activist for indigenous welfare, Sir Douglas Nicholls and his wife Gladys, are commemorated in a 2007 bronze sculpture in Parliament Gardens, and in 2015, an

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experimental, symbolically loaded artwork, Standing By Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner, was installed to commemorate the eponymous Aboriginal men who were executed in 1842 for killing two European whale hunters as part of a campaign to resist colonisation. Six brightly coloured newspaper stands, a nineteenth-century suburban fence and a static swing forged out of steel with a large bluestone seat collectively emblematise the clash of cultures, nostalgic visions of early Melbourne and elegiac loss. Finally, along the coast between Brighton and Beaumaris are a number of abstract stone sculptures created by Glenn Romanis and Ellen Jose depicting mythic tales and figures. While these works importantly extend a sense of Aboriginal belonging into the urban landscape, I now focus on three particularly potent memorials in which stone has been creatively deployed by indigenous artists. First, the memorial landscape of the Domain Parklands, dominated by the Shrine of Remembrance and saturated with military and colonial memorials, now includes the Kings Domain Resting Place (Fig. 5.5), a modest memorial to indigenous Australians. Here, below a granite stone from the You Yangs, ancient granite hills that rise 35 miles west of Melbourne, are buried the remains of 38 Aboriginal people, returned back ‘to country’ in 1985 from their containment as part of an ‘anthropological’ collection at the University of Melbourne, following a successful nationwide campaign to introduce government legislation to repatriate such remains from universities, museums and other collections. The boulder is embossed with a plaque that names the different communities that constitute the Kulin nation. The roughly textured granite contrasts with the Domain’s highly polished, sculpted European memorials, its half-submerged stony form seemingly connected to the land rather than superimposed upon it. Symbolically, the memorial also stands opposite the grandiloquent monument to Queen Victoria, implicitly challenging the colonial expropriation of land in her name. This return to country is endowed with added significance since prior to colonial settlement, large areas of the Domain Parklands contained valuable wetlands and were widely used as a meeting place and food source. The burial was accompanied by a symbolically important ceremony that honoured the ancestors, foregrounding the critical significance of the performative act to Aboriginal culture in contradistinction

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Fig. 5.5 Resting Place, King’s Domain

to the centrality of material expression epitomised by the European commemorative forms in the Domain. As Shanahan and Shanahan (2017) contend, the Resting Place is connected to knowledge, cultural identity and the ritual that accompanied its establishment. Second, Wominjeka Tarnuk Yooroom (Welcome Bowl) (Fig. 5.6) was created by Vicki Couzens and Maree Clarke to connect past and present. Ten large bluestone boulders encircle the corners of Paisley and Nicholson Streets in Footscray, representing a traditional coolamon, a wooden dish used to hold foliage that is burned in Welcome to Country ceremonies. The work’s location at a junction also symbolically proposes

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Fig. 5.6 Wominjeka Tarnuk Yooroom, Footscray

an inclusive meeting place, a welcoming location for the many migrants that have moved to this part of the city. Emerging from the pavement, the boulders seem as if they have always been there, jagged forms that put back both unworked stone and Aboriginal presence into the urban landscape. The figuration of the coolamon sunk into the ground solicits a vision of the hollowed-out surface of the hard bluestone that lies beneath the pavement, connecting place back to history and the earth, and offers a delicious point of contrast to the overworked, smoothed over material fabric that pervades the city. The big shards of rough, tactile stone constitute an irregular mass at variance to the rectilinear elements of the

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built environment, and as I discuss in Chapter 6, invite inhabitants and visitors to sit upon and clamber over them, exemplifying the more inclusive characteristics of contemporary memorials identified by Stevens and Sumartojo (2015). Third, Lie of the Land (Fig. 5.7), created by Fiona Foley and Chris Knowles in 1999 and sited in a courtyard at Melbourne Museum, comprises seven Tasmanian sandstone pillars standing some three metres high. Each pillar is inscribed with an item listed in the diary of the aforementioned John Batman that was traded with the local Wurundjeri people in 1835 to secure sixty-thousand acres of their land: ‘blankets’, ‘knives’, ‘looking glasses’, ‘tomahawks’, ‘beads’, ‘scissors’ and ‘flour’. Knowles’ soundscape includes Batman’s written passage detailing the controversial deal read out in the local language of Woiwurrung, along with several other languages representing the indigenous groups present in Australia. The etched tombstone-like pillars powerfully articulate the fate of many indigenous people following European colonisation. Foley has explicitly referred to the political necessity of supplementing and challenging authoritative forms of commemoration. Indeed, the gradual acceptance of political authorities of the necessity for this commemorative imperative is signified by Lie of the Land’s commission by the City of Melbourne to mark the Australian Reconciliation Convention, held in the city in 1997, and to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the 1967 referendum in which the constitutional status of indigenous Australians was amended. However, this symbolical rebuke to settler colonial power was diminished when the sculpture was moved from the Town Hall to its present location, although in the quiet museum courtyard it possesses an undisturbed material and sonic power. These varied and creative forms of stony commemoration have been effective in re-installing Aboriginal presence in the urban landscape to counter the numerous European memorial inscriptions. Despite these material reminders, some argue that the political bodies that address reconciliation by deploying such symbolic measures sidestep more effective concrete measures such as giving ownership to land and the means to maintain that land. They contend that material possession should replace material symbolism.

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Fig. 5.7 Lie of the Land, detail

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Critically Interrogating Memorial Traditions Melbourne was relatively late in installing high-profile modernist sculptures, a situation drastically transformed with the siting of RonRobertson-Swann’s Vault in the former City Square in 1980. The large, bright yellow, minimalist, abstract, prefabricated steel form, sardonically nicknamed the ‘yellow peril’, created a furore. Swiftly relocated, it now stands outside the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Yet this high-profile controversy paved the way for the wider decentring of the traditional figurative memorials discussed above and heralds the current proliferation of memorial forms across the city. The gradual penetration into Melbourne of modernist memorials is well exemplified by the organic stone forms created by the Japanese Australian sculptor, Akio Makigawa, and installed at several city locations. Garden of Unity, a bluestone sculpture of six different cone-shaped forms of similar dimensions (Fig. 5.8), commemorates the centenary of the union of the six colonies during Federation and the establishment of the first parliament at the Royal Exhibition Building in 1901. In commemorating this significant Australian event, the sculpture amply demonstrates how previous national(ist) memorials have been supplanted by abstract forms that express less overt, quieter sentiments and affects. Such modernist works belong to the broader process of memorial diversification. This includes inventive critical approaches, with one recent sculpture particularly parodying the normative ideals that colonial and national monuments perpetrate. Charles Robb’s Landmark, completed in 2004 and sited at Latrobe University’s Bundoora campus, is a traditional memorial statue of Charles Latrobe, the first Lieutenant Governor of Victoria from 1839 to 1854, after whom the university is named (Fig. 5.9). Except it is upside down, and crucially, although it appears to be wrought out of stone and bronze, this is an illusion. In creating this inverted monument, Robb sought to literally express the notion that universities should adopt the critical function of turning ideas on their head. The sculpture is wrought from a mixture of fibreglass, steel, polystyrene, polyurethane and acrylic paint to resemble bronze and stone (Holsworth 2015), mocking the fantasies of those who wish to eternally perpetuate the reputation of people and events through

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Fig. 5.8 Garden of Unity, Aiko Makigawa

the deployment of durable lithic and metal materials. Because it seems to be balancing precariously on its head, the irreverently upturned Latrobe immediately captures attention in a way that it would not if it were it sited in a city square, park or street the ‘right way up’. It challenges the formal and ideological impetus for placing such monuments in public space and renders absurd the commanding, patrician postures of the great men who stand atop their plinths in celebration of their royal status, national importance, historical significance, good character or civic responsibility.

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Fig. 5.9 Landmark, Charles Robb

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Another work subtly questions the hubris of those who attempt to stamp meanings on space forever. Architectural Fragment by Petrus Spronk, sited outside the State Library in 1992, is a pyramidal, bluestone sculpture representing a fragment of a library emerging from the pavement as might an archaeological artefact. Quoting from the poem, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’, the pedestal reads, ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my work you Mighty, and despair’. This stony Memento Mori calls to mind the remains of a classical monument. It suggests the decline of a once great civilisation, the obliteration of a grand metropolis or an episode of catastrophic warfare. Alternatively, it conjures up the spectre of an invading barbarian horde or ruthless imperial force, resonating with the Roman destruction of Alexandria’s library or the Christian sack of Constantinople, the savage defeat of an educated and cultured city. Finally, Nearamnew is a huge commemorative ground sculpture designed by Paul Carter and wrought out of Kimberley sandstone that covers large areas of Federation Square (Fig. 5.10). It is named after an early colonial mispronunciation of an indigenous name for the area upon which the city was founded. I now draw out some key elements, but a complete depiction of this complex, philosophical and highly nuanced work can only be partially captured. Commemorating Federation in 1901, Nearamnew includes nine discrete poems, each composed in multi-layered calligraphic texts that give voice to distinctive visions of place, fragmentary narratives that are only partially legible and can only be partly decoded, like a three-dimensional palimpsest. The letters run into each other and words break-up and are entangled in different patterns as they intermix. According to Jennifer Rutherford (2005: 5), these articulate ‘the lost speech that colonial practice silences’, the speech that becomes detached from living bodies and is obscured by ‘the monologic drive of white culture to write out the speech of the other’ (ibid.: 7). This accords with Carter’s (2005: 3) intention to contest ‘the cult of immaculate origins characteristic of most public art’ by sparking conjectures, intimations and connections but not representing definitive representations of historical figures or events. The nine poems envisage different people who have passed through the site upon which Federation Square now stands. ‘The Maker’s Vision’

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Nearamnew, Federation Square, detail

focuses on the Aboriginal creation story of the giant eagle, Bunjil; the ‘Colonist’s Vision’ conjures the violence that inheres in Batman’s corrupt treaty; the ‘Child’s Vision’ uses hopscotch as a metaphor for the colonial carving up of country and the leaping across these demarcated areas irrespective of indigenous belonging. In addition, there are broken narratives from the Artist, Alfred Deakin, the Migrant, the Builder, the Ferryman and the Visitor, all composed by Carter from multiple archival sources and poetic invention. Accordingly, very different voices are distributed across the Square, constituting a polyphony whereby each enunciates a fragmented story without being silenced. Rutherford (2005) discusses the challenges of telling such uncomfortable stories in a country in which the historical realities of colonialism, migration and institutionalised racism are suppressed by a politics of

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deliberate obfuscation and forgetting through which anything other than a triumphant colonial past is silenced. In contrast to these compulsions to relate fixed, unambiguous stories of foundation and progress, Emily Potter (2007: 248) remarks that Carter’s intention to create new place myths is ‘predicated not upon a clean imaginative slate’ but as part of a place-making practice that is ‘an active ongoing process of storytelling in which different individuals participate’ and in which landscape is not a detached, picturesque spectacle but is narrated into being. Critically, ‘Nearamnew challenges the paradigm of public space’ (ibid.: 252), where, as with the colonial memorials discussed above, modes of commemoration are unconnected to the place in which they are sited, imposed upon rather than emerging out of place. Indeed, Potter (ibid.: 249) emphasises that by silencing other narratives and stifling the potential to tell stories, ‘places lose their dynamism and become the imposition of unsustainable place myths’. The Kimberley sandstone has a powerful agency in contributing to this commemorative work. The unsettled, ever recomposing stories resonate with the fluid, ongoing flows of people and non-human agents that include the continuously emergent stone on and beneath the ground that rebuke any essentialist assertions of place. Carter is explicit about this: The marble-cake coloration, the unpredictable distribution of fossils, the variable hardness of the tiles … all these were means by which the stone wrote back, refusing to be the passive tabula rasa of an imposed scheme. (2005: 31)

This strikingly diverges from the typical tendencies of memorial designers and sculptors to fashion stone so that it is subservient to a symbolic and commemorative function. Here, the stone’s liveliness is itself part of the work, as it imposes its colours, textures and geological provenance on place. The particular affordances of the very hard, finely grained sandstone give clarity and durability to the typographic mosaics and make possible the type of reading that Carter calls ‘treading’, whereby the reader performs the work through the act of stepping on its textured surface, exemplifying the tendencies for contemporary commemorative forms to offer sensuous encounters as discussed above.

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The overarching form of Nearamnew is a whorl pattern taken from a bark etching created by a Boorong artist around 1860 that captures the turbulence of the water that flowed from a creek into Tyrell Lake, roughly 200 miles north of Melbourne. Carter (2005: 15) asserts that ‘the exquisitely “unexpected whirls” of this pattern, mirrored in the geological composition of the sandstone’s “marble cake”, embodied the federal dream more effectively than any pattern the hand could design’, as elements and colours swirl together. Aligning federalism with the structure constituted by the five tribes that made up the Kulin nation and the former significance for them of the site itself, conceived as an ‘extraterritorial gathering space demarcated for inter-tribal business’, Potter (2007: 253) further contends that this marble cake metaphor works to highlight political alliances well beyond the events of 1901, and potentially in the future. Some contend that the use of Kimberley stone for this important iconic Melbourne square is inappropriate and that material closer to home would have better signified civic identity. But the qualities the stone possesses are critical to Nearamnew’s symbolic and affective power. Furthermore, since the work is intended to commemorate Federation, the importation of the sandstone harks back to the symbolic use of stone from around Australia to symbolise a political coming together, as discussed in Chapter 2.

The Gravestone Having explored the public memorials found in the parks, squares and streets of Melbourne, I now consider that most mundane, ubiquitous form of lithic public commemoration, the gravestone. While practices of burial, disposal and commemoration are changing, with the increasing popularity of cremation, the rise of the mausoleum and the advent of natural burials, the practice of placing a deceased person in a coffin, interring them in the ground and marking the site with a gravestone remains a popular convention of relating to the dead.

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Melbourne General Cemetery, which contains over 300,000 burial sites, was established by statute in 1850 in response to fears about public hygiene, with anxieties about the contamination of water supplies prompting local authorities to relocate cemeteries away from urban centres. The cemetery, opened in 1853, is located on 106 acres of land in Carlton, two kilometres from the city centre, and replaced an earlier burial ground adjacent to Queen Victoria Market. The cemetery authorities have enforced strict regulations that monitor the allocation of space reserved for those from particular ethnic and religious heritage, and prescribe the style, location and material constitution of memorials. This reflects social inequalities, as large monuments constructed out of costly lithic materials commemorate the wealthy and powerful. These markers of prestige are now supplemented by the ceaselessly maintained granite interiors of the two-storeyed mausolea that accommodate the remains of the deceased. The durable marble, granite and high-quality sandstone tombs that persist contrast with the crumbling remain of those graves that are shoddily constructed and wrought out of poor material. As O’Shea (2011: 94) remarks, these memorials ‘face a transformation into terrain vague’ as they deteriorate and decay, for there are no available finances for their maintenance; state regulations decree that this remains the responsibility of the family and descendants of the deceased (Fig. 5.11). Besides these class distinctions, O’Shea (2011) explains that the apportioning of space for the deceased has been calculated according to the percentage of Melburnians that belonged to each Christian denomination, with Catholic and Protestant factions dominating. Besides Church of England and Catholic areas, sections of the graveyard are assigned to Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and Pentecostalist denominations, and for Jewish and Chinese interments. There is, however, no burial area assigned for Aboriginal burials, although a leader of the Bunurong mob, Derrimut, is buried here. From the 1950s, the cemetery paths were narrowed to provide additional grave sites, primarily for Italian migrants, ensuring that a band of black and grey granite Catholic graves now border many Protestant allotments. In 1995, Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett promoted the development of the sequestered Prime Minister’s Memorial Garden in the hope that it would become a national site of memory,

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Crumbling grave, Melbourne General Cemetery

though to date it only holds the ashes of Malcolm Fraser and Sir John Gorton. Accordingly, the distribution and quality of stony memorials in this vast graveyard, as in the rest of the city, demonstrate class, ethnic and religious power. The design of the cemetery was also conditioned by the desire to combine its commemorative function with that of the public garden. To this

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end, small patios and numerous ornamental trees were installed, ‘orientated toward an idealised genteel class who were expected to promenade around the grounds, visiting the elaborate monuments to Governors and other members of the colonial elite’ (O’Shea 2011: 91). In 1888, a fantastical limestone grotto was created by sculptor Charles Robinette, as discussed immediately after this chapter. These intentions to create the cemetery as a place of improvement in which perambulating citizens could admire scenic pleasures and benefit from exercise as well as appreciating the funerary forms on display encouraged large numbers to walk through the park-like setting on Sundays (Chambers 2003). As sites susceptible to the imposition of ideological meanings, cemeteries have been conceived as places for moral improvement and the cultivation of architectural and sculptural taste. At the General Cemetery, rigid constraints were placed on memorial text and the ‘use of particular types and colours of stone was also forbidden, forcing many stonemasons to rely upon imported materials’ (Chambers 2003: 67). These strictures also included specifications on the phraseology of mourning and remembrance, with inscriptions having to be submitted to the trustees of the Cemetery for approval to ensure that epitaphs or designs deemed inappropriate or profane were forbidden (O’Shea 2011). Despite these prescriptions, Ashish Chanda contends that the inscription of ‘date, the name, and age provide an indexical referentiality that… imparts an epistemological authority to the materiality of the funerary monument’ and thus orients the reader of the inscription to acknowledge the individuality of the person interred beneath it and the historical specificity of their death (206: 356). Sarah Tarlow (1999) agrees, contending that despite reflecting the social mores, politics and tastes of particular historical eras, the funerary monument most saliently articulates an ‘archaeology of emotion and bereavement’ that communicates the deep loss caused to individuals and families. The dead thus continue to haunt this civic space. The cemetery also contains abundant signs of a specific use of stone in memorial practices. Many of the tombs in the area of the graveyard assigned for Jewish interments are covered in pebbles from mourners.

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The Holocaust memorial, fashioned into the form of a concrete menorah, has an area at its base composed of ten concrete slabs, each bearing the name of a concentration camp, which are similarly covered with numerous small stones. The ancient practice is attributed with a medley of incentives that include the impulse to mark a burial place to prevent it from lapsing into obscurity, to mark a visit, to evidence the lasting memory of the deceased and to help a restless soul remain in the place of entombment. Beyond these explanations, it is easy to somatically empathise with the sensory intimacy of warming a pebble in the palm of the hand and then placing it on the shiny marble surface of a grave. Don Chambers (2003: 67) considers that with its eclectic compendium of styles, materials, epitaphs and the cultural origins of those commemorated, the cemetery constitutes ‘an immense museum collection representing one and a half centuries of craftsmanship in stone and iron’. As discussed in the previous chapter, local sandstone graves are interspersed by the serried ranks of nineteenth-century white Carrara marble imports shaped in arch window form and tombstones fashioned out of Harcourt Granite. Highly stylised, post-war shiny black Italian marble memorials line paths while in other areas, a jumble of older decaying gravestones is punctuated by the grander marble and granite memorials of the wealthy. Many white marble figures of angels and open bibles rise above the ranks of tombstones, supplemented by an array of tabletop memorials, gothic effusions, sarcophagi, urns, truncated columns and obelisks, variously wrought out of concrete, bluestone, iron, brick and cement, Bath and Portland stone, Caen limestone, and grey and red Scottish granites.

Conclusion: Moving Away from Hylomorphic Memory In this chapter, I have discussed a great range of commemorative forms that use stone and provided broader contexts for the emergence and decline of these divergent memorials and ways of remembering. All these

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forms exemplify Daniel Sherman’s (1999: 7) assertion that all commemoration is cultural: ‘it inscribes or reinscribes a set of symbolic codes, ordering discourses, and master narratives’, though these are invariably susceptible to challenge over time. As identified in this book’s introduction, the investment of stone forms with meaning contributes to an interpretation of the city’s landscape as text. In Melbourne, colonial and national lithic memorials of elite figures endure, and the massive stony entity of the Shrine of Remembrance casts its commemorative and material power over an area of the city. However, these older practices have been decentred by the recent emergence of vernacular forms, memorials that restore indigenous presence, and inventive forms that implicitly critique traditional monuments and instantiate new ways of remembering. They inscribe new meanings on the city. One repeatedly installed memorial form has been the mundane gravestone, though styles and materials have changed. Stone then, continues to be enrolled to imprint presence, ideals, identity and memory, and is able to index the shifting complexities of power in the city. Currently, it seems that in Melbourne, a multisyllabic, multivalent memorial landscape is emerging in which forms of commemoration compete with each other, reflect traditional practices, the advent of modernism, the rise of the history wars, the greater prominence accorded to subaltern groups, the intensified strategies of placemaking and the movement of creative art practice from gallery to street. The growing number of memorials adds to an urban landscape in which the odd, the indecipherable and outmoded, the artful, the basic and the sophisticated coexist. They supplement the fixtures around which people move to provide a material presence that affectively and phenomenologically shapes the everyday experience of space. Their meanings are also subject to interpretation, with changing values and ideas being mobilised to make sense of memorial forms. Yet the makers of all the memorials that I have featured thus far have extracted stone from one place, shaped it and installed the resulting form in another location. These creators have all used stone to make meanings and attract attention; they conform to the hylomorphic approach where material forms are invested with meaning and imposed upon a landscape. To conclude this chapter, I move away from these deliberate stylistic creations and consider how stony features in the landscape formed by non-human

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agencies can attract forms of commemoration that invest them with symbolic and sensory properties, mobilise reiterative narratives and inspire ritual and ceremony. I am referring here to the centrality of stone landforms and rock formations to practices of remembering amongst Aboriginal cultures that have endured for many thousands of years. These practices are not connected to the construction and installation of stone memorials; they remember with the stony materialities that already exist in the landscape. This mode of remembering resonates with Veronica Strang’s (2014) aforementioned exploration of how humans make meaning with the materiality of the world through formulating imaginative and symbolic concepts. Materiality anchors and crystallises the meanings aligned with the phenomenological and affective experience of the landscape. Historical accounts record the multiple features in the landscape that have served as otherworldly dominions for supernatural and mythical creatures. Forests, waterfalls, swamps, lakes, deserts and the sea, as well as rocks and stony formations, are saturated with such allusions. As I have discussed in the Chapter 2, an Aboriginal knowing of country involves movement along enduring routes that are embedded with memories of former journeys and follow the lines of travel of the ancestral beings from the Dreaming, with key features in the landscape constituting traces of the actions of these beings (McBryde 2000). This mnemonic journeying is further underpinned by the singing of songcycles at important places of power along the route. As Ross Gibson (2002: 68) notes, ‘(C)ultures which do not rely on written records know that their environment is their world of meaning, because landmarks hold the prompts to the stories that constitute knowledge’. As such, these storied landscapes are sedimented with memories, disclose the occurrence of significant events from the past and serve as locations for ritual. Certain sites also contain potent lithic substances; for example, I have already mentioned the sacred significance of Half Moon Bay, Sandringham, where rituals used the revered blood-red ochre found there, and the cherished quartz stone keepsakes sourced from north of Melbourne. The silcrete extracted from the banks of Maribyrnong and the greenstone implements quarried at Mount William similarly possessed numinous qualities that signified the sacred site from which they were

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derived, the social connections generated through their trading and their sensuous affordances. We can also assume that the rocky crossing point on the River Yarra at Queens Bridge was saturated with symbolic significance, along with many other vanished or concealed stony features. Though much of the knowledge about the symbolic significance of the landscape upon which Melbourne now lies has been lost, a sense of how stone may be part of a memory-saturated realm is provided by an array of significant lithic features outside the metropolitan area, the landscape around Castlemaine. The traditional owners of the land here, the Dja Dja Wurrung, refer to what they call an ‘upside down country’, whereby that which was formerly buried below the ground—stone, quartz, gold— has been brought to the surface in huge quantities by extensive mining, a metaphor that is given extra salience by the many dead trees found in devastated parts of the landscape, their branches resembling roots. Yet though the catastrophic destruction wrought by colonialism means that much knowledge of country has been lost and many old stories have lost their reference points, Indigenous groups are carrying out research to rediscover meanings and traces of the past in the landscape. For example, archaeological research was recently carried out by members of the Dja Dja Wurrung, Wurundjeri and Taungurung, three member groups of the Kulin nation, to ascertain which of them were the traditional owners of the renowned Hanging Rock, some 45 miles north of Melbourne. As one member of the Dja Dja Wurrung asserted to me (personal communication, 25 March 2019), stone testifies to a connection with place, and the discovery of plentiful quantities of yellow ochre and a particular fine-grained basalt suggested that these important elements, commonly traded and used by this mob, demonstrate that they were the likely owners. Respectful negotiation between the three groups is ongoing and stone has served as one form of symbolic and material evidence that contributes to the development of a fuller understanding of the site. Yet colonial effacement has not been total and memories of the significance of several symbolic sites in the area have not been extinguished. For instance, one stone site at Leanganook, the indigenous name for Mount Alexander, meaning ‘His Teeth’, is scattered with rows of sharp granite stones that resemble teeth. This was an initiation site for young men on the cusp of puberty. Here, ritual and the symbolic appearance

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of the site mesh to reinforce a long-standing memory of its significance. Other places in the landscape similarly evoke ancestral events where specific ritual uses are aligned with their stony form. Nari, otherwise known as Mount Egbert, north of Wedderburn, a little over 200 kilometres from Melbourne, is known as a site synonymous with eggs since granite formations take an ovoid shape. Resonating with the associations of eggs with fertility, there are birthing trees in the immediate vicinity of the stones at which women give birth. These associations are extended at the nearby Larne-ne-barramul, furnished with a creek that from above was akin to the scrape created by an emu in which to lay and incubate eggs. Another story—based on local experience of volcanic activity some 5000 years ago—concerns the old, large, dormant volcano of Tarrengower, located adjacent to the town of Maldon and a newer volcano, Lalgambook (Mount Franklin), situated further south. The younger, smaller volcano challenged the authority of the older mountain but no matter how much he tried to rumble loudly, and produce copious amounts of ash and smoke, Tarrengower ignored him, even when Lalgambook started to spurt out rocks towards him, rocks that today litter the landscape between the two hills. This ineffective onslaught culminated in Tarrengower summoning his powers for one final furious explosion that blew out his core, rendering him an extinct volcano (Culture Victoria, n.d.). These stony residues and hills thus remember geological and ancestral events and were also sites for ritual activity. Besides such stories, part of a deep knowing of country through time, stone was also used to augment the potency of particularly auspicious sites. For instance, a side of Mount Barker, also close to Castlemaine, was adorned with a large ‘Mindi’, or Rainbow Serpent’ stone arrangement. These mnemonic stony forms in the landscape provide a sense of how Melbourne’s landscape might have been saturated with very differently constituted lithic memorial forms prior to colonialism. Since then, as I have emphasised, a changing medley of commemorative designs have been imposed upon the city’s space by humans, all of which depend for their charismatic material affects and effects on the stone they deploy. Most traditional memorial forms use stone because of its durable and aesthetic qualities, and yet a connection to the ground below and a wider sense of place is typically lost through the imperative to impose form

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on matter, through hylomorphic practice. Thoughsome of the recent commemorative forms I have discussed also conjure up these local and regional associations and allude to the geological distinctiveness of place, this does not extend to the deep knowing of stone in place and landscape that characterises a more profound knowledge of country (Moran et al. 2018).

References Atkinson, D. (2008). The Heritage of Mundane Places. In B. Graham & P. Howard (Eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (pp. 381–396). Aldershot: Ashgate. Beattie, S. (1983). The New Sculpture. London: Yale University Press. Carter, P. (2005). Mythform: The Making of Nearamnew at Federation Square. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press. Chambers, D. (2003). The Melbourne General Cemetery. Melbourne: Hyland House Publishing. Connerton, P. (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crownshaw, R. (2014). The Memorialization of History. In S. Berger & B. Niven (Eds.), Writing the History of Memory (pp. 219–237). London: Bloomsbury. Culture Victoria. (n.d.). Dja Dja Wurrung: The Two Feuding Volcanoes. https:// cv.vic.gov.au/stories/aboriginal-culture/nyernila/dja-dja-wurrung-the-twofeuding-volcanoes/. Accessed 31 March 2019. Daley, P. (2018, June 8). Australia’s Frontier War Killings Still Conveniently Escape Official Memory. The Guardian. Doss, E. (2012). Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dunstan, A. (2016). Reading Victorian Sculpture. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 22. Edensor, T. (2019). Stony Hauntings: Public Statues Present and Absent. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 19 (1), 53–76. Enloe, C. (1998). All the Men Are in the Militias. In L. Lorentzen & J. Turpin (Eds.), The Women and War Reader (pp. 50–62). New York: New York University Press.

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Furniss, E. (2001). Timeline History and the Anzac Myth: Settler Narratives of Local History in a North Australian Town. Oceania, 71(4), 279–297. Gibson, R. (2002). Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Hamilton, P. (2011). Material Memories and the Australian Memorial Imagination. Melbourne Historical Journal, 39 (1), 11–23. Hoelscher, S., & Alderman, D. (2004). Memory and Place: Geographies of a Critical Relationship. Social and Cultural Geography, 5 (3), 347–355. Holbrook, C. (2014). Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography. Sydney: New South. Holsworth, M. (2015). Sculptures of Melbourne. Melbourne: Melbourne Books. Inglis, K. (1998). Sacred Places: War memorials in the Australian landscape. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press. Johnson, N. (1995). Cast in Stone: Monuments, Geography and Nationalism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13(1), 51–65. Kostof, S. (1991). The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History. Boston: Little Brown. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City. Cambridge MA: MIT. McBryde, I. (2000). Travellers in Storied Landscapes: A Case Study in Exchanges and Heritage. Aboriginal History, 24, 152–174. Marschall, S. (2009). Landscape of Memory: Commemorative Monuments, Memorials and Public Statuary in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Leiden: Brill. Moran, C., Harrington, G., & Sheehan, N. (2018). On Country Learning. Design and Culture, 10 (1), 71–79. Myers, K. (2013). Colonial Landscapes: From Historical Trauma to Mythic History 1850–2013. Melbourne Historical Journal, 41(1), 45–64. Nora, P. (1989). Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De M´emoire. Representations, 26, 7–24. O’Shea, R. (2011). The Melbourne General Cemetery: The Provisionality of a Final Resting Place. Melbourne Historical Journal, 39 (1), 81–97. Paterson, R. (2015). History in Stone: The Work of the Victorian Historical Memorials Committee. Melbourne Historical Journal, 43(1), 63–83. Pinto, S. (2019). Unsettling the Settler City Indigenous Commemoration in Central Melbourne. In S. Pinto, S. Hannigan, B. Walker-Gibbs, & E. Charlton (Eds.), Interdisciplinary Unsettlings of Place and Space: Conversations, Investigations and Research. Singapore: Springer. Potter, E. (2007). Reimagining Place: The Possibilities of Paul Carter’s Nearamnew. In E. Potter & S. McKenzie (Eds.), Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia (pp. 246–258). Carlton: Melbourne University Press.

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Reynolds, H. (2013). Forgotten War. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing. Ridley, R. (1996). Melbourne’s Monuments. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Robertson, I. (2016). Heritage from Below: Heritage, Culture and Identity. London: Routledge. Rutherford, J. (2005). Writing the Square: Paul Carter’s Nearamnew and the Art of Federation. PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 2(2), 1–14. Scates, B. (2009). A Place to Remember: A History of the Shrine of Remembrance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shanahan, M., & Shanahan, B. (2017). Commemorating Melbourne’s Past: Constructing and Contesting Space, Time and Public Memory in Contemporary Parkscapes. In L. McAtackney & K. Ryzewski (Eds.), Contemporary Archaeology and the City: Creativity, Ruination, and Political Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sherman, D. (1999). The Construction of Memory in Interwar France. London: University of Chicago Press. Stevens, Q., & Sumartojo, S. (2015). Introduction: Commemoration and Public Space. Landscape Review, 15 (2), 2–6. Strang, V. (2014). Fluid Consistencies: Material Relationality in Human Engagements with Water. Archaeological Dialogues, 21(2), 150–153. Sumartojo, S. (2015). National Identity and Commemorative Space: Conational Connections Through Time and Site. Landscape Review, 15 (2), 7– 18. Tarlow, S. (1999) Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality. Oxford: Blackwell. Turai, H. (2009). Past Unmastered: Hot and Cold Memory in Hungary. Third Text, 23(1), 97–106. Vaughan, G. (2013). The Cult of the Queen Empress: Royal Portraiture in Colonial Victoria. Art Journal of the National Gallery of Victoria, 50. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/the-cult-of-the-queen-empressroyal-portraiture-in-colonial-victoria/. Accessed 7 March 2019. Warner, M. (1993). Monuments and Maidens. London: Verso.

Part VI Grotto

Melbourne General Cemetery was once a site that besides accommodating tombs, offered citizens an aestheticized space of leisure in which they might promenade through its park-like environs. The most curious element of the design of this romantic setting was created in 1889. Following European picturesque garden trends, Charles Robinette, an English artisan and specialist in whimsical stone ornamentation, installed a complex grotto fashioned out of naturally occurring, sculptural pieces of limestone that were probably sourced from Cape Schanck on nearby Mornington Peninsula. These limestone segments were fused together with cement to create a fantastical, honeycombed effusion of clefts, niches, caves, pillars, outcrops and stalactites, a tortuous configuration that was adorned with succulents, ferns and palms. Now drastically truncated to accommodate demand for burial space, the remaining sections still convey a sense of its aesthetic intentions. The grotto sought to mimic the effects of ‘nature’, to suggest the erosive actions of water and wind on the formation of spectacular rock formations, perhaps to improve on the work perpetrated by these non-human agencies. Grottoes have evolved in purpose and style. In their fifteenth century European incarnation, they were associated with mystery but also

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enlightenment, and designs often alluded to events from classical narratives. Later, eighteenth century designs were more concerned with evoking a fantastical theatricality, characterised by grotesque and quirky elements. By the Victorian era, fabulous grottoes like those wrought by Robinette sought to honour the power of nature, aspects of the sublime and picturesque, with enhanced attention directed to creating niches and hollows in which particular plants could thrive. The irregular, rough, rugged and jagged textures of rocky Alpine places, with their chasms, hollows and defiles, much celebrated by romantic aesthetes, inspired smaller scale imitations. In the public space of the cemetery, Robinette’s grotto conveys intimations of the rural in the heart of the city. His other stony concoctions included the now demolished platypus pool at Melbourne Zoo and a rockery at Flemington Racecourse. Two structures remain, however. There is substantially intact rockery, a fishpond and a fountain at Malvern Gardens. And there is another grotto situated on a traffic island between the Domain Parklands and the Yarra River. Now lavished with thick cement lathered on by crude repair work, its rustic array of caves, arches and pockets continue to accommodate numerous plants. Though the grotto in the cemetery has been cleaved in two and part of it has been occupied by a shrine dedicated to rock and roll icon Elvis Presley, its startling combination of contorted form and botanical growth retain an allure that contrasts with the regimented lines of gravestones that surround it.

Part VI: Grotto

Fig. 1 Charles Robinette, Grotto, Melbourne General Cemetery

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6 Sensing Place: Living with Melbourne’s Stone

Stone, Sensation and Affect In previous chapters, I have focused on the swirl of materials through the city, quarrying and disposal, maintenance and repair, and commemoration. Though I have primarily concentrated on the practices and meanings that surround these processes, I have also intimated that they are entangled with the sensory and affective experiences of stony materialities. In this chapter, I take a more focused look at these aspects of Melbourne’s stone, examining how the varied lithic affordances of the city engender a sense of being in place and are part of its sensory constitution. In recent years, the centrality of emotion, affect and sensation to human experience has been foregrounded through the rise of nonrepresentational theory. In a summary assessment, Nigel Thrift (1996: 4) asserts that a focus upon discourse and representation was unsatisfactory since it took ‘precedence over lived experience and materiality’, construing a subject as detached from the world. Here, the notion of the human as an irreducibly instrumental, meaning-making subject is challenged by accounts that identify the non-discursive experiences that colour apprehension and experience. This especially applies to somatic experience, for © The Author(s) 2020 T. Edensor, Stone, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1_6

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as Hockey and Allen-Collinson contend, an overemphasis on considering the body as discursively constituted ‘eliminates its sensory capacities, its odours, textures, joys and anguish’ (2009: 217). If human experience solely focuses on the ongoing production of meaning, our sensory experiences are merely conceived as a gateway to the knowledgeable discernment of the phenomenological world, and our affective responses to its intensities and resonances evaporate. Earlier accounts have indicated the centrality of sensation to everyday experience. For instance, Yi Fu Tuan (1975: 152) refers to ‘distinctive odours, textural and visual qualities in the environment, seasonal changes of temperature and colour, how (places) look as they are approached from the highway’ in foregrounding the sensory and the affective qualities of place. More focused phenomenological exploration foregrounds the ways in which we come to corporeally know our environments; as John Wylie (2007: 148) puts it, in coming to know place, we are possessed of an ‘always-already-incarnate subjectivity, a self inseparable from its embodiment’. In moving through, lingering and dwelling in places, our bodies are intermingled with the world through a melding of the senses (Serres 2008). Accordingly, through the diverse social and cultural practices that we undertake and through which we become familiar with the world, self, body and place are continuously reproduced through sensation. Post-phenomenological enquiry advances non-representational thinking by questioning the subjectivism of phenomenology, consequently decentring the human body and focusing on a more distributed notion of agency and feeling. Such acknowledgement of the material and atmospheric elements with which we undertake practices and sense the world involves the recognition of how the lively agencies of matter and things, discussed at length in Chapters 3 and 4, impact upon the human sensorium. This focus on the vitality of material entities that belong to a world in formation solicits the recognition that we are not embodied subjects separate from the world that we experience; rather we encounter ‘the entwined materialities and sensibilities with which we act and sense’ (Wylie 2005: 245). Thus, we do not singularly act upon the world but sense and act with it. We see with light, we move with surfaces, we feel with stone.

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Living in the city involves repeated and ongoing sensory experiences with materiality, weather and air. Such encounters are commonplace, part of everyday urban living. Yet as Jennifer Mason (2018) points out, the ways in which such ongoing experiences are integral to gaining a sense of place, whether as inhabitant or visitor, are rarely considered; they tend to be effaced by depictions of the symbolic meanings through which people cognitively articulate a sense of belonging. Often unamenable to conscious reflection, such affective and sensory experience is sedimented in bodies, contributes to the formation of habits of feeling and doing, and adds to the swirl of shifting atmospheres of place and time. These encounters are thus compiled into a compendium of sensory and affective experiences through which people come to feel place over time. In such ways, the materiality of a place comes to matter: its textures, hues, temperatures, consistencies and host of other affordances that change according to light, age and weather shape the sensory encounters that solicit a deep knowing of inhabited place and sharply engender a sense of difference when entering unfamiliar places. These sensory and affective impacts emanate from stone; they are part of a relational process of encounter through which non-human entities make an affective and sensory impression on human bodies, bodies that also impact upon these materialities over time. Such relations shift in intensity and energy depending on happenstance, context and time, mental preoccupation and attunement to surroundings. For many inhabitants, perhaps enacting a routine walk to work or home, such encounters become part of the backdrop to habit. As Mason (2018: 176) insists, ‘people’s sensory experience and perception of cities in the present are always layered with their memories of those places in the past’, memories that may barely be reflexively understood, yet all the same, are integral to an attunement to place, as experiences accumulate over time. For those unaccustomed to a particular city, such material impacts may loom larger in conscious thought, since they contrast with the affordances to which the visitor has become habituated in the places with which they are familiar. In previous chapters, I have demonstrated that assemblage thinking is useful in developing analyses about how buildings and other material arrangements come together, stick together and become disaggregated.

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However, as Mason points out, the concept of assemblage tends to miss out relational effects that cannot be subsumed within the aggregation as a whole. Accordingly, a focus on these material-to-material relationalities overlooks the ‘fascination and flashes of connection’ (2018: 171) that occasionally emerge between discrete elements, the animated effects that shimmer with potency that suddenly occur, what Walter Benjamin refers to as ‘profane illuminations’ (1989). At such moments, the mundane background suddenly looms into view and impresses itself upon awareness, perhaps momentarily defamiliarising the everyday world or soliciting an acute awareness of particular qualities that have hitherto been disregarded. I now focus on the everyday, largely unreflexive practices through which we differently sense the stony qualities of the city as we inhabit, move, rest and play across its terrain. Most people come to know and sense a place, usually unreflexively, through an embodied belonging after prolonged inhabitation. Yet such experiences are largely ignored by academic enquiry since they are difficult to access and narrate. John Law (2004: 2) questions the extent to which standard social science methods and languages can effectively deal with a world where much is ‘vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct, changes like a kaleidoscope, or doesn’t really have a pattern at all’. These important insights are aligned with a contemporary critical sensibility that endeavours to move beyond classificatory, categorical ways of ‘knowing’ place. Historically speaking, forms of scholarly expertise have characteristically sought to organise thinking about places and landscapes by identifying distinctive elements such as landforms, building styles, accents, foods and heritage sites. However, places also possess recognisable commonalities and consistencies in temperature, colour, sound, loftiness and compactness, as well as less clearly identifiable, often evanescent sensory and atmospheric qualities. These latter elements undergird the emotional, affective and sensory resonances that contribute to a sense of place but are often difficult to articulate. The cloudiness or cloudlessness of the sky, the sense of wide openness or being closed in by the looming height of the buildings, the angularity or rounded forms of streets and architecture, the vibrant colours of the tree blossoms, the deliberate or frenzied pace of pedestrian movement, the volatile or muted tones of

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street conversation, the volume and intensity of recorded music, the distinctive play of light and shadows across space, the faint waft of sewage or the arboreal scents that drift across space, and the bright or muted colours of the building surfaces and their particular material textures. In paying attention to such qualities, we might better grasp those characteristics of place and landscape that are felt but often barely noticed, affectively and sensorially apprehended attributes that solicit an unreflexive and habituated inhabitation rather than a fixed set of inscribed meanings. Even though awareness about the sensory and affective qualities of familiar space may be dim, the forms of embodied knowledge that emerge are constituted by an understanding deepened by time and embedded in memory (Lippard 1997), so that the accumulation of repetitively sensed mundane textures, smells, sounds and sights become sedimented in bodies. Though these diverse sensory elements are not typically the subject of conscious reflection, they are entangled with the everyday experience of familiar space in which quotidian tasks, pleasures and routine journeys are undertaken. Buildings orchestrate the possible human movements within them by ‘supplying the perceptive body with a set of possible actions or movements to perform’ (Kraftl and Adey 2008: 227). Yet place is not a passive material backdrop but constitutes a dynamic milieu in which ‘bodies themselves generate spaces’ (Lefebvre 1991: 216). This mundane, habitual foundation upon which a sense of place is reproduced is consolidated by familiar, routine encounters with buildings, material fixtures and pathways as we commute to work, visit friends and go shopping. David Seamon (1979) terms these routine journeys ‘place ballets’ and considers that they foster a mundane, unreflexive sense of being in the world, a sense that contributes to what David Crouch (1999) calls ‘lay geographical knowledge’ and Sarah Pink refers to as ‘emplaced knowing’ (2009). Such habitual practices also intersect with those of others, as people move along collective routes or congregate at points of constellations at which individual paths coincide, at bars, cafes, stores, parks and transport termini, co-producing communal choreographies. In considering the ways in which people differently experience the city as part of the flow of the everyday, it is critical to note that we do

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not always feel the same emotions or sensations; these are unpredictable and mesh with the current orientations, dispositions and objectives of individuals. For instance, in their account of the sensory experience of a shopping mall, Degen et al. (2008) account for how different modes of visual attention are mobilised while manoeuvring, parenting and shopping. The sensory apprehension and interpretation of space and materiality is also profoundly shaped by bodily capacities and dispositions that are conditioned by age, class, sex and physical ability. The feel of a hard, concrete floor may impact on the experience of a wheelchair user very differently to a sprightly pedestrian, while a cobbled street impacts divergently on the experience of those using a walking stick, the highheeled pedestrian, the cyclist or the person wearing thickly soled shoes. In the introduction, I emphasised that the senses do not provide unmediated access to the world but are invariably culturally shaped, informed by epistemologies, values, notions about what should be sensorially prioritised, shared cultural practices, histories and stories. This is critical when considering the affective and sensory responses of those from different cultural backgrounds as they apprehend the city. Yet whatever the bodily capacities and cultural predilections of those who are mobile, experience is never seamless and homogeneous. For instance, walking successively moves between states such as heightened attentiveness to the close at hand, distraction and reverie, or a preoccupation with bodily fatigue, all in accordance with the affordances that surround the walker and those underfoot. Such experiences are part of the densely apprehended everyday world, rooted in our own histories and vague memories, movement and inaction, and triggered by the sudden awareness of something that catches us unaware, perhaps by a sudden texture underfoot, a light effect, an unexpected sound or an emerging atmosphere. For it is also salient to grasp how the sensory perception of the city is toned by the atmospheres within which we become immersed, and which are ‘perpetually forming and deforming, appearing and disappearing, as bodies enter into relation with one another’ (Anderson 2009: 79). Atmospheres, described by B¨ohme (2014: 96) as ‘spaces with a mood, or emotionally felt spaces’, saturate the city. Juhani Pallasmaa (2016: 133) regards the creation of atmospheres as integral to architectural design, so that the ambience of buildings can be wrought to possess ‘a haptic,

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almost material presence, as if we were surrounded and embraced by a specific substance’. This conception of a created realm in which scale, texture, height, colour and the arrangement of elements contribute to the atmosphere of a space draws attention to how the city is never merely a site which is organised and engineered by humans but a great composite of hydrid forms and relationalities, a seething realm of energies, materialities, flows, humans and non-humans that meld in infinite and changing ways. The city is an assemblage of assemblages in which constituents come together, blend, coexist, clash, die and emerge in ever-changing configurations. Amongst the regular encounters of humans with the nonhuman elements of these complex assemblages are those meetings with the numerous lithic materials of the city; stone has potency in contributing to the formation and deformation of atmospheres as it interacts with colour, light, touch and movement and gives dimension, shape and texture to the built environment. Though material structures might perpetrate ‘restrictions on human experience and affective excess’ (Dekyser 2017: 186), it is crucial not to fall prey to the assumption that the experience of urban space is determined by the ways in which architects and designers seek to create moods, ambiences and atmospheres through the use of sound, colour, texture and tactile surfaces. Sumartojo and Graves (2018: 340) acknowledge that ‘the careful design, controlled narrative and purposeful aesthetics help shape both the messages of the site and the sensory terms in which they are apprehended’, but despite the intensification of design processes to construct places that have a co-ordinated, coherent, often thematic appearance (Degen et al. 2008), to consider any urban space as unchanging is to deny the different circumstances and conditions under which it is experienced, whether it is crowded, illuminated, cold or lively. Though carefully designed landscapes may offer potential for practical enaction and sensory encounter, they can only be ‘actualised through embodied, sensory and performative engagement’ (Ebbensgaard 2017: 447). As Degen et al. insist (2008: 1916), people ‘produce aesthetic relations through specific, everyday practices: touching, looking, photographing, sitting, listening, climbing’.

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In exemplifying such unfoldings, Kaya Barry (2019: 3) identifies how a bridge, embedded in its Brisbane environment, is ‘composed of materials that expand and contract with alterations to the weight and load, movements exerted on and around it by pedestrians and traffic, wind speed and direction, precipitation, temperature, seismic movements, or water flow and pressure’. These vital material responses to changing events and conditions defy notions that the bridge is an insensate, immobile material assemblage; Barry emphasising that it is aquiver in response to the multiple agencies that surround it, and that such vital material responses are likely to be registered by sensing bodies as a kind of unreflexive backdrop to everyday urban experience. Along with experiencing qualities of shade, sun, grass, the height of built structures, the din of traffic and people, the aromas of food and sewage, encounters with the stony fabric of the city provoke some of the myriad sensory experiences of living and moving in the city. Moments of attuned awareness to stony surroundings may particularly devolve when there is a sudden disruption to a routine, and we are forced to linger in a place longer than expected, focusing upon that which has formerly been passed at speed. Or they may arise when construction or maintenance work suddenly draws attention to a particular feature—perhaps when lumps of bluestone are removed from a laneway to accommodate work on underground infrastructure, or when they are re-laid to produce a more even surface.

Living with the Stony Fabric of Melbourne Like other cities, stone is an essential part of Melbourne’s fabric, contributing to the ways in which the city is apprehended sensually and affectively. The feel of stone to the touch and whether it is coarse, polished or smooth and grainy; its capacities to absorb heat, cold and light; its sharpness in contradistinction to other, less delineated surfaces or its craggy textures; its heft and weight; the ways in which it soaks up and reflects moisture; the noise it makes when struck, whether a ringing chime or a dull thud; its smoothness, grip or rough irregularity underfoot; the consistency, variation and depth of its colours; the ways in

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which it ages, erodes or becomes colonised by bacteria and lichen. This latter dimension also has the potential to solicit a sense of the vitality of stone and that of the forces that assail, colonise and deteriorate it, making apparent the sensory consequences of the usually imperceptible lithic transformations that are always taking place. Stone is also enrolled into a range of phenomenologically oriented architectural practices that seek to create particular relationships between parts of the built environment and human bodies. Stone may thus be deployed to create a solid or enfolded sense of insidedness or enclosure, or conversely, enrolled into a design that seeks to produce a sense of openness and accessibility, an expansive place of congregation or a welcoming entrance that draws bodies inside. Alternatively, massive and thick stone walls, as at the mighty bluestone Pentridge Prison in the northern inner suburb of Coburg, offer an architectonic symbol of confinement that melds with a sensorial grasp of an unbreachable, ineluctable spatial imposition. In a mixed material composition, stone may combine with other materials to engender an awareness of textural complexity, or on the contrary, the undeviating, uniform composition of a single stone type or concrete mix may convey a purified or monolithic impression. A weighty volumetric use of stone, as at the gigantic Shrine of Remembrance, may construe an overwhelming impression of permanence and authoritative presence. In further considering the ways in which stone is phenomenologically entangled with stone, Tilly (2004) investigates a series of Breton menhirs, standing stones that occur in five distinctive locations. These ancient menhirs vary in height, size, rock type, location, orientation, texture, shape and number, and in the ways in which they relate to each other. Yet all have been designed to be perceived from certain angles, and from near and far. Similarly, in the city, an object is always situated in relation to other things and is approached from various perspectives— from above, below, side on and head on, for instance, positing different relationships with bodies. This is further complicated by an object’s positioning within a complex material urban environment that contains multiple dimensions, textures, colours, shapes and combinations, relations that shape how it is perceived: sensation is always relational within a

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wider field of perception. This changes over time as buildings are demolished, others grow, some are given facelifts and others allowed to degenerate, becoming worn or discoloured and consequently reflect light in different ways. These shifting conditions bring out different textures and affordances, once more emphasising how ‘meaning is neither imposed on things nor pre-given in consciousness but discovered in the course of practical activity’ (Tilly 2004: 24). The sensory impact of certain stone objects may be weakened by the imposition of other material companions in the landscape that dwarf them or otherwise detract from their presence. For like Tilly’s menhirs, certain built forms are significant markers that are intended to endure over time, and their potency may be distributed across space and time, residing ‘in a fusion of their physical form and location or placement in the landscape, the sensual experience of these stones and the ideas and memories, histories and mythologies that became associated with them’ (ibid.: 35). Here, quite appositely, Tilly transcends a purely phenomenological approach by acknowledging that we also need to investigate ‘the hermeneutics of interpretation’ and ‘metaphoric and metonymic linkages between things’ (ibid.: 224). It seems futile to try and segregate sensory and symbolic power in such cases, for they are entwined and reinforce each other. This is also underpinned by the ways in which certain landmarks in the city—including the commemorative forms that I discuss in Chapter 5—accrue and intensify their powerful presence by combining a felicitous orientation, symbolism and a sensory charge. I have adopted two approaches here to investigating the sensations solicited by stone. First, I draw on my own experiences: entering into an unfamiliar realm that feels, sounds, looks and smells different to the places that I have usually inhabited has triggered a sudden awareness of sensory distinctiveness. As a recent inhabitant of Melbourne, I claim that my attunement to its material, sonic, textural, climatic and atmospheric distinctiveness has been solicited by its sensory contrast with these elements in Northern England, where I have lived for most of my life. As an initial ‘outsider’, those aspects of the city which are usually part of unreflexive experience have to me become subject to a reflexive awareness. I exploit this attunement to the city’s difference by including brief descriptions of my sensory encounters with Melbourne’s stone. A late

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middle-aged white man, I walk, sit upon, linger at, touch, look at and listen to my engagements with the city’s stone. As Springgay and Truman (2017) point out, intimately encountering stone requires and approach that disavows the discursive and the categorisable, but that acknowledge its material vitality and sensory and affective responses to this. Second, I have spent considerable time watching how others interact with Melbourne’s lithic matter, in parks, along laneways and streets, and at monuments, shopping centres and stations. Through these two approaches, I seek to provide insights into some of the many ways in which the city’s stone might be sensed. I have identified above some of the numerous qualities that stone and lithic structures possess in contributing to the sensory experience of the city. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on a range of attributes that belong to two key overarching sensory qualities: the ways in which different kinds of stone interact with colour and light, and the textural and tactile attributes of Melbourne’s stone surfaces, fixtures and structures.

Colour, Light and Stone One of the qualities integral to the human experience of space and place is colour, yet it has been largely overlooked, perhaps partly because its qualities are difficult to conceptualise. Our perception of colour does not objectively recognise what is out there; instead it is a subjective process through which the brain makes sense of the stimuli produced by light as it reflects and is absorbed by surfaces and enters the eye. Apprehension of colour then is forged through our relationship to light and the ways in which it animates our environments. Colours do not exist independently; as Beveridge states (2000: 312), they are not intrinsic but ‘are a product of both the electro-magnetic spectrum and visual perception’. Despite this scientific explanation, colours profoundly impact on sensation and perception. As Diane Young (2006: 173) submits, colours ‘animate things in a variety of ways, evoking space, emitting brilliance, endowing things with an aura of energy or light’ and can be combined to ‘create a medley of affective and sensual impressions’. Accordingly, purely scientific conceptions that construe the experience of colour as a

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mechanical or psychological response ignore ‘the emotion and desire, the sensuality and danger, and hence the expressive potential that colours possess’ (ibid.: 174). Similarly, tendencies to regard colour as representative of particular cultural values and meanings that elicit universal responses from humans, for instance, that blue is ‘cold’ and orange is ‘warm’, minimise the non-representational qualities of colour that solicit affective and sensory responses (Peacock 2017). Of course, the colours used for particular flags, sporting colours, commercial logos and banners do prompt emotional responses that are bound up in their significations, but this is to focus on a small range of symbolic elements in the landscape. In considering how colour is distributed across the built environment, David Batchelor (2000) contends that western cultures have veered towards a chromophobia in which muted and minimal colour schemes predominate over bright hues. In most northern European built environments, vibrant pigments are scarce. Nevertheless, certain cities have adopted design strategies that contrast with the general preponderance of subdued colours, as in Tirana, Albania. Here, buildings have been rejuvenated by painted, multicoloured designs that provide an energetic, optimistic counterpoint to the drabness of the urban environment during the communist era (Peacock 2017). The overwhelming monochromatic tones of western cities contrast with those in other parts of the world, such as the dominantly pink Indian city of Jaipur, the overwhelmingly blue city of Chefchaouen in Morocco, and the dazzling white with vibrant splashes of blue that colour Greece’s Santorini. Yet in most western cities, an aesthetic that minimises bright colours persists. This is exemplified by the approach of the influential colour designer, Jean-Philippe Lenclos (in Lenclos and Lenclos 2004) in highlighting the chromatic characteristics of a place by identifying a ‘general’ palette consisting of toned-down colours, and a ‘specific’ palette, comprised of stronger saturated colours. The former, he contends, should predominate, while brighter colours ought only to be used minimally to adorn doors, windows and other small details on facades and walls. Besides these general codes, certain cities have striven to maintain a consistency in their material composition, and hence their colour, in order to sustaining a historic identity. Most of the crystalline silver-grey

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stone building material in central Aberdeen, renowned as the ‘Granite City’, has come from the nearby Rubislaw Quarries since at least the seventeenth century. Bath, composed mainly of the yellowish local limestone, features an equally monotonal lithic texture. These cities are comparable to Paris, whose buildings have for centuries been primarily supplied by a handful limestone quarries in the Oise, 25 miles north of the city. Rebecca Solnit (2000: 196) eloquently describes this monotone appearance: ‘Everything – houses, churches, bridges, walls – is the same sandy grey so that the city seems like a single construction of inconceivable complexity, a sort of coral reef of high culture’. Similarly, the pigment derived from Siena’s burned earth clads the Italian city in the reddish-brown colour after which it is named. As Vasiljevi´c-Tomi´c and Mari´c (2011) maintain, more broadly speaking, the colour of cities has been shaped by divergent aesthetic approaches; in favour of a monochromatic ascetism and towards polychromatism. Melbourne’s colour palette seems to fit somewhere between these two design strategies. By contrast to those cities in which the colour of the built environment is somewhat monotonal, Melbourne’s palette is more diverse, featuring regular polychromatic intrusions, some of them strikingly gaudy. This mix of bright and varied hues conforms to Boeri’s (2017) assertion that the colour of cities should not be constrained by historical architecture but should also allow for aesthetic innovation, through which the brilliant and the multi-hued might emerge. Yet overall, serial encounters with stone and brick structures that produce repeated expanses of similar colours predominate during an excursion through the city. For the predominant stony materials of Melbourne identified in Chapter 2 add a limited colour range to the urban environment but nonetheless distinguish the city from others. Most prominent are the widespread cottages, factories, churches, administrative buildings, laneways, kerbs and walls that are fashioned from dark, durable bluestone. The deep blue-black-brown colours of the basalt absorb light so that they stand out as markedly darker than the rest of the environment, especially in the shine of summer when lighter colours reflect light, sometimes blindingly. These sombre tones make a powerful impression on those visiting Melbourne for the first time, and suggest the prevalence

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of an unadorned, pragmatic architecture. In underlining this distinctive gloomy pigment, Stephanie Trigg (2018: 42) cites architect Norman Day, who contrasts Sydney’s sandstone textures as (‘slippery and fluid, like an upturned jar of honey’) with Melbourne’s basalt, which ‘turns an ugly wet black when it rains’, and novelist Delia Falconer, who describes bluestone as ‘a kind of bass note to Sydney’. Indeed, a head down style of walking will encounter shades of grey, the lumpy variations of the tarmacked pavements bordered by blue-grey basalt kerbs and cobbles followed by a larger expanse of asphalt on parallel roads. Only cream coloured utility grids, road markings and spatters of gum intrude on this spread of drab hues. Yet the strong chromatic delineations of basalt mean that where other colours occur, whether through architectural designs, arboreal greens or colourful clothes and vehicles, they are apt to stand out against the sombreness (Fig. 6.1). Indeed, stones of a different hue contrast with this darkness, adding to the palette of the city. I have discussed how Walter Burley Griffin selected the ‘soft, grateful’, light sandy Barrabool sandstone to clad Newman College to create a colourscape that chimed with the stone of surrounding buildings and verdant foliage. Similarly, the creamier, even tones of Heatherlie sandstone on which ornamental details may be discerned pleasingly rise above the contrasting darkness of the bluestone foundations of several iconic city buildings. Equally, the speckled light greys of Harcourt Granite provide relief and contrast to the dark basalt tones. In the city centre, varied concrete mixes are increasingly supplementing these tones, generally adding lighter grey, brown and cream to the colour scheme. Some central streets are particularly multicoloured, notably Collins Street with its glossy reds, greys and black granites that clad ornate bank exteriors, reflecting sunlight and street illuminations. In the interiors of these old financial institutions, walls and floors are adorned with luscious marbles that provide kaleidoscopic combinations of colour and invite hands to run along their cold, sheeny surfaces. Dwarfing these sumptuous buildings are the increasing number of tall towers largely fashioned out of archetypal concrete, steel and glass but as I discuss in Chapter 2, many also incorporate highly polished granite atria and entrances, as well as elements of polychromatic glass and copper. In malls and shop frontages, white tiles and the saturated colours of

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Fig. 6.1 Wet bluestone laneway

plastic also provide a counterpoint to the more sober hues of basalt and concrete. Outside the centre, in the inner suburbs, the main shopping roads offer a mixture of painted surface, bright advertising, shop frontage and brick. Off these main roads, however, the colour palette is a mixture of the green of nature strips, parks, avenues and gardens, and a medley of painted facades and brick houses. In places, a sequence of plaster covers brick facades, usually painted in pale blues, yellows, oranges and pinks, and interspersed with fashionable grey. Elsewhere, bricks predominate, ranging from rows of Hawthorn brown and black brick walls to those

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composed of rustic red or cream bricks, with some older houses composed of elaborate geometric mosaics of differently coloured bricks. In some suburbs, the rows of brick housing are punctuated by the massive, slab-like structures of the precast concrete of the 47 huge high-rise towers constructed by the Housing Commission of Victoria in the 1960s. These giant blocks, primarily coloured grey and brown, sometimes moderately tinted with red or cream, are transformed by the play of light and shadow upon their rectilinear facades as the sun moves across the sky, and they similarly cast thick swathes of shade across the surrounding neighbourhoods. The colours of the city are further toned by the luminosity of the daylight, the colour of the sky and of surrounding vegetation. On sunny days, bluestone surfaces absorb light while lighter materials reflect the sun, luminously standing out from basalt surroundings. The dappled patterns of shadow augment the colours of the buildings and particularly delineate the decorative and geometric features of the ornamental sandstone and geometrically patterned concrete buildings (Fig. 6.2) in Melbourne’s bright summer months (Edensor and Hughes 2020). These shadowy effects are intensified during Melbhenge, when the setting sun descends at an angle of 250° west of the city. This annual occasion takes place in early February as an homage to the celestial effects of the solstice at the ancient monument of Stonehenge. The canyon like, linear forms of Bourke and Collins Streets, undeviating, parallel streets within the city’s east-west grid structure, are transformed, with intensely illuminated asphalt bordered by the deep shade of the adjacent large tower blocks. These distinctive annual effects highlight how weather impacts upon our sensory engagements with stone, and is an existential element of being immersed in place, with ‘what it feels like to be warm, or cold, drenched in rain, caught in a storm’ (Ingold and Kurttila 2000: 187). Various forms of weather are thus continuously ‘permeating our walls and clothes and affecting our moods and doings’ (Madzak 2018: 3). As Austin and Vannini (2020) assert, ‘we control, modify, endure, adapt to, enjoy, or remove ourselves from the weather-places we inhabit’ and ‘the weather is not so much what we perceive as what we perceive in’:

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Fig. 6.2 Effects of shadow and concrete

We see in sunlight whose shades and colours reveal more about the composition and textures of the ground surface than about the shapes of objects, we hear these textures in the rain from the sounds of drops falling on diverse materials, and we touch and smell in the keen wind that – piercing the body – opens it up and sharpens its haptic and olfactory responses. (Ingold 2010: S131)

As such, we encounter stone according to shifting conditions of light, wetness and dryness, heat and cold. In attending the occasion of Melbhenge, referred to above, in February 2018, the sun had long ceased to

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beam upon the sweeping bluestone steps of the Parliament Building on which I and other onlookers gathered. I sat down to await the arrival of the sinking sun that would radiate its brilliant glow along the length of Bourke Street, and immediately became conscious of the heat that the stone had absorbed on what had been a warm, bright day. So hot were the stones that I was forced to stand once more. Some 30 minutes later, the dark bluestone still emitted considerable warmth, having been infused with the heat of the day’s sun, unlike the creamy Heatherlie Sandstone walls of the same building which had also been bathed in sunlight but remained cool to the touch. Besides its capacity to absorb heat because of its dark colouring and dense, sometimes rough textures—its albedo—basalt possesses a particularly high thermal conductivity (Doulos et al. 2004). Consequently, in summer, the prevalence of bluestone across Melbourne’s pavements, kerbs, laneways and buildings contributes to the urban heat island affect, where temperatures in the city are higher than surrounding rural areas. Especially in the geometrical configurations formed by the canyon-like downtown streets, the summer heat is absorbed by the bluestone and is trapped, warming the surrounding air, adding to discomfort and decreasing the habitability of the city on hot days as it invisibly circulates and fluxes through materials, bodies and spaces. As McHugh and Kitson (2018: 157) note, heat ‘is sensation as felt intensity, vibratory currents that enervate, and sometimes overwhelm, bodies human and nonhuman’. On winter days by contrast, the heat-absorbing bluestone adds welcome warmth. Though the particular climate-shaping capacities of the material and structural characteristics of the built environments of cities are typically overlooked, widespread tendencies to deploy heat-retaining materials in dense urban environments are a significant factor in generating climate change (Rickards 2019) as well as playing a key role in the distribution of thermal comfort. These impacts could be ameliorated by the use of lighter coloured building materials. In Melbourne, the effects of the rain are especially notable, as I have already mentioned, on the glistening cobbles of the bluestone laneways, their dark colour augmented by their reflective, shiny surfaces, especially when dimly illuminated at night. The rainwater that gushes along the gutters or central channels provides a sonic accompaniment, along with

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quickened footsteps and the sounds of tyres swishing along nearby roads. A wander through a soaking laneway can be a solitary experience as others seek shelter, but rain also charges the setting with the gurgling sounds of drains, chill, wetness and patches of luminosity amidst the gloom to conjure a potent atmosphere. These shifting material and sensory affordances foreground some of the consequential pleasures and inconveniences of Melbourne’s variable, unpredictable climate, conditions to which inhabitants become habitually attuned over time and come to sensorially and affectively know the city. Such experiences encourage them to prepare for their outdoor excursions at different times of the year, shaping their decisions about where and how to travel and what activities to undertake, and their selection of light or warm or waterproof clothing, different forms of headgear and footwear, and sunglasses and sunscreen.

Stony Tactilities and Textures Mark Paterson (2009) draws attention to the role of touch within the haptic system. Besides the sensations conveyed by the skin upon contact with materials, touch includes the somatic sensations of proprioception (an awareness of the position of the body in space), kinaesthesia (a sense of the movements of muscles, sinews and joints within the moving body) and the vestibular system (that fosters a sense of balance and the maintenance of posture). In addition, the sense of physical contact through touch is also accompanied by being touched. These internal and external haptic sensations enhance feelings of ‘immersion and presence, of intimacy and proximity’ (Obrador-Pons 2007: 136) which underscores ‘our withness with things’. Such reciprocity dislodges reductive perspectives of the skin as a surface that contains the body to instead imagine it as a porous interface through which we can consider a blurring between subject and object, and the imbrication of the internal and external. The continuity between bodily sensation and inhuman forces also reveals a ‘profound yet indirect relationship between acts of physical touching and being emotionally “touched”’ (Paterson et al. 2016: 13); perhaps one factor that contributes to the fondness with which Melburnians regard bluestone.

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While the numerous stone fixtures, infrastructures, memorials and buildings of Melbourne offer a means for inhabitants to orient themselves in familiar space, along with numerous other habitual features encountered during everyday mobile routines, stone also affects the ways in which we feel our body and its capacities as we move across particular lithic surfaces. This, of course, depends upon a medley of embodied capacities such as height, age, fitness, weight and health. Tim Ingold focuses upon the somewhat ignored ways in which humans apprehend the world through the feet. He (2011: 16) asserts that the built-upon, paved over and tarmacked city environment has replaced the ‘composite and heterogeneous’ surface that predated the emergence of the city. Our encounters with the city are with the streets and transport systems that form the ‘urban exoskeleton’ that we construct to ‘control the movement of human flesh’ (DeLanda 2011: 27). A walk across the ground upon which Melbourne lies before the city’s emergence would have encountered a panoply of textures underfoot: sharp points, gravelly passages, slippery surfaces, irregularities and blockages that would have promoted an improvisatory, ever-changing experience of stone as a key material element of the walking experience and its interspersal with soil, mud, vegetation and water. The building of the city has almost entirely effaced this variegated realm, which has been replaced by flat, smooth horizontal stone and asphalt surfaces that facilitate the circulation of bodies, vehicles and things. This largely homogeneous surface—though disrupted by certain elements including uneven bluestone laneways—largely obviates the need to look down at where you are walking to avoid obtruding objects or damp, jagged, slippery, moss-laden stone. Literally, as Paul Carter (1996: 2) eloquently expresses, due to the ‘engineered surfaces’ we walk on in the contemporary city, and more metaphorically, in terms of settler ignorance of indigenous modes of understanding the land, we have become detached from a sense of land or ground, for we, walk with the surface; we do not align our lives with its inclines, folds and pockets. We glide over it; and to do this, to render what is rough smooth, passive, passable, we linearize it, conceptualizing the ground, indeed the

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civilised world, as an ideally flat space whose billiard table surface can be skated over in any direction without hindrance.

As I will exemplify, aspects of the pre-colonial landscape do rise up to remind us of these different lithic affordances, surface that have not been tarmacked, paved, concreted or otherwise rendered smooth are unfamiliar and cajole most bodies into manoeuvres to which they are not habituated. Yet this is not a homogeneously flattened land, and there are subtle distinctions between cobbles, tiles, asphalt and stone paving that can be perceived through the feet. As I discuss in Chapter 2, bluestone, once little regarded as a material element of Melbourne’s built environment, has become enfolded into contemporary expressions of heritage, its qualities reappraised. While ease of extraction and working, and its widespread accessibility for quarrying have always made it of practical value, it was regarded as crude, unamenable to ornamentation and unpleasantly dark in tone. However, it is now conceived as an integral part of Melbourne’s identity, signified both in the preservation of the old laneways and the imperative to clad the city’s pavements. Accordingly, the same lithic material, bluestone, has been deployed to create two very different surfaces underfoot that provoke divergent tactile experiences. As I have also discussed, contemporary technologies of cutting and polishing mean that the surface of bluestone can now be fashioned into very flat, highly even surfaces. As a reconfigured component in Melbourne’s built environment, the sensory engagements that the highly polished stone now afford contrast with those of yesteryear, allowing pedestrians to glide over pleasingly smooth pavements that also provide grip in wet conditions. Yet despite the ongoing project to layer the city’s pedestrian surfaces with level, smooth, machine-cut bluestone, this basaltic material is not visually homogeneous and conveys an impression of its origins and vitality in ways that were less apparent in the earlier paved and cobbled surfaces. For an infinite variation in the patterns caused by bluestone’s vesiculation that signifies its formation are highly visible: the stone is typically garlanded with vesicules that reveal signs of rapid

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cooling, bubbling and the release of gases. However, this visually apprehended diversity is not matched by any significant degree of tactile variation; contemporary machine-cut bluestone possesses an even smoothness rarely realised by earlier, manual methods of dressing stone. These newer, flat bluestone surfaces are accompanied by those of the much-venerated laneways that proliferate across the inner suburbs and city centre. Their bumpy, hard basalt textures have become associated with historicity, increasing the esteem in which they are held. The condition of the laneways is uneven across the city, with programmes of repair and refurbishment installed to restore smoother surfaces. Despite their heritage value, their rough cobbled surfaces provoke many complaints from those who find them difficult to negotiate, and the laneways are not universally held in high regard. For the disabled, the elderly, for those with wheelchairs and prams, and for cyclists, they provide a particularly juddering surface and can potentially cause accidents. Walking along these routes is especially difficult for those wearing footwear unsuited to negotiating their bumpy materiality, with those who don high heels imperilling their ankles. Residents thus tend to be mindful of choosing shoes that will make passage easier. Any pedestrian excursion along a laneway is rarely an uninterrupted eurhythmic saunter and the ground underfoot is usually surveyed to avoid losing balance. Yet these uneven affordances also generate pleasurable engagements. Walking along a laneway in the inner suburb of Brunswick, I was passed by a young mother who was jogging with a pushchair while the baby being pushed emitted a continuous tone that changed according to the variations of the surface under the wheels, much to her delight. This prolonged childish utterance punctuated the silence that had gathered in the laneway and also conjured speculation about the soundscape of yesteryear, when the clattering of horses’ hooves and clamour of wooden and steel-rimmed cartwheels on hard stone would have resounded. A more vigorous contemporary encounter with Melbourne’s bluestone cobbles occurs during the annually staged Roobaix , initiated in 2006. For several hours, hundreds of cyclists follow a 40-kilometre route, revealed only on the day of the event, organised so that it predominantly runs through the laneways and other unheralded byways. Unlike the gruelling sporting occasion that inspired it, the Paris

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to Roubaix race, similarly staged along aged cobbled roads, this is not a racing competition. Instead, prizes are awarded based on criteria such as the most inventive cycling costumes, yet the race nonetheless challenges riders to experience the uncomfortable, jarring impact of cycling along the bluestone laneways. Away from these bluestone thoroughfares, other lithic surfaces provoke different somatic engagements. For instance, to enter the Shrine of Remembrance, most visitors approach along the huge stone forecourt that leads to the steps. Walking upon the unyielding Tynong granite that continues up a steep stairway to the interior of the memorial hall impacts upon knees and ankles, and serves as an effortful prelude to entry into the echoing sepulchral sanctuary, inside which smoother, shinier marble flooring provides some relief. By contrast, the gently sloping surfaces of the soft, colourful Kimberley sandstone that paves the surface of Federation Square encourage pedestrians to linger; in summer, many people sit down on the ground in front of the large media screen or gather in groups to converse. Adjacent to the square lies a finely gravelled path that runs eastwards alongside the River Yarra, a springy surface that is energising to walk upon but is accompanied by the sudden discomfort caused by the intrusion of small grains into the shoes as well as the scrunching sound of footsteps. The surroundings of stone buildings also induce sensations of tactility. Collins Street was once overwhelmingly composed of stone of divergent provenance, characterised by basalt bases, elaborate decoration and luxuriant marble assembled in commercial buildings that imparted an imposing solidity and a thriving prosperity. I have alluded above to how the visual attractions of the smooth, shiny marble and granite surfaces of their interiors invite tactile encounters. Several of these stone-clad buildings remain but many have been replaced by buildings of an altogether different material constituency, the concrete towers that loom over the street, adding vertical immensity to the dense aggregation of masonry, glass and steel. In addition, some of the massive modernist brutalist concrete structures created in the 1960s and 1970s, many detailed in the Concrete Map of Melbourne (Harper and Weaver 2019), are imbued with a characteristically uncompromising geometrical solidity and rough

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surfaces that charismatically radiate across space. Melbourne University’s underground car park, its Infrastructural Engineering Building, the Royal Women’s Hospital Car Park, Footscray Psychiatric Hospital and the gigantic Menzies Building at Monash University’s Clayton Campus are especially daunting structures. Victor Buchli (2006) calls attention to the ‘unhomeliness’ of modernist architecture to point out how its structural and surficial materialities are intimately intertwined with reduced accounts of human sensibility, yet I contend that many concrete modernist and brutalist structures offer distinctive visual and tactile qualities, attributes solicited by particular geographical contexts. For instance, in the radiant Victorian summer light, the sculptural and textural qualities of such concrete buildings are imparted more powerfully than in northerly climes where the weak light and weather-tarnished surfaces bestow less alluring resonances. Across Melbourne, at other sites, stone offers a more accommodating setting for social gatherings: people sit upon steps, ledges, balustrades and walls that are stationed at points of quietness, liveliness, gathering and intersection. On occasion, stone fixtures are more deliberately designed to accommodate bodies at rest or engaged in communal activities. At the junction of Smith Street and Stanley Street in the inner suburb of Fitzroy is an Aboriginal meeting place designed by sculptor Glenn Romanis, composed of three large, flat stones and an area of paving. All elements are shaped out of a variety of rock types, with some lithic elements embedded into other areas of stone to create a pleasing, multicoloured, multi-textured arrangement. In addition, basalt, granite and petrified wood are cleverly aligned to compose a symbolic map of indigenous sites in the surrounding locale, including the locations of significant aboriginal social, sporting, political and health facilities, historically important rivers, camping grounds, trees and gardens. On a busy Saturday, this micro-park is replete with Aboriginal folk hanging out, some sitting, others lying on the stones, chatting and drinking coffee. The inscription carved into the stone, Wominjeka Wurundjeri Bik (Welcome to Wurundjeri Country), resonates with the affordances of the stone, inviting sensuous interactions and contributing a space of conviviality along a busy shopping street. Symbolic meaning and sculpted space combine to create a sensuous meeting place, affording comfort, interaction

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and tactile pleasure. This combination of surfaces, textures and gradients lures bodies to linger or move transversally, diverging from the linear movement typified by browsing, spending and moving to destinations by foot or vehicle. As such, the meeting place accords with David Seamon’s (1979) recommendation that streets should be designed to facilitate faceto-face interaction through structures that bring together different people and encourage mingling, countering instrumental bureaucratic and commercial functions that are all too frequently prioritised (Fig. 6.3). Besides affording opportunities to socialise, linger and relax, certain stony materialities invite playful sensory engagements, with some possessing affordances that unexpectedly attract ludic practices. Tanya Woodyer (2012: 319) depicts play as a ‘prioritising of the non-cognitive and more-than-rational’; the provision of playful spaces enhances affective belonging and unleashes improvisational and spontaneous movement that fosters a sense of urban belonging and engagement. Architectural Fragment by Petrus Spronk, the sculpture discussed in Chapter 5,

Fig. 6.3 Meeting place, Smith street

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situated on the pavement outside the State Library on Swanston Street, affords a challenge to skateboarders who gleefully try to accomplish slide and grind manoeuvres along its hard edges. Less energetic somatic adventures are solicited at Footscray’s Welcome Bowl , where the large, stable bluestones offer fixtures upon which to either clamber or sit, constituting an inter-generational space of assembly. Like the gathering place at Smith Street discussed above, these irregular stony installations reintroduce a sense of wild stony materiality into a landscape colonised and coated with tarmac, concrete, brick and polished stone, summoning up the kinds of embodied sensory engagements that took place across the pre-colonial landscape on which Melbourne is sited. A particularly alluring site of play is formed by the 25 blocks of pink and grey granite that formed part of the demolished Colonial Mutual Life Building and were relocated in 2000 to Carlton Gardens, a large park on the perimeter of the city centre. Scattered across an area of the eastern side of the gardens, the stone blocks and columns, of various shapes and sizes, seem irresistible to small children. Passing alongside them, many kids swerve away from their families to clamber and leap across these ornamental stone forms, stretching their bodies across the top surfaces and jumping off onto the turf below. Many children also walk or run along the low walls to test their balance. On sunny days, the area becomes an impromptu playground, animated by young children shouting, running and climbing as part of a multidirectional choreography that is characteristic of the ‘fluid, continuous, adaptive’ qualities of play (Stevens 2007: 200). Here, stony elements invite pleasurable tactile engagements (Fig. 6.4).

Conclusions In this chapter, I have sought to emphasise the affective and sensory qualities of urban materiality. This remains a daunting task, for it is difficult to articulate those experiences that usually lies beyond conscious reflection, are simultaneously ‘known’ but unavailable to reflexive depiction. Nevertheless, I have tried to identify certain urban qualities through writing about my own sensory engagements with the colours and textures of

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Fig. 6.4 Granite blocks, Carlton Gardens

stone and descriptions drawn from participant observation, to bring the usually non-discursive into the realm of the discursive. As a non-native inhabitant of Melbourne, I have brought something of an outsider’s perspective to an encounter with the city’s stone. A habituation to differently composed material environments can solicit a heightened awareness in the absence of a familiar sensory milieu. Extended spells of walking, hanging out and watching people’s engagements with their material environment across the city have stimulated the writing of descriptive passages that complement these personal sensory extracts. The denizens of Melbourne serially encounter the city as a perceptual realm, saturated with historical resonances from their own lives and those of others. In carrying out everyday tasks and ordinary practices,

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they habitually sense place and move through it unreflexively while possessing a competence borne of repeated practice in a familiar realm. As Tim Ingold (1993: 155) insists, any place ‘owes its character to the [sensory] experiences it affords to those who spend time there’ and, he continues, these experiences ‘depend on the kinds of activities in which its inhabitants engage’, their place ballets, routines, pleasures and duties. In the city, ‘individual bodies coordinate, interact, dodge and manoeuvre around other bodies as choreographies… as a set of highly localised and specific practices… surrounded and structured by features of the built environment’ (Noxolo 2018: 800). I have attempted to discern some of these practices. I have particularly focused on the ways in which stone vibrates with light and colour, and is imbued with textures and tactilities. I have sought to demonstrate that the dominant lithic distribution of basalt, sandstone, granite and concrete contributes to the production of a very particular sensory and affective setting for everyday inhabitation. Such material qualities react to light and shadow in particular ways, invite the construction of particular forms and shapes, are conducive to the formation of particular atmospheres, generate forms of sensory contrast, guide or deter movement, and solicit modes of lingering and play. As an important material element, stone constitutes an integral component of the urban environment, although it may rarely be consciously noticed. The sensations it provokes are compounded and complemented by the subtleties of weather, vegetation, the sounds of birdsong, the play of light and shadow, traffic and music, the ways in which people move and talk, the tastes and smells of local food, the affective intensities that accumulate in public spaces, the familiar institutions and places of gathering, and the mobile rhythms course through place. By becoming aware of these serial sensory and affective qualities, it is possible to experience the ‘re-enchantment’ (Bennett 2001: 5) of place where a heightened sensory awareness is initiated that allows us to ‘notice new colours, discern details previously ignored, hear extraordinary sounds, as familiar landscapes of sense sharpen and intensify’. Such reattunement might enrich the experience of place. It may also foreground a critical alertness to the ways in which power shapes place in distributing the sensible, in creating massive tower blocks, guiding bodies through

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particular channels, confining other bodies in protected enclaves and creating infrastructures out of particular materials. As Jacques Rancière (2009: 13) submits, the distribution of the sensible ‘revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it’, and concerns who has the power to speak about the sensory qualities of the material environment, and is able to attribute value to particular elements and not to others. Consequently, it is critical to pay attention to the ways in which stone is enrolled into the production of the cities in which we live, for urban space could always be composed and arranged otherwise. And in the case of Melbourne, before the city emerged, as I have emphasised, stone and the other material components of the pre-colonial landscape would have been sensed in a radically divergent fashion, a distribution of the sensible that was intimately connected to knowing country. The shifting urban environments through which we move inculcate habits borne of the place ballets that have shaped bodily routines, even when those settings change. As Pat Noxolo (2018) demonstrates, the procedural movements and forms of bodily comportment that such material arrangements are intended to accommodate may be confounded by those who transgress them by developing choreographies of their own. And in so doing, they offer alternative visions of how urban materiality might be organised otherwise, and how sensation might thereby be redistributed in ways that accommodate different desires, identities and projects. The examples of the stone-fashioned gathering places and the stony sites of improvisational play gesture towards such possibilities. In the next chapter, I focus on the very different sensory and affective engagements with stone amongst those who are most attuned to it: the artisans and artists who have prolonged and repeated experiences of working with stone. As I will discuss, such intimate encounters with the lithic provoke eloquent reflection upon the highly divergent ways in which stone becomes known.

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Ebbensgaard, C. (2017). ‘I Like the Sound of Falling Water, It’s Calming’: Engineering Sensory Experiences Through Landscape Architecture. Cultural Geographies, 24 (3), 441–455. Edensor, T., & Hughes, R. (2020). Moving Through a Dappled World: The Aesthetics of Shade and Shadow in Central Melbourne. Social and Cultural Geography. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1705994. Harper, G., & Weaver, C. (2019). Concrete Map of Melbourne. London: Blue Crow Publications. Hockey, J., & Allen-Collinson, J. (2009). The Sensorium at Work: The Sensory Phenomenology of the Working Body. The Sociological Review, 57 (2), 217– 239. Ingold, T. (1993). The Temporality of the Landscape. World Archaeology, 25 (2), 152–174. Ingold, T. (2010). Footprints through the Weather World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16, S121–139. Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge. Ingold, T., & Kurttila, T. (2000). Perceiving the Environment in Finnish Lapland. Body and Society, 6 (3–4), 183–196. Kraftl, P., & Adey, P. (2008). Architecture/Affect/Inhabitation: Geographies of Being-In Buildings. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 98(1), 213–231. Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lenclos, J., & Lenclos, D. (2004). Colors of the World: The Geography of Color. New York: W. W. Norton. Lippard, L. (1997). The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: The New Press. McHugh, K., & Kitson, J. (2018). Thermal Sensations—Burning the Flesh of the World. GeoHumanities, 4 (1), 157–177. Madzak, M. (2018). Weaving Through Weather on a Danish Caravan Site. Space and Culture. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331218773297. Mason, J. (2018). Affinities: Potent Connections in Personal Life. Cambridge: Polity. Noxolo, P. (2018). Flat Out! Dancing the City at a Time of Austerity. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (5), 797–811. Obrador-Pons, P. (2007). A Haptic Geography of the Beach: Naked Bodies, Vision and Touch. Social and Cultural Geography, 8(1), 123–141.

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Pallasmaa, J. (2016). The Sixth Sense: The Meaning of Atmosphere and Mood. Architectural Design, 86 (6), 126–133. Paterson, M. (2009). Haptic Geographies: Ethnography, Haptic Knowledges and Sensuous Dispositions. Progress in Human Geography, 33(6), 766–788. Paterson, M., Dodge, M., & MacKian, S. (2016). Introduction: Placing Touch Within Social Theory and Empirical Study. In M. Paterson & M. Dodge (Eds.), Touching Space, Placing Touch. London: Routledge. Peacock, H. (2017). Geographies of Colour: Practices and Performances of Repair (Doctoral dissertation). Queen Mary University of London. Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage. Rancière, J. (2009). Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rickards, L. (2019). Making Climates Through the City. In J. van der Heijden, H. Bulkeley, & C. Certomà (Eds.), Urban Climate Politics: Agency and Empowerment (pp. 80–97). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seamon, D. (1979). A Geography of the Lifeworld. London: Croom Helm. Serres, M. (2008). The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. London: Bloomsbury. Solnit, R. (2000). Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. (2017). Stone Walks: Inhuman Animacies and Queer Archives of Feeling. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 38(6), 851–863. Stevens, Q. (2007). The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces. London: Routledge. Sumartojo, S., & Graves, M. (2018). Rust and Dust: Materiality and the Feel of Memory at Camp des Milles. Journal of Material Culture, 23(3), 328– 343. Thrift, N. (1996). Spatial Formations. London: Sage. Tilly, C. (2004). The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology. Oxford: Berg. Trigg, S. (2018). Bluestone and the City: Writing an Emotional History. Melbourne Historical Journal, 44 (1), 41–52. Tuan, Y. F. (1975). Place: An Experiential Perspective. Geographical Review, 65 (2), 151–165. Vasiljevi´c-Tomi´c, D., & Mari´c, I. (2011). Colour in the City: Principles of Nature-Climate Characteristics. Facta Universitatis-Series: Architecture and Civil Engineering, 9 (2), 315–323. Woodyer, T. (2012). Ludic Geographies: Not Merely Child’s Play. Geography Compass, 6 (6), 313–326.

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Wylie, J. (2005). A Single Day’s Walking: Narrating Self and Landscape on the South West Coast Path. Transactions of the institute of British Geographers, 30 (2), 234–247. Wylie, J. (2007). Landscape. London: Routledge. Young, D. (2006). The Colours of Things. In P. Spyer, C. Tilley, S. Kuechler, & W. Keane (Eds.), The Handbook of Material Culture. London: Sage.

Part VII Garden

Since the nineteenth century, European styles of urban planning and architecture in Melbourne, as across Australia, were matched by influential trends in garden design that ranged from the city beautiful to arts and crafts movements. These green designs perpetrated a desired image of the city as cultured and sophisticated, heir to a European sensibility. In Melbourne’s parks, large oaks and elms were favoured instead of indigenous trees and bushes, where they provided beneficent shade. These traditions prevailed until the decades that followed the Second World War, when the shifting relationship between the UK and Australia, along with rapid social and environmental change, prompted the renegotiation of Australia’s national identity, a process reflected in architecture, art and literature. New styles in garden design also emerged to evoke a more recognisably ‘Australian’ identity. Now, rather than being conceived as scrubby and unattractive, native plants became symbols of a resurgent nationalism. These innovations entailed not merely the substituting of European plants with indigenous varieties but also the incorporation of other elements of the rural landscape, notably the use of ‘wild’ stone in domestic gardens, suburban parks and public spaces, most notably in the work of the aptly named Ellis Stones (1895–1975).

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These developments chimed with an emerging environmentalism that idealised the bush landscapes of drover and shearer, romantic conceptions that resonated in influential garden designer Edna Walling’s The Australian Roadside (1952). Tellingly, these distinctive lithic materials also emblematised the much-vaunted ancient origins of the landscape that were detailed in scientific research and romantic texts. Stones worked for Walling at the start of his career and similarly sought to express a distinctive Australianness in his own garden design. His aesthetics were also formed by his familiarity with particular rural landscapes in the local environs of Essendon, his boyhood home, and further north in Euroa. He was especially drawn to the granite outcrops and they were extracted and imported to the gardens he designed, where he surrounded them with local plants to bring the attractions of the bush landscape into the city. For Stones, these boulders resonated with wider emergent claims that the Australian landscape was ancient; they embodied a comforting sense of authentic endurance over millennia. In seeming to be a ‘natural’ element within the landscape, these lithic materials contrasted with the formerly popular use of dressed stone in formal walls and paths that endeavoured to convey an aesthetic ordering. Stones (1971: 14) followed the principle that the placing of the boulders should ‘appear as natural as possible’. He recommended that they should be partly sunk into the earth, placed so they resembled a line of strata, not be too numerous, and vary in size and shape, so that they mirrored the appearance of the outcrops that so pleased him. Critically, they ought also to be of weathered appearance and clothed in lichens and moss to further honour the bush landscape from which they derived and the processes that had aged them. Ellis Stones’ work is exemplified by his large native garden situated in the south-west corner of Melbourne University’s South Lawn, completed in 1973, a plot of land that contrasts with the rectilinearity of the adjacent lawns, water course and paving. The sloping garden is planted with aromatic native plants, equipped with wooden seats and furnished with large granite boulders sourced from the landscape around Tullamarine. The influence of Stones endures, and stone remains an important element in Australian garden design. A recent example is provided by the

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Fig. 1 Ellis Stones, Garden, Melbourne University

use of pebbles and boulders to create a simulation of a dry creek bed in the Australian Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Victoria, at Cranbourne, some 45 km south of Melbourne.

7 Becoming Attuned to Stone: Skill, Craft, Making

Skill, Sensation and Working with Stone In this chapter, I extend an analysis of the ways in which stone is sensed. Having explored the ways in which sensory experiences of the city might be solicited by its stony materiality, especially through textures and colours, I now focus on different intimate engagements with lithic materials, exploring the sensuous engagement through which artisans and artists working in and around Melbourne come to know, feel and love the stone with which they work. As Mark Smalley (2018: 8) contends, ‘knowledge of rocks and skill in handling them has been fundamental to our survival’; a brief appraisal of the plethora of human stony engagements with stone in the making of tools, buildings and memorials confirms his assertion. In this chapter, working with stone is examined as productive of a skilled and sensuous knowing rather than a cognitive, scientific appraisal of stony qualities. In focusing upon diverse accounts and interviews with people who skilfully work with stone in very different ways, as well as my own creative engagements, I reveal stone’s multiple affordances and potentialities and its capacity to generate sensuous, affective and emotional experiences. © The Author(s) 2020 T. Edensor, Stone, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1_7

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As Trevor Marchand insists, the development of skilled knowledge does not emerge in a vacuum but from a context that includes ‘artefacts, tools-to-hand, and raw materials; space, place, and architecture; paths and boundaries; time-frames and temporal rhythms; light, darkness, and weather’ (2010: s2). Working in these environments also involves being amongst a community of practitioners, with novices inculcated into shared ‘values, ethos and social persona, and the learning of related professional competencies’ (Marchand 2012: 261) through specialised training and work on the job with fellow artisans. Stonemasons, quarriers, sculptors and drystone wall makers all enter similar processes of learning and becoming part of a working community. In such environments, these practitioners become intimate with stone and develop sensuous knowledge and ever-evolving skills. In developing ideas about tactile and haptic engagements discussed in the previous chapter, the salience of manual touch becomes especially acute when considering those who work with stone. As Marchand (2012: 261) declares, ‘(T)he hand is the most effective body part for manipulating objects and for configuring and modifying our physical environment’. In discussing the development of carpentry skills amongst woodworkers, Marchand considers that ‘a handtool becomes an extension of the forearm, hands or fingers, and thereby integrated within a brain−hand−tool complex’. Similarly, the stonemason or sculptor deploys chisels, saws, mallets and rasps in ways that make them impossible to separate from the working body: hand and tool ‘reciprocally form one another in shape and posture, in performance and efficiency’ (ibid.: 260). Like carpenters, skilled stone workers act ‘with materials and with tools whose inherent qualities ‘respond’ to the work’ (ibid.: 264). Through such tactile sensing, they develop an ability to flexibly respond to the material’s contingent qualities and to improvise in making adjustments and repairs during the crafting process. As Marchand (2012: 263) puts it: As contact is made, the fingers and palm receive haptic information and responsively adjust and fine tune the grip, and apply the necessary force to lift, then carry, manipulate or operate. Touch is both reactive and proactive, seeking tactile data that informs the shape of the grip, the application of pressure and the subsequent hand movements

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Gripped and wielded in habituated fashion, tool and worker constitute ‘an intimate coupling of perception and action’ (Ingold 2011: 58) that evolves through repeated use. Each time an implement is utilised and a material is worked upon, the artisan draws upon memories of previous practice and applies these to the task in hand. As Hockey and Allen-Collinson (2009: 228) explain, beyond manual dexterity, experienced workers develop other skills, including advanced haptic and kinaesthetic attunements. Accordingly, they are able to achieve a ‘balanced posture and complementary movements of other body parts in synchrony with the dominant hand’, and when using a familiar tool, for instance a hammer, sensorially interpret the vibrations that reverberate through their body as ‘input that is used to inform decisions on action and technique’. Deploying such skills, workers may respond to unexpected areas of hardness or softness in the stone, and unseen glitches and faults are accommodated by adjustments made by the continuously attuned, skilled body. Sensory aptitudes are also enhanced by what Cristina Grasseni (2004) refers to as ‘skilled vision’, an embodied, idiosyncratic way of knowing and perceiving the world practised amongst different artisanal communities. This is a mode of looking distinguished from that mobilised by engineers and architects who make work plans largely ‘through drawings and measurements, reports and schedules… representations from an allseeing viewpoint, as well as elevations, sections and details’ (Lyon 2012: 54). Skilled vision, Grasseni (2004: 41) contends, is ‘never detached from a certain amount of multisensoriality - especially from tactility’ and can thus be deployed to assess the qualities of the material to be worked with, its textures, plasticity and amenability to proposed designs. This is akin to what Laura Marks (2002) refers to as a ‘haptic’ or ‘tactile’ gaze and extends the capacity of workers to swiftly appraise what can or cannot be achieved. Besides skilfully mobilising sight, artisans develop a heightened attunement to the sounds produced by tools upon stone, which may indicate fragility, solidity or good progress. After sustained experience, artisans may enter what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2002) terms a state of flow, an absorbed, attentive disposition that is acquired as eyes, muscles, hands and somatic balance become attuned to working with stone. This might also emerge by

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working rhythmically and repetitively through what Henri Lefebvre calls ‘dressage’, a mode of learning through reiterative practice that conditions the body into performing repeated manoeuvres but also fosters an improvisational capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. Indeed, as Hockey and Allen-Collinson (2009: 223) aver, it is through a developed sense of rhythm and timing that workers ‘skilfully coordinate their bodies, often in time with co-workers or machinery’. As practice becomes absorbed into corporeal experience (Paterson 2015), these repeated practices produce a body that is not only highly sensorially attuned to working with stone but is also shaped by them, though of course the capacities and sensory experiences of working bodies are always fashioned according to gender, class, sexuality and ethnicity, amongst other factors (Hockey and Allen-Collinson 2009). In general, however, forearms become solid with muscle, fingers enlarge, skin toughens, and consequently, work becomes easier. And as we may observe in the rhythms of the stonemason or quarrier, methodical practices—chiselling, for instance—develops to conserve energy and more reliably control how the material is worked into the desired form. Besides chiselling, stone can be encountered through a range of sensory practices: scraping, gouging, chipping, sawing, planning, smoothing and weighing, as I now explore. I successively investigate the sensory and skilled practices of the quarrier, the mason, the sculptor, the flint-knapper, the performance artist, the lithographer and the stone balancer.

The Quarrier An encounter with an aged stone building can potentially solicit a vicarious sensory empathy that helps us to imagine the embodied experiences through which the material was extracted from a quarry. Similarly, old quarry faces reveal the unheralded, arduous working practices of quarriers. As Gary Vines (1993) recounts, the practices of quarrying have transformed over the centuries, deploying different technologies to collect rock, and thereby provoking divergent sensory experiences. He outlines how Aboriginal quarrying techniques primarily centred upon the use of fire, with rocks heated before cold water was poured over them

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to cause cracking. Fire-hardened poles were used to prise pieces of stone away from the outcrop, and subsequent knapping was deployed through which one rock was struck against another to reduce the extracted stone to a smaller size. The material was then worked on stone anvils to prepare the shape for sharpening into axe heads and other tools, which was achieved through the downward pressure exerted onto beds of abrasive sandstone, creating the sharpening grooves located at various locations around Melbourne. Vines (1993: 16) describes how early European quarrying in Melbourne was similarly labour-intensive, ‘with only hand tools: picks, shovels, hammers, long steel drills and iron levers and splitting wedges’. Eschewing the use of fire, quarriers typically deployed the ‘plug and feather’ technique where outcrops of rock were found, using wedges that were inserted into pre-existing crevices or drilled holes and hammered until chunks split away. These blocks were usually split into smaller slabs by creating cracks into which slighter wedges and rods were inserted and hit more gently. In Melbourne, those stones that were to be used for guttering and kerbs would be further dressed on site before being transported by dray. By 1850, the exhausting manual labour of quarrying was sometimes alleviated by the use of explosives to remove much larger quantities of stone, first through the pouring of black powder into drill holes which was subsequently ignited, and in later years, by dynamite and gelignite. Yet even following the advent of explosive technologies, strenuous physical effort was still necessary in lifting quarried stone into trolleys which when filled, were manually pushed or hauled by cables out of the quarry hole. Such labour was only alleviated with the advent of conveyor belts after the First World War, though the earlier introduction of mechanical crushers obviated the exhausting work of crushing stone through manual labour. It is difficult to imagine this ‘heavy, dusty and dangerous work’, labour that was also accompanied by numerous accidents caused by ‘falling rock, moving trucks, machinery and explosions’ (Vines 1993: 21). Such dangerous, gruelling toil belongs to a world of frequent industrial accidents that has long vanished from the city, along with other forms of skilled physical drudgery that produced certain kinds of hard male bodies. Yet a contemporary awareness of the risks of working with stone persist. As

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Alison Leitch (2007) discusses, the workers at Italy’s ancient Carrara marble quarries develop a great sensitivity to danger. These quarriers conceive of the mountain with which they work as never sleeping, as disclosed by the unpredictable and highly dangerous rock-falls to which they are occasionally exposed. Accordingly, they are acutely sensorially attuned to the sounds that suggest that cracking is taking place and to the visual signs of slippage that forewarn of collapse. Leitch (2007) describes how these Carrara workers critically interpret newer extractive technologies that use explosives and mechanisation as akin to ruthless plunder. They consider their own manually oriented work, by contrast, to be a craft, a skilled, creative practice that is only attainable through immersive and enduring experience. Unlike scientists and overseers, they contend that only they have a full appreciation of the knots, grains and hidden faults of the marble, its different consistencies and durabilities. This skilled intimacy leads these workers to attribute liveliness to the stone, where marble that breaks easily like ‘glass’ is thought of as being more ‘alive’ or as having greater ‘vivezza’. Marble ‘sings’ and has ‘nerves’ which make it strong. It ‘sleeps’ and ‘wakes’ and is sometimes described as having an anima or ‘soul’ (Leitch 2007: 420). Accordingly, Leitch (2010: 67) considers working with this stone to be ‘an intersubjective, reciprocal and, indeed, dynamic relationship’ in which the marble should be conceived as ‘animated and living material’ rather than inert matter that is worked on by a lively subject. Such skilled work becomes far more attuned to the vital materiality of stone, disavowing the notions of inert passivity discussed earlier in this book. Most contemporary quarrying is mechanised, involving large quantities of explosives, industrial crushers, fork-lift trucks and large lorries to transport stone. I consider that this has perpetrated a sensory redistribution in which skilled driving, stone manoeuvring and machine operation are paramount. Yet a more intimate, experienced sensory appreciation of stone is still required to assess the suitability of stone for particular uses, as for instance, in a bluestone quarry used to source the material used for Melbourne’s pavements and kerbs. Here, the quarried stone consists of large ‘floaters’, loosely detached boulders that are buried underground and are extracted by means of mechanical diggers and excavators. Once the machines have brought these large stone lumps to the surface, careful

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manual and visual appraisal is deployed by experienced quarriers to ascertain whether they are suited for stone-cutting or should be consigned to the crusher to create aggregate. Though this work retains an intimacy with stone, in other circumstances quarry work is dirty, unpleasant and potentially injurious to health. Without the use of masks, workers may suffer from silicosis when quarrying stone that contains high quantities of silica, but even if masked, they may have to endure a thick pall of dust as well as the loud noise caused by explosions, notably at quarries that solely manufacture aggregate. Such work generates a different sense of embodied intimacy with stone. Nonetheless, such work, like older methods of quarrying, involves skilful ways of working with and knowing stone, and similarly engages working bodies in sensorially experiencing different forms of lithic matter.

The Stonemason In the case of Melbourne, stonemasons are most celebrated for stopping work over their employer’s refusal to grant them reduced working hours. On 21 April 1856, they curtailed work on the old quadrangle at the University of Melbourne, coercing their bosses to agree to their demands that they would thereafter work no longer than eight hours in a day, an action celebrated by the labour movement and commemorated at the Eight Hours Monument referred to in Chapter 5. In addition, of course, they have enormously contributed to the shaping of the material fabric of the city. The creative skills and physical aptitude of the mason can be discerned by sensing the deeply engraved surfaces of stones used in the construction of older buildings, with their parallel grooves, smoothed surfaces or pitted textures. Such material traces conjure up the strong, leathery hands that worked the stone, gripping chisel and mallet, using prodigious forearm muscles and iron-hard biceps, measuring progress with the rhythmic beat of metal on rock. Stonemasons are those imagined to be most intimately involved with stone, learning to cut, carve, shape, inscribe and finish varied forms of diverse lithic materials. The choreography of the mason’s work is akin to Tim Ingold’s depiction of the toil of the carpenter. Through one stage in the much bigger process of making a bookshelf, the act of cutting

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a plank, Ingold explains how the practice of sawing as a movement is felt throughout the whole body ‘in the oscillating balance of forces in my knees, legs, hands, arms and back’ (2011: 52). Echoing the acquisition of manual, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive aptitudes identified by Marchant, and Hockey and Allen-Collinson, and the skilled vision discussed by Grasseni, the stonemason similarly performs continuous micro-adjustments to shift position, balance, weight and force throughout the body. The eye continually checks progress, the hand modulates its grip, and balance and focus unceasingly shifts, as the work proceeds through the successive stages of creation (Fig. 7.1). While much contemporary stone shaping and dressing is mechanical, certain procedures continue to require dextrous manual work that follows a sequence of different practices, tools and skills that culminate in

Fig. 7.1 Old tools, Stonemason’s yard

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the finished product, as sculptor David Paton (2013) amply exemplifies in his carving of a granite quoin in the Cornish quarry at which he works. In general, the first stage of manual stonemasonry involves a marking out of the area of stone to be dressed, and thenceforth a deliberate chiselling away of material that delineates the shape and area to be cut, followed by the adoption of a more flowing rhythm of chiselling. Once the stone has been shaped to a degree of satisfaction, the mason will consider the partially completed stone anew, making minor modifications that improve detail and achieve greater exactitude. Critically, the ongoing, relentless adjustments made by the mason are not simply a repetition of the same manoeuvres but testifies to continuous attunement to the task at hand and to the ever-changing stone that is being worked with. This solicits ‘a form of awareness that does not so much retreat as grow in intensity with the fluency of action’ (Ingold 2011: 61). Paton (2013) further notes that traditional forms of stone building blocks are variously fashioned with hammer and heavy chisel, polished, fine axed using a flat chisel, and fine punched, medium punched and rough punched, practices that create a plethora of surfaces. Such skills are developed by immersion in apprenticeship followed by years of practice, a period of learning that Paton has undertaken. The development of masonry skills also facilitate a knowledge of distinctive lithic qualities, a trained awareness about which stone is appropriate for which particular task and an anticipation of what will be experienced when working with different materials. For instance, in Chapter 2, I remarked on the unpopularity of Heatherlie Sandstone amongst masons despite its great durability, because ‘the presence of flinties (silicified worm burrows) made the sandstone less popular with masons’ (King and Weston 1997: 75). Huntly, a stonemason from Kyneton, a small town some 90 kilometres from Melbourne, has almost 40 years’ experience in the trade. He creates stone walls and gateways but predominantly focuses on memorial work. Acquainted with the stone walls and buildings on the farm on which he grew up, Huntly initially learned to build houses, though it took several years to ‘get the hang of it’. He then gained employment at the stone yard where he presently works, learning the skills of monumental masonry from the former proprietor. Purchasing the yard from the owner in 1990, he has usually employed at least six stone workers, and the firm continues

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to create sculptures and domestic stonework in addition to designing and creating gravestones and tombs. He recruits two or three apprentices to help with the work and to develop their skills, which in their first year, centre on drawing and cutting the letters of memorial inscriptions with a series of different chisels. Huntly explains that the key skill, inscribing monuments with lettering and patterns, requires the acquisition of a range of different techniques, including hand chiselling, inserting plaques upon smooth lithic surfaces, and hammering lead into the already hollowed letters. These letters can be hand-chiselled and inscribed in v-cut form, and lead can be raised from the surface or flush with it. In the latter case, as he elaborates, the letters are fashioned and then ‘you melt your lead and then pour it over the top of them and that sinks and then you go across and you hammer the bejesus out of it and you flatten it down, and then we cut the lead out with a little fine chisel’. His own favourite practice, which derives from his former skills in housing and walling, lies in splitting large stones with a large hammer and chisel in such a manner that the rough textures of the back of the stone contrast with the smoothed surface of the memorial’s face. His expertise in this technique has promoted the firm’s speciality of creating rustic monuments that Huntly refers to as ‘more arty types’ of memorial. The yard uses a variety of different stone types, including Castlemaine Sandstone, bluestone and Harcourt Granite. Huntly likes to work with the Harcourt granite which possesses firm attributes that facilitate the design of exact lines and edges: The beauty of granite is that it’s nice and hard so it’s got lots of resistance, you can use heavy hammers on it, a six-pound hammer, and you can really give it a good wallop. And when you want to put a margin on it, you’re using pneumatic hammers, and then you chisel that in. And that’s what it takes to get a sharp edge on it. It’s quite satisfying to get that done.

Yet his favourite stone is the Mintara Slate that he sources from South Australia, because of its pliable, plastic qualities that allow the mason to hand cut letters and achieve an ‘incredibly clarity between the chiselled areas’.

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In referring to the specialist skills of sawing stone, Huntly discusses the implications of a process identified in Chapter 2, the increasing import of stone from abroad. He laments how this practice diminishes the skills of sawing stone because of an increasing reliance on ready cut stone imports: When I first started off there would have been more than 20 break-down saws in Melbourne; there’s only two left, because everything comes from China. Most of the gravestones you see are Indian Black or China Black, but before that it would have been Adelaide Black, it would have been all Australian stone, but since the ‘90s, since we’ve become a global economy the industry’s just been blown away. The people who have the ear of the government are all importers – we call them ‘box stonemasons’, they bring everything in a box and open it up. All they do is fix and letter. Once upon a time all the stone manufacturers would have sawn the stone, and this is just deskilling the industry.

Here, a sensory, skilled engagement with stone and knowledge of its distinctive properties is drastically diminished in one stage of the production of memorial stones. Yet a working life manually labouring on stone can produce other detrimental effects. As with quarry workers, the physical impact of working with stone over a working life may have a injurious effect on the mason’s body, as Huntly acknowledges: ‘after 34 years, It’s the lifting that’s the worst, but I mean, this shoulder aches now because this arm has always been my hammer arm, and I don’t know how many millions of strokes I’ve done over my working career’. Huntly bears the traces of his sustained skilled engagement with stone in and on his body, yet more broadly, heavy toil such as that which he has undertaken has been largely replaced by stone working techniques that rely on mechanised apparatus, minimising such corporeal harm. At the cutting and polishing facility at Port Fairy, bluestone is currently cut, shaped and finished in ways that have almost wholly redistributed the sensory practices of working with stone. Though some manual work with chisel and hammer is deployed to form specialist stones and other finessed material, the work of the contemporary stone cutter principally involves the skilful use of large mechanical saws and

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polishers. This equipment ranges from huge, diamond-tipped saws with multiple blades that rhythmically move back and forth, gradually slicing similarly sized slabs, to delicate wire cutting machines for smaller and more elaborate forms. Both require a continuous, copious flow of water to cool the heat caused by the friction of metal on stone. Once cut, large polishing machines inexorably smooth the surfaces of the cut stone. Though such work does not resemble the tactile and intimate engagements deployed by the stonemasons of yesteryear, the studious positioning of stone and blade requires a steady hand, an experienced eye and safety conscious habits. This work is certainly not unsensuous: the relentless slicing through of the stone by the powerful machines solicits a sense of lithic tactility. Moreover, after it has been machine-cut and polished, the bluestone invites a desire to run one’s hand over its smooth surfaces and to gaze upon its appealingly deep grey tones. This provokes a sense of wonder at the transformation of an uneven and rounded boulder into discrete stone slabs that will serve as uniformly sized elements in a pavement or building. Moreover, the machines themselves might be conceived as giant, efficient tools that still require an entanglement with skilled human bodies. They possess a mechanical aesthetic that emphasises the sensuous interplay between metal and stone, and express the powerful combinatory agencies of electricity, kinetic energy and water. Nonetheless, workers here are periodically somatically shielded from sensory engagement with these stone-processing operations. For the screeching din generated by some machines requires the systematic use of ear plugs and headphones to protect hearing, sensorially insulating equipment that is supplemented by the gloves and hard hats synonymous with heavy industry. Tim Ingold distinguishes the skilled artisan from the ‘machine operative, a workman of certainty, whose activity is constrained by the parameters of a determining system’ (2011: 59), who starts and stops the machine according to preordained settings. He echoes the contention of John Ruskin that unlike the factory worker, the stonemason has a creative autonomy that imprints his identity on the stone, with its imperfections and all. But I question whether the stone cutter who deploys advanced machinery is quite as unskilled as this implies, for as I have inferred, there remains an intimacy with stone, and as Ingold himself maintains,

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‘even the most finely tuned circular saw… is susceptible to irregularities and imperfections’ (2011: 62). Making decisions about which stones to cut and where, and about where to insert the expanding chemical compound into the drill holes to split large boulders into separate blocks, require a sensory assessment of bluestone’s variable qualities. As I have emphasised in Chapter 2, contemporary bluestone forms, smooth, regular and polished, could only have been achieved in former times by unfeasibly extended toil. They provoke a wholly distinctive sensory experience that greatly diverges from an encounter with the rugged, rough cut stone manually fashioned by the mason. These transformed sensory engagements also resonate with brick production. In an earlier era, clay was obtained from the earth with shovels and picks, and arranged in long piles to weather for a number of days. It would then be relocated to shallow pits where water was added. There, it was worked further by feet—animal or human, or in a horse-drawn ‘pug mill’—before becoming sufficiently malleable for the moulding process to begin. A worker would knead a small ‘clot’ of clay before forcing it into a rectangular iron and hardwood frame, creating the shape of the brick. These were then dried in sunlight using a device called the ‘hack’, an object resembling a wheelbarrow, which could hold two rows of thirteen bricks. Bricks would then dry over the course of three to five weeks. This is radically different from the accelerated manufacture of contemporary bricks, where clay is crushed, mixed with water and numerous other additives that improve consistency, texture and colour, and subsequently extruded by machine into a continuous ribbon that is mechanically cut into standardised units before being fired. Stone and brick that is machine worked and that which is hand-cut possess different affordances that testify to the means by which they are produced. They are charged with divergent sensorial properties. To emphasise, both mechanical and manual stonework require an ‘improvisatory feeling-forward’, both ‘visceral and intellectual’ (Ingold 2018: 160); neither are merely dull and repetitive but respond to the conditions at hand through a focused attentiveness that adapts to contingency and variation. Both modes of working with stone epitomise a skilled, practical orientation to the world (Hockey and Allen-Collinson 2009).

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However, the contemporary reliance on machine produced lithic material, as with other systematic, standardised commodities, has presaged the emergence of desires to more intimately engage with matter once more, as I have discussed in Chapter 2. Such yearnings are evident in the surge of making cultures that in the case of stone range from drystone walling, making individual concrete mixes and bricks, and sculpting. Carr and Gibson (2016: 299) contend that this ‘renaissance in small-scale making’ has especially emerged in industrial cities where ‘re-connections are being forged with themes such as quality, providence, craft, ethics, tacit design knowledge, haptic skill and the value of physical labour’. In considering these returns to skilled sensory engagement, an older Australian mode of working with stone is flint-knapping, the practice of rubbing or striking a stone with another, harder ‘hammer’ stone to fashion sharp edges so as to create a scraper, knife or other bladed implement. Such skilled work has been carried out for millennia amongst Aboriginal people, as testified by the stone scatterings that proliferate in certain locations on Melbourne’s outskirts. John, a Bundjalung/Yorta Yorta man on his father’s side, from New South Wales, and currently working at Museums Victoria, has spent some time practising the ancient art. John emphasises that patience is required in order to acquire a feel for the practice and become proficient at striking the stone with the requisite accuracy and force—neither too energetically nor with insufficient power. Hands need to become used to the action and to the rough textures of the stone that they enclose, so that they become stronger and develop harder skin. John discloses how the flint-knapper becomes adept at quickly identifying the qualities of particular stones and those areas that will fracture when struck with a percussive, reverberating strike. Some stones may possess a consistent granularity whereas others might contain imperfections. An awareness of these different qualities informs how hard the blow needs to be to achieve flaking, yet John considers that the most economic methods are to keep up a steady rhythm through ‘percussion flaking’ so that pressure is consistently applied to the stone or alternatively, to gradually apply increasing ‘pressure flaking’ to break off small fragments. As a creator of sculptures wrought from other kinds of material, including wood and glass, John remarked on the pleasures of coming

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to know the qualities and potentialities of these kinds of lithic material. Critically, however, in undertaking the practice of flint-knapping, he describes how he came to experience a deep emotional connection with the past in aligning his emerging skills, and his sensory and embodied experiences, with those ancestors who have for many thousands of years similarly practised this craft. Flint-knapping, he contends, has helped him feel more acutely connected to country.

The Sculptor Sculpting with stone involves an intense focus on the near-at-hand, specifically on the block of stone that is progressively shaped, and this immersive concentration solicits intimacy with its textures, colours, grain, weight, friability, hardness, variability and pliability. A stone cannot be manipulated in any way that a sculptor may desire; rather, they must adapt to its peculiarities. Consequently, only sustained absorption over a period of time will foster skilled knowledge and a feel for the affordances of particular stone types. For instance, Peter Randall-Page (2018: 47) notes how granite ‘does not lend itself to Hellenistic or Baroque flights of fancy. Granite is conducive to a heavy, understated sensuality, fecundity rarer than frippery’. Fellow sculptor David Paton (2013: 1076) also comments on the distinctiveness of working with granite, noting how the ‘sweet thud of impact, that to some would seem impossibly hard, to the mason is a fluid bodily motion’. He goes on to discuss how his working body has become accustomed to its qualities, as ‘muscle readily accustomed to this activity flexes without complaint; the granite accommodating an impact that on other stones would render it useless, bruised, or even shattered’. By contrast, Alison Leitch identifies the salient qualities of ‘whiteness, translucency, hardness, permeability, mutability, weight, veining’ in the enduringly popular Carrara marble (2010: 70), affordances with which many quarriers, masons and sculptors work. She also notes that the quarry workers are also habituated to the flaws in the stone that may emerge during the process of working upon it, finding unexpected fossils or fault lines or colours.

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Unlike painting or drawing, sculpting does not usually involve a gaze at a scene or object that is being depicted on canvas or paper; moreover, there is no single surface upon which concentration is directed but a three-dimensional perspective which tends to involve successively turning the stone around to be viewed from various positions and worked with from different angles of approach. With a stone sculpture, while the original surface may be transformed through smoothing and polishing, the material out of which the piece is wrought remains wholly apparent, unlike the canvas which becomes covered by paint. Sculpting is thus a particularly intense sensory encounter with matter, as hands wield tools that work with stone in diverse ways, eyes continuously scrutinise the emerging form, and the whole body shifts weight and stance to obtain the best angle at which to work, as dust spills out into nostrils and onto skin. Time passes without much notice as focus is commanded by the task at hand. And like John Wylie’s experience as a novice painter, sculpting involves ‘a kind of initiation into new styles of attending and contemplating’ (Wylie and Webster 2018: 7). In exploring the sensory and affective experiences of sculpting with stone, I focus on my own brief engagement with a very distinctive material at a sculpture workshop before drawing on the reflections of a more experienced sculptor. At a sculpture workshop in Melbourne, along with 12 other novices, I was introduced to the tools that we would be using—rasps, mallets, chisels, saws, drills and planes—and to the stone that we would be attempting to sculpt, Mount Gambier limestone, quarried close to the South Australian border with Victoria. The limestone, formed on a shallow ocean bed around 35 million years ago, is composed of the skeletal remains of marine animals such as bryozoa, bivalves and echinoids. This creamy white material continues to provide dimension stone for buildings and is treasured because of its acoustic and insulation qualities. Exceptionally porous, it is usually worked upon after being saturated with water to produce a more consistent texture and to ensure that the quantity of dust is minimised. The limestone is particularly soft and pliant, with few disruptive constituents, and thus ideal for beginners. It is easy to work with and its malleable consistency is manipulable into a variety of forms in a short span of time. However, it is not amenable to carving fine detail or elaborate ornamentation, offering a

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finish that is always somewhat uneven and rough. Instead of requiring the time-consuming and arduous task of gradually chipping away at large unwanted portions, chunks of excess material can be simply sawn off or chopped away with a small axe. Chisels can cut with little resistance and knives can shape without the need for a mallet. Drills readily forge holes, angular surfaces can be rounded with files, and clefts and lines are easily etched into the fabric. Although the sporadic disruptive occurrence of a concealed, much harder fossil of shell or bivalve must be negotiated, progress in sculpting is largely uninterrupted by other unexpected inconsistencies. The acquiescence of the limestone to gentle chiselling spares the sinews of the hands, and unlike engagements with harder, more resilient stone, sculpting with wet stone sidesteps the discomfort wrought by the mingling of dust and sweat in the crinkles and crevices of the working body. In this moderate bodily encounter with stone, muscular exertion is not strenuous, blisters are avoided and hands do not cramp. The blocks are light and can be easily manoeuvred around the workbench. It is certainly pleasing to manipulate the Mount Gambier limestone with these tools, to create shapely forms at speed and feel the easy surrender of the material. The swiftness of the sculpting means that an improvisatory approach can be mobilised wherein forms quickly assume shape and can be easily amended, while relationships between the rectilinear and curvilinear, the smooth and the rough, and the detailed and the crude can swiftly be assessed. Despite these virtues, I felt a sense of loss when beholding my finished work at the conclusion of the workshop, though I was pleased with the abstract design that I had created. For it lacked a textural uniformity or shine, and there was thus no compulsion to pleasingly run the hand or lips over the smooth fabric, to commune intimately with the stone, to fold it into the body. Its dazzling whiteness partly compensates for this, for placed outside in daylight, any hollows and angles are sharply accentuated, but its rough texture promotes a desire to work with smoother lithic material that could be sensuously shaped into a more highly finished sculpture. To develop this understanding of a sensual engagement with stone through sculpting, I now consider the eloquent reflections of Jenny, an experienced sculptor from Melbourne. Jenny generally uses marble,

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alabaster and soapstone in her practice, lithic substances that are all imported from outside Victoria due to what she perceives as a dearth of local stone that is well suited to sculpting. She particularly focuses on her attraction to alabaster and marble, bringing out the particular affordances of sculpture formed from each stone type. In the case of the former she relates: For me, the alabasters, especially the pale-coloured alabasters, are a very feminine stone and I feel that I need to make very soft and very flowing, gorgeous, rounded and organic-looking pieces. It’s the look of it, the sense I get from it. I look at it and start doing something flowing with it. You want to touch it… because it has a kind of translucence and a fragility though it’s still quite hard. So that lovely movement in the stone is what I want to expose. Rather than create a thing that’s rather geometric and rigid, I like to work with the way the stone moves and behaves.

She continues by discussing the properties of marble, which she regards as ‘a different beast altogether’: I’ve done a couple of pieces in pink marble and white marble. It certainly behaves differently to any other stone. There’s something very in-depth about it. I don’t know if that’s because of the many years that it has taken for it to be created but marble has a creaminess and an earthiness to it even though it’s hard - and it’s sparkling too, which is always a lovely thing; the crystals sparkle, not hugely but there is a glisten. It holds form and edges beautifully, but I think marble can get very cold it it’s too angular, and so I like to make a soft, flowing and organic form.

After having discussed the virtues and specific affordances of her favourite stones with which to sculpt, she considers how a tactile knowing characterises her practice: The more you work with it, the more it becomes tactile, more than just a lump of stone. And it’s got ridges and roughness and things. You start to create shapes or a line and my instinct is to feel that line because I think you feel more than you see. With your hands you’ll feel certain things that are wrong whereas with certain light you can’t necessarily detect if

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it’s wrong. Every day, as you press forward, it feels different until you get to that point where… ‘Ah, I love this shape, I like that hole there, I like the roughness that I’ve created there’… that’s on a tactile basis, and on an emotional basis. Because part of the joy is the process or carving, it’s like I handle this stone, I can see where it’s going, and problem-solving comes in: how am I going to achieve that? Is that going to look good? And you’re constantly processing those questions without asking them, so it’s this constant evolution. The joy of course, is at the end, when it’s all finished, and you polish it up and you’re happy with it. Maybe there’s a little bit of colour that I’ve preserved as a feature, or some raw stone, so that people realise what the raw stone is like.

Jenny makes evident that this ongoing sensuous interaction with the material is mobilised through the sense of touch, echoing the arguments of Marchand discussed above, but she also refers to a sonic engagement with stone as it is worked that also informs the sculpting process: The sound is really important because when you tap a stone, it rings, and if it doesn’t ring there’s either a fault or a different kind of stone in there or maybe there’s a chunk that has already got a fracture, and that chunk’s going to fall off. But the sound of it is really lovely too, so marble, when you hit it with a chisel it just pings, it chimes and resonates. If you hit soapstone with a chisel it sounds different to the sound of marble. They all make very different sounds depending on how dense the stone is.

These sonic qualities of stone, fundamental to the sculpting process, are notable in other contexts. Geologists frequently deploy their hammers to hear whether the ring of a stone suggests that it is loose or connected to the bedrock. These tones are also sought by tourists who visit the aptly named Bell Rock range in Western Australia to hear the ringing sounds of the gabbro when struck. The sonic properties are especially refined in the production of stone xylophones and have been acutely investigated by Italian artist Pinuccio Sciola in his sounding stones or pietre sonore, large limestone and basalt sculptures that emit a plethora of resonant musical notes when rubbed or hit. In concluding, Jenny attempts to further identify the improvisational skilful and sensory processes that are involved in sculpting stone:

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I rarely map out a sculpture in total; sometimes I have an idea of what I want to create from that piece of stone, but I am not sure of the actual form so I think what’s the best use I get can from the stone rather than trying to shoehorn a design in. I’ll turn it upside-down and work out how it is going to stand. But it’s not always a thought… the brain is processing on a different level. A good analogy for this is what my son says, he used to dance. I’d ask him ‘Well how do you know when to do that move at that point? Don’t you think about what kind of steps are going to come up next?’ and he smiled and said, ‘I just go to that place that you go to while you sculpt’.

The heightened knowledge of stone that has emerged out of a career working with diverse lithic materials marks Jenny’s experience as a sculptor. She has come to possess a highly attuned, skilful and sensuous form of knowing about different kinds of stones and their distinctive properties that has been deepened by time and experience.

The Performance Artist: Smashing Stones In contrast to the deliberate and immersed engagement with sculpting stone, a more vigorous encounter with lithic matter typifies the event staged by the performance artist that I now discuss. The gruelling heavy labour undertaken by convicts and workers in breaking rocks, working in quarries, and building roads in nineteenth-century Melbourne, was explored in a three-and-a-half-hour endurance performance staged by artist Amy-Jo Jory in 2015. In Listening to Stones Part 2, the artist used a sledgehammer to smash numerous one and a half tons of bluestone blocks that were arranged into a semicircle around her. The nineteenthcentury blocks had been hand cut by convicts to form the walls of a now demolished building. Besides exploring the experience of undergoing the trial of very hard labour, Jory sought to advance several other ideas through her performance. On one level, the performance was an act of resistance to the ongoing process to cover colonised land with lithic layers, and she sought to break up a small part of this material layer and return it to the ground from which it was extracted. Explicating this, Jory described that the returning of this stone back to country

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was like opening a mainline to the past. A hammered, methodical howl…a sense of a violent rejection: of colonial history, of gender stereotypes, of ecological destruction. These ideas were bound up in the historical, square, hand-cut stones of the past. I was releasing them

This aligns with the discussion in the previous chapter about how the land on which Melbourne stands has been sensorially transformed, heavily coated with lithic and other material surfaces that cover up the earth and stone that lies beneath. The artist also thus looked to challenge highly gendered assumptions that heavy work with stone is solely the preserve of men by exemplifying how a woman may also perform arduous labour. Indeed, the sight of a woman engaged in such toil proved arresting to passers-by and onlookers (Fig. 7.2). Initially, the performance was taxing, yet the artist persisted with the task until almost all the blocks had triumphantly been reduced to rubble. An early sign of the physical toll the work was taking was the swelling of her right forearm, instigated by the painful vibrations caused by each

Fig. 7.2 Smashing bluestone bock with sledgehammer, Amy-Jo Jory (Photograph by Amy-Jo Jory)

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hefty blow of sledgehammer on obdurate stone. The toughness of the bluestone meant that as many as 40 strokes could be required before the material cracked, with some stones only able to be chipped at their edges before a breakthrough was achieved, though the variable, unpredictable consistencies of the blocks caused others to be shattered with less effort. In the early stages of the performance, Jory explains that it was difficult to achieve an effective grip on the sledgehammer’s long wooden handle. Yet gradually, becoming skilful, she developed a rhythmic swinging motion to ensure that the momentum of the sledgehammer’s metal head struck the stone with sufficient force, so that the hard work was accomplished by entering a state of flow described above. As she explains, ‘I was in a heightened state where pain was irrelevant. I felt it in the beginning, but it disappeared. It was just the sound of my hammer smashing on rock and releasing it. I was calm, determined’. The rhythm of work enfolded the task of scooping up the shattered fragments of pulverised stones and adding them to a two-foot-high and wide line that extended away from the site of labour. After three and half hours of pounding the stones, she ceased, realising that unlike slaves and prisoners she was not subject to the punishing regimes enforced by overseers: ‘I did not have somebody threatening me to work beyond this point’. Although understandably exhausted, the work brought forth a sense of achievement and pride in mobilising the physical and mental strength necessary to complete such an onerous task: ‘I was tired after hours of doing this extreme labour, I was also electrified. I was fierce’. This resilience was fortified by the supportive, empathetic response of onlookers to the extreme work being performed: ‘I carried the viewers with me. When the stone did break, there were audible sounds of relief from the audience’. The physical effort was thus affectively transmitted to the watching crowd. Besides conjuring up the excessively cruel laboriousness of convict labour, the environmental and cultural damage caused by the lithic layering of the city, and the reification of gendered work roles, Listening to Stones Part 2 was a viscerally and emotionally engaging spectacle for onlookers. Though the artist describes her focused determination to get the job done through developing a sense of flow and blocking out painful

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sensations, such labour can be conceived as an intensely sensuous engagement that encounters bluestone’s resilience and variability, and in which repeated blows against an unyielding lithic material impact profoundly upon the body’s muscles, sinews and bones. The performance reminds us of the intense labour and physical energies that have been expended in creating the city, countless acts that have laid down the foundations and structures of the built environment. Unlike many of the sensory practices discussed above, the smashing of stone blocks summons up the dogged perseverance required by manual workers to accomplish laborious tasks, and Jory’s performance conjures a vicarious sense of the pain felt throughout the body, muscular exhaustion, and the discomfort generated by a film of dust and sweat that covers the skin and clogs the throat.

The Lithographer Lithography is a printmaking process that uses a slab of a lithographic limestone or a flat metal surface to print images or text onto papers. Though lithographic stone is found elsewhere, the most popular source remains the original supply found in the Bavarian quarries between Solenhofen and Kelheim, where a limestone of exceptionally dense and fine grain is extracted. It is easily split into plates which are polished before export. Formed in shallow lagoons that were stagnant and thus inhospitable to microbes, the limestone is also devoid of other minerals that might taint its evenness. To make a lithographic print, images are drawn directly onto the surface of the flat stone plate with an oil-based implement, usually a wax crayon. The stone is subsequently treated with gum arabic supplemented with a small quantity of nitric acid so that only the area that has been drawn upon will accept the printing ink that is subsequent applied. The rest of the plate, which must be damp, will not accept the oily ink and the crayoned area resists water. While a smooth metal surface is often favoured by American lithographers in search of technical exactitude, the smooth limestone material allows for greater diversity in drawing techniques and affords the imprinting of more subtle tones, marks and shades. It also records the material qualities of the

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stone in the final print and has proved to be more popular amongst European artists. Kyoko is a Melbourne-based artist for whom lithography is a highly pleasing and sensuous practice. Though the stone plates are weighty and somewhat cumbersome to move around, the artist considers that this induces a disposition of care and reverence for them. She describes the experience of making the image as a ‘sincere’ process, in that the designs drawn on the stone plate yield consistent results in the finished print: ‘what you draw is what you get’. She states that ‘the beauty of drawing on a litho stone is the smoothness, and how the surface of the stone is hard so it’s great to draw on, but simultaneously soft so that I can scrape the surface easily to introduce some highlights over a black drawing’. Subsequently, when treating the drawing with gum arabic to etch the stone, Kyoko regards the pleasing act of patting the surface gently as extending the sense that ‘I am treating something really precious’. The final act that follows the making of the lithograph is to ‘grain’ the stone, a practice intent on removing all traces of the previous image and preparing the stone for new work. Water is applied and a flat, round grinding stone is manipulated by means of a vertical handle to inscribe repeated circular motions so as to ensure that all areas of the plate are abraded. The artist explains how the tactile feel of the stone, the sonic rhythms produced by the grinding and the sight of the milky, gritty residue that collects on the plate’s surface add to the sensory satisfaction of the lithographic process. Kyoko appreciates the origins of this imported Bavarian stone and the ‘landscape from which the stone was excavated’, and this is compounded by an awareness that the plates with which she works to make a new image have long been used and reused in the studio where she practices her art: As I prepare the surface of the stone by graining the previous image off, I imagine the countless images that the stone contained and hands of countless artists. As I draw, I think about how I add my image to the memory of the stone which is continuously erased to welcome new drawings.

Further, she draws a comparison between the ephemerality of the lithographic design on the stone and the abiding presence of the stone itself.

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Clearly, the moving of the stone, the practice of drawing upon it, the application of the gum, the washing of the stone, the application of ink, the printing that occurs when stone meets paper and the final process of grinding away the image are a sequence of sensuous, intimate engagements. Through these successive practices, the different affordances of this highly particular limestone become familiar to the artist and are inextricably entangled with the creative process of making images. The characteristic sensory forms of knowing stone and the skills required to work with it in lithography greatly diverge from the sensations and aptitudes developed by the other artisanal practices discussed above. In developing these skills and ways of knowing, lithographers respond to the distinctive affordances of the special limestone that has proved well-matched to their objectives since the early nineteenth century. A unique, skilful engagement with stone is also characteristic of the final creative practice I discuss.

The Stone Balancer: Freeze In exploring how drystone walling requires a sensory familiarity with lithic material, Mhairi Paterson discusses how the hands of experienced wallers ‘quickly moved over stones, fluently collecting information about shape, texture and weight’ (2015: 212). She notes that they also develop a recognition of the lively forces within stone and an ability to accommodate these agencies in the construction of walls. These intimate, skilful tactile assessments of individual stones and the ways in which these qualities must be considered in their relationships with other stones are expressed in an advanced form in the work of stone balancers. On 22 April 2018, at Melbourne’s Botanical Gardens, around 60 spectators gathered at the visitor centre to attend Freeze, a show by Dutch performance artist Nick Steur. Walking to the event site in silence as requested, we became acutely attuned to the sounds, sights and smells of the gardens, a sensory attentiveness that became more focused when we selected a rock from amongst dozens placed along the circular bench of a large gazebo. Our awareness of its weight, shape, colour and texture intensified as we carried it. Subsequently, upon arrival at the lawn

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at the southern end of the Ornamental Lake on which the performance was to take place, the artist entreated us to collectively arrange the stones into a ring that we sat behind, forming our own human circle. The interior of the circle was ringed by eight rectangular, metre high steel poles implanted in the ground. This formed the prelude to the performance which commenced shortly thereafter, a demonstration of the art of stone balancing. Steur does not especially focus on the shape, texture or size of the stones he selects, but he does choose lithic material from the area in which his demonstration is staged. In accordance with this practice, he chose pieces of bluestone from the central Botanical Gardens as well as chunks of sandstone transported from the Cranbourne Botanical Gardens over 45 kilometres away, the latter being far heavier than the bluestone. Accordingly, the qualities of both kinds of stones, together with their idiosyncratic shapes, sizes and textures had to be taken into account. The artist explained his method Well, I found the density, the weight very interesting because they look lighter but once you pick them up it causes you to re-examine… the volcanic rock is the opposite, lighter than expected and their texture makes for more possibilities in balancing.

Circling the arrangement slowly, he selected a stone, wedged it into the hollow opening at the apex of a pole and then chose another one or two stones that he attempted to balance on the first stone. Focusing intently, meditatively, the artist ran the stone through his hands, piercingly scrutinised it, stood still and considered the possibilities, tried out different angles and centres of balance, and continuously assessed the weight of stones. Adopting different stances in his blue overalls, Steur balanced a stone on his shoulder, tucked it under his arm or held it aloft in preparation as he endeavoured to find the centre of balance, making minute adjustments to the positions of the stones. The resulting arrangements were achieved by placing small edges and points of separate stones together so that they balanced in ways that appeared impossible. Each set of balancing stones also formed a unique, temporary sculpture, with the shapely forms harmoniously relating to

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each other in surprising juxtapositions that shifted according to the angle at which they were viewed. The silent onlookers seemed to regard the forms with a sense of wonder, described by Martin Evans (2012: 127) as an ‘altered, compellingly intensified attention’ that saturates experience in the moment through which the world is made newly-present to us. The friction between the stones that occurs at the small balance point counteracts the gravitational pull, keeping the stones in place. In other words, a state of equilibrium is maintained since the force of friction is equal to that of gravity. Though some of the arrangements remain in place for the duration of the performance, others collapse. This seems wholly unpredictable and erratic, with some falling soon after completion, while others tumble many minutes after they have been composed. The reasons for the collapses are rarely attributable to obvious causes that can be sensed. An indiscernible breeze may dislodge a stone, or perhaps vibrations from nearby traffic or footsteps, minute episodes of erosion at the contact point, or perhaps the effects of gravity as the combined weight of stones gradually makes an impression on the ground. Does air quality subtly change or is it that moisture levels alter in such a way as to influence the stability of the arrangement? Quite starkly, the stones are revealed to be intimately entangled with a world of unnoticed, non-human forces. The falling of the stones reveals that their position, like that of all matter, is dependent upon their own qualities—here of weight, mass and form—and the innumerable agencies that churn in and around the space that they occupy, potent forces that produce immediate effects or those that are impactful over longer periods of time. Such agencies may be instantly evident or indiscernible in producing the displacements, eruptions, catalysis, combinations, flows and reactions that seethe through all space. In balancing stone, the artist acknowledges the vitality of the ways in which his skilled practice coexists with these multiple forces: I believe balance doesn’t exist. Balancing, yes, but balance no. Because everything moves. The only static is movement. It’s inevitable that they fall for nothing is static.

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The performance suggests that, although they are characterised by widely varying temporalities, all material arrangements are precarious. It is as if through gravitational pull, there is an earthly will that stones should return to the realm from which they came, the earth’s interior, to be absorbed once more into the boiling liquid mass that only solidifies when it reaches the earth’s surface. The stone balancer, however, seems preoccupied in an intensely concentrated pursuit through which the highly varied affordances of stone are assessed in terms of the possibilities for aligning them together in relationships of balance, if only for a short time. Weight, texture and shape are all carefully considered, for a highly skilled, experienced understanding of these lithic attributes are integral to the success of stone balancing.

Conclusions In Chapter 2, I discussed Carolan’s (2007) contention that urban inhabitants suffer from an epistemic distance in lacking knowledge about where and how things come into the city and recompose its fabric. Besides acquiring knowledge about these commodity flows, he also suggests that connections with this material composition can be grounded through a sensorial knowing, through becoming aware of how bodies and environment are co-constituted. This chapter identifies one approach to exploring how more attuned ways of sensing forms of materiality overcomes this contemporary alienation from matter. Here, I have explored how very different ways of working with stone are productive of skilled and sensuous understandings, forms of knowledge that veer sharply away from classificatory and geological comprehension, and are developed through a sustained, intimate relationship with stone over time. By interviewing a range of skilled artisans and artists who work with it in diverse ways, I have further exposed stone’s multiple affordances and potentialities, as well as its capacities to enhance creativity and foster sensuous and emotional experiences. The very divergent forms of stone worked with by these people underpin the manifold qualities of different lithic matter and the complex and inventive human engagements that this has solicited. Ways of knowing that

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emerge are based on affective and sensory attunements that develop through focused, sustained immersion in training and experimenting with techniques that explore stone’s properties. The workers featured here have developed skilled vision, manual dexterity, a heightened sense of touch, awareness of sound, kinaesthetic abilities, muscular aptitude and a pragmatic, ergonomic consciousness through which the fragile, friable, durable, textural and pliable qualities of stone come to be known. Their intimate, skilled, sensory and affective engagements with stone produce bodies with different sensory capacities and different attunements towards different lithic affordances and potentials. These quarry workers, stonemasons, flint-knappers, sculptors, performance artists, lithographers and stone balancers have developed specific skills germane to their objectives, skills quite peculiar to the job in hand. This diversity emphasises how any authoritative assertions that the qualities of lithic matter are identifiable, or that stone possesses essential properties that can be disclosed to those who work with it, are misplaced. Such notions would be further decentred if I had focused on the very different stony engagements entailed in bricklaying, road making, concrete mixing or kerb laying, for instance. This underscores the larger point that understanding space and materiality is always partial; it invariably depends upon dispositions, perspectives, objectives and desires. Those intimate with stone mobilise diverse skills and procedures that solicit different perceptions and sensory understandings in accordance with their working practices and intentions. While these artisans and artists can extend and deepen understandings about stone, they can only come to know stone in particular ways; they cannot capture its multiplicities. Indeed, as I explore in the final chapter, any claim from any disciplinary or practical orientation that asserts a full knowledge of stone is illusory and misplaced.

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References Carolan, M. (2007). Introducing the Concept of Tactile Space: Creating Lasting Social and Environmental Commitments. Geoforum, 38(6), 1264–1275. Carr, C., & Gibson, C. (2016). Geographies of Making: Rethinking Materials and Skills for Volatile Futures. Progress in Human Geography, 40 (3), 297– 315. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002). Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness. London: Random House. Evans, H. (2012). Wonder and the Clinical Encounter. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 33, 123–136. Grasseni, C. (2004). Skilled Vision: An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics. Social Anthropology, 12(1), 41–55. Hockey, J., & Allen-Collinson, J. (2009). The Sensorium at Work: The Sensory Phenomenology of the Working Body. The Sociological Review, 57 (2), 217– 239. Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2018). Five Questions of Skill. Cultural Geographies, 25 (1), 159– 163. King, R., & Weston, S. (1997). Geological Survey Report 112: Dimension Stone in Victoria. Melbourne: Geological Survey of Victoria. Leitch, A. (2007). Visualizing the Mountain: The Photographer as Ethnographer in the Marble Quarries of Carrara. Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 12(4), 417–429. Leitch, A. (2010). Materiality of Marble: Explorations in the Artistic Life of Stone. Thesis Eleven, 103(1), 65–77. Lyon, D. (2012). The Labour of Refurbishment: The Building and the Body in Space and Time. In S. Pink, D. Tutt, & A. Dainty (Eds.), Ethnographic Research in the Construction Industry (pp. 41–57). London: Routledge. Marchand, T. (2010). Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation Between Minds, Bodies, and Environment. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16, S1–S21. Marchand, T. (2012). Knowledge in Hand: Explorations of Brain, Hand and Tool. In R. Fardon, O. Harris, T. Marchand, C. Shore, V, Strang, R. Wilson, & C. Nuttall (Eds.), Handbook of Social Anthropology (pp. 260–269). The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology. London: Sage.

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Marks, L. (2002). Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Paterson, M. (2015). ‘Set in Stone?’ Building a New Geography of the Dry-Stone Wall (PhD thesis). University of Glasgow. Paton, D. (2013). The Quarry as Sculpture: The Place of Making. Environment and Planning A, 45 (5), 1070–1086. Randall-Page, P. (2018). Granite, Dartmoor. In M. Smalley (Ed.), Cornerstones: Subterranean Writings. Little Toller, Dorset: Little Toller Books. Smalley, M. (2018). Introduction. In M. Smalley (Ed.), Cornerstones: Subterranean Writings. Little Toller, Dorset: Little Toller Books. Vines, G. (1993). Quarry and Stone: Bluestone Quarrying, Stonemasonry and Building in Melbourne’s West. Highpoint City, VIC: Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West. Wylie, J., & Webster, C. (2018). Eye-Opener: Drawing Landscape Near and Far. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44 (1), 32–47.

Part VIII Temple

Shri Shiva Vishnu Temple, Carrum Downs, 36 km south west of central Melbourne, inspired by the ancient Indian style of South Indian Dravidian architecture, is an extravagant structure that stands out amidst the surrounding low-key landscape. In 1985, Melbourne’s growing Hindu community made the decision to install their own place of worship and purchased the semi-rural land on which the temple is founded. Now the temple had to be built, and this required the import of a particular kind of stone from India, as well as guidance from Indian religious, sculptural and architectural expertise; this material and spiritual connection has nourished the building’s continued evolution as Victoria’s largest Hindu temple. The first step was to source the foundation stones. Blocks of granite were cut in India, blessed by the chief priests at revered temples and transported to Carrum Downs, where they were installed during a ‘foundation stone laying’ ceremony in June 1988. The next significant stage was to employ skilled workers with the requisite know-how and in November 1992, a distinguished temple architect and team of eight artisans arrived from India and commenced work on the Shrines. Devised to accommodate all strands of Hindu belief, the temple had to accord with certain religious strictures, including the following of conventions about

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its orientation and its height above ground as well as the position of the sculptural deities on the two highly ornamental gopurams or towers, one constructed to honour Shiva, the other to celebrate Vishnu. The extravagant concrete sculptural figures that cluster above and around the front entrance were hand-crafted over a period of three years by a further six sculptors. They arrived from the state of Tamil Nadu in India in January 1994 to accelerate the pace of construction in order to meet the May 1994 deadline for the formal consecration, or Mahakumbabhishekam, of the temple. Drawing on highly skilled techniques deployed in South India, the sculptors create wire armatures that are manipulated into the rough shape of the figure, flesh out the form by using broken stone, brick or wood, and subsequently pour concrete over this skeleton to give it solidity and substance. The final stage involves the application of smooth cement over the whole form, with detailed carving creating the final figure. While the concrete for these sculptures was sourced locally, readymade, dark granite statues were imported from South India, probably sourced and carved at the town of Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu, renowned as a centre of stone carving artisanship, and placed into the interior of the temple. These idols are supplemented with panchaloha vigraha sculptures composed out of a combination of five metal alloys. Crucially, the dense, black granite is ideally suited for use as a material for sacred statues since the stone is untainted by the oil, milk, honey, sandal paste and other fluids that cascade over the godly forms. These offerings from devotees are part of the abisekam rituals that are staged in the belief that such substances will energise the divine figures. Though to the casual observer the temple might appear finished, it can never be completed. For customs of material maintenance decree that every 12 years, the building must be rejuvenated by an extensive programme of repair and refurbishment. Happily, its exuberant shapes will continue to contrast with the functional rectangular storage units and bungalows of the surrounding landscape for years to come.

Part VIII: Temple

Fig. 1 Shri Shiva Vishnu Temple, Carrum Downs

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8 The Ghosts of Urban Stone

Introduction: The Ghostly, the Eerie and the Excess of Stone In Joan Lindsay’s novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), a party of four schoolgirls and their teacher enter an ancient geologic realm in which time and space seem suspended. They ‘fall under the thrall of the rock’ (Fisher 2017: 53), and enter the ineffable and irresolvable, provoking the central unexplained mystery that focuses on the disappearance of four of them. Hanging Rock, 70 kilometres northwest of Melbourne, is certainly an arresting volcanic landform, replete with rounded sculptural formations, crevices and caves, narrow passages, monolithic stones and vertiginous drops. It is unsurprising that it has become suffused with intimations of mystery and legend following the dispossession of the native Aboriginal landholders, associations compounded by Lindsay’s tale. Within Melbourne’s environs, it has become the stony place most associated with the inexpressible, the eerie and the ghostly. However, in this chapter, I suggest that such associations abound in the city’s stone. In this book, I have focused on stone in Melbourne from a number of perspectives in seeking to extend understanding of urban materiality and enrich our everyday experience of the lithic. In this final chapter, I © The Author(s) 2020 T. Edensor, Stone, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1_8

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undercut the ways in which I have organised the chapters into separate narrative themes by arguing that stone can never be captured through any single theoretical perspective or focus. Dewsbury et al. (2002: 437) claim that the world ‘is more excessive than we can theorise’. Stone too, like all material forms and substances, is always excessive; it invites the telling of myriad stories. Accordingly, this chapter is composed out of minor tales of the lithic that do not conform to my narrative themes and slip away from the analytical frames I have deployed. This follows Cindi Katz’s (2017: 596) use of ‘minor theory’ which ‘reworks and decomposes “the major” from within’. Indeed, monolithic theories are ill equipped to encounter the superfluity of materialities, but nonetheless, some of the minor tales told below resonate with some of the key themes identified throughout this book—with power, temporality, material agency, memory and value, for instance. Largely, however, these small stories arise from encounters, and in refusing the explanatory frameworks of major theory, call for the utterance of conjectural connections and imaginative speculations. Becoming attentive and attuned to stone means that previously unnoticed objects, textures, absences and traces become apparent. Stony objects gather associations and summon up extant and vanished relations. They solicit stories and spawn unexpected affects and sensations. And others too tell their own stories about stone, imparting ideas and feelings about their own encounters with the lithic. In becoming immersed in an enquiry about stone and the city, stone’s multiplicities, historical trajectories and lively relations with other places, people and processes proliferate. I have already sought to solicit an appreciation of stone’s excessive capacities, its spooky resonances, vibrancies, becomings and mysteries by the insertion of short vignettes throughout the book that exceed the narrative themes I adopt in structuring chapters. All objects and forms of matter are ultimately only ever partially knowable, whether through representational or non-representational approaches; in this book, stone has served as an exemplary substance from which to acknowledge these epistemological and ontological limits. I follow Kathleen Stewart’s (1996: 5) approach towards the ‘haunting or exciting presence of traces, remainders and excess uncaptured by claimed meanings’ that reside in stony things, and speculate about their presence

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or absence. Why are these lithic entities located here? Who placed them here? How do they fit in with the place in which they are found and how do they relate to other things? How have they changed and are changing? What used to accompany them and is now gone? To what and where might they lead us? Before I tell of the teeming mysteries and obscurities manifest in Melbourne’s stones, I contextualise my stories by drawing out conceptions of the multiple temporalities of the city and salient notions about haunting, the eerie and the ineffable. Kevin Lynch (1972) contends that the city is subjected to continuous re-composition through the ‘accumulation of overlapping traces from successive periods, each trace modifying and being modified by the new additions, to produce something like a collage of time’. Melbourne, like other cities of diverse vintage, is similarly constituted by a ‘pluritemporal landscape’ that contains ‘discordant moments’ within a ‘mosaic of sites’ that resonate with different temporalities, rhythms and origins (Crang and Travlou 2001: 174). These incongruous elements are not always immediately noticeable, but like the city of Zaira depicted by Italo Calvino, traces of the past are ‘written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls’ (1978: 11). The emergence and disappearance of all urban materialities are hugely variable, subject to ‘different relations and durations of movement, speed and slowness’ (Latham and McCormack 2004: 705). Some decay, some vanish, others endure. Outside ever-changing central urban areas, in places not caught up in dynamic regeneration schemes, traces of the past may linger more prominently, untouched by urgent desires for change (Edensor 2008). Yet clues about the past pervade both mundane and spectacular spaces, for even systematic transformation leaves residual traces of that which was there before. As Louise Crewe (2011: 27) remarks, ‘things are dismantled, cast aside, destroyed, and disposed of but remain in countless material and immaterial forms, traces, remnants, fragments, and memories’. In their residual state, these traces thwart desires to continually restore and remake the city, or stabilise it in the face of entropy, and they interrupt the experiential flow of the present, interjecting inferences, affects, sensations and fantasies. This highlights

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how, as Coole and Frost (2010: 2) maintain, a plenitude of immaterial resonances is inextricably entangled with materiality, including ‘imagination, emotions, values, meanings’. Affective and sensory responses to vestigial things underline how humans are not distinct from materiality but are imbricated in its continuous emergence as part of the ‘multitude of interlocking systems and forces’ that contribute to its vitality, and render matter ‘active, selfcreative, productive, unpredictable’ (ibid.: 9). As I have discussed in the introduction, an object is never discrete or self-contained but is better conceived as a knot constituted by threads that trail beyond it towards multiple other connections. But as things gets moved around, networks evaporate and meanings and purposes shift or disappear, things are marooned, becoming detached from the chains of signifiers or networks that gave them meaning and purpose. Other things are reassembled in settings in which they form new symbolic and practical alliances with different objects. Some things bear traces of outmoded functions or styles while others bear hieroglyphic inscriptions untranslatable for those who do not possess the codes. Some are concealed only to erupt or leak out from the underground to which they have been consigned. These material residues, peculiarities, incongruities, traces and absences contribute to ‘the stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants’ (De Certeau 1984: 107). I particularly focus on how we might consider the haunted, eerie and ineffable qualities of stone to capture these multiple temporalities, and the ways in which stone refuses categorisation, produces excessive meanings and arouses unanticipated feelings. Stone is a particularly salient material through which to explore these strange resonances because of its longevity as a consistent, enduring urban element that so often bears traces or conjures lingering reverberations of former non-human and human life, records outmoded cultural and political fashions, signifies the absence of what once resided in a location, and reminds us of things that have been concealed or forgotten. One useful trope through which to explore such excessive effects is the ghost, for ghosts are ubiquitous, emerging in encounters with vestiges of the city’s past. As Jo Maddern and Peter Adey (2008) claim, exploring the ghostly is about being curious about those obdurate elements that

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somehow remain amidst ongoing processes of urban becoming. Synonymous with material obduracy, stone bears many kinds of signs that signify ghostly agencies wherein ‘something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there… makes itself known or apparent’ (Gordon 2008: 8). Such traces often persist despite attempts to update, renovate, remove or refurbish parts of the urban fabric, unsettling the present, interrogating its certainties and assumptions. As Lars Frers (2013: 433) submits, haunting may pervade urban life ‘as an eerie undercurrent that threatens to destabilize established categories of self as well as place’. With the appearance of the ghostly and the weird, a ‘sneaky feeling’ emerges that suggests ‘that boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar, homely and unhomely are more porous, leaky and precarious than normally assumed’ (Pors 2016: 1645), as past elements return to haunt and enchant daily life. Awareness of a haunting may be triggered by a sharp sensory or affective response to a usually unnoticed thing (Frers 2013), or be provoked by an encounter with the noises, smells and textures that formerly pervaded parts of the city. Such reverberations may also trigger remembered sensations of places in which we have lived, sites in which we have played or things we have handled (Edensor 2008). Moreover, the material and the immaterial, and the actual and the virtual may entwine (Brettel 2016), as unexpected intimations of the past resonate with halfremembered images, old television footage, historical narratives, grandparents’ tales and museum visits. Yet such hauntings are often only halfrecognisable and difficult to grasp. They may disrupt, distort and trouble the present or be welcomed as benign spirits who charm, fascinate or recall intimacies. Ghosts may summon abject, strange or unknowable pasts or conjure up potential or lost futures. In extending the notion of the strange beyond haunting, Mark Fisher (2017: 15) contends that the ‘weird’ lies beyond the familiar; it is not recuperable to that which is customarily experienced: ‘a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here’. The weird is ‘marked by an exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it’. Fisher also foregrounds the ‘eerie’ as characterised by juxtapositions which seem to make no sense and do not belong together. The eerie thus captures those

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enigmatic objects that are unidentifiable or of uncertain provenance, but that linger in space long after the agents that made and situated them have disappeared. These things seem to be situated with material companions that do not align with them or are located in spaces in which they seem to be uneasily accommodated. More prosaically, ghostly, weird and eerie things are arresting because they have not been incorporated into prevalent spatial design codes. Instead, they disturb normative spatial orders, seeming to belong to another realm or time, disrupting privileged meanings and functions. In many cases, patina-encrusted surfaces are refurbished, and remnants that do not conform to spatial designs are either incorporated or discarded (Crisman 2007). Makeovers of heritage sites and repurposed industrial sites also seek to minimise ambiguity by such cleansing, and by selective strategies to narrate particular material elements and guide visitors around preferred routes while extinguishing other stories and ignoring other objects (Edensor 2005). The stony residues, remnants, inscribed surfaces and outmoded objects depicted below have so far escaped such ordering processes (also see Armstrong 2010). In what follows, I provide short accounts of the spectral traces of the violent eruptions, volcanic flows and slow particle sedimentation of ancient geological history contained in the fabric of stone. I then explore how the symbolic and practical uses, dreamings and stories of stone that formerly circulated amongst indigenous Australians pervade the Victorian landscape, before looking at the vanished trade routes that connected Melbourne with places from far and wide and the phantom roads and rail tracks that conveyed stone to the city. Subsequently, I consider the often unreadable colonial and nationalist memorials that continue to haunt the city with their outmoded symbolic meanings and obsolete styles, along with formerly popular architectural styles, policies and technologies that have been left behind. Next, I investigate the inscriptions and engravings on stone that testify to labour and bear traces of longgone social activities and obscure forms of communication. Certain stony hauntings are inscrutable, mysterious relics that seem out of place and disconnected to what surrounds them, and they form the penultimate focus of this chapter. Finally, I look at the vestigial traces of extensive quarrying and the haunting presence of what lies beneath the ground,

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and this leads into a discussion of the Anthropocene and how emergent stony stratigraphies haunt the future by prefiguring geologies to come.

Haunting Geologies Stone is never a lone element but a partner with water, fire, air, organic life. In stone a sense of place joins a sense of planet, but even that scale is not enough. Stone emphasizes the cosmos in cosmopolitan, the universe of inhuman forces and materialities that stretches to the distant arms of the galaxy. (Cohen 2015: 38)

As Saskia Breudel (2017) declares, ‘material evidence of the Earth’s deep history is meshed deep in our urban fabrics’. I have emphasised that stone exemplifies the multiple temporalities embodied in urban materiality and the continual emergence of the city. Jeffrey Cohen (2015: 43) identifies how stone ‘unfolds nonlinear time and rebuffs supersessionary histories, suggesting that things emerge multiple times, intensifying and adapting rather than engendering definitive breaks’. He (ibid.: 34) considers that ‘stone is fluid when viewed within its proper duration’, is ‘part of a continually moving lithosphere’, and that this embraces a temporal frame that is impossible for humans to grasp, for these endless transformations are either too slow, too fast or too vast to perceive or easily comprehend. Though stone in the city may seem frozen in time, wrought into stable forms, attentive visual and tactile inspection reveals the seething forces that produced it. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that historically, in a world lacking in scientific geological knowledge, fossilised worm casts and dinosaur skeletons stimulated the envisioning of dragons, monsters and giants. Fabulous, mythic worlds were conjured by stony forms that resembled petrified trolls, caves seemed to beckon travellers into other realms, rocky peaks and gorges were surely forged by divine acts. Signs of supernatural or sacred agencies seemed to abound in a world of stony configurations, forms and inscriptions. Subsequent forms of scientific knowledge have read the stones differently, but they seem no less uncanny.

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Gary Brierley (2010) writes that landscape memory includes geologic memory; this material commemoration remembers the tectonic, volcanic, depositional and erosive forces that have continuously forged topography, traces that provide evidence of inhuman forces that are elsewhere concealed below ground. All cities are haunted by the non-human elements of the environment upon which they are built and by the landscapes from which stone was subsequently supplied to build them. These stony elements range across great timescales, from the deep past to more recent times, and give clues about earth forces, shifting continental plates, volcanic eruptions and intrusions, the advance and retreat of ice, deluges, wind action and changes in climate. This can be destabilising, for as Cohen (2015: 63) remarks, ‘stone records advents and extinctions on vast scales, so that humans lose predominance’. Victoria’s basalt plain, extending across the state to 400 kilometres west of Melbourne, was created by lava spewed from the vents of hundreds of volcanoes. This Newer Volcanics Province covers around 15,000 square kilometres to form a distinctive bioregion that stretches across land and under sea. Though the surging violence of these massive geological events are difficult to identify in a landscape now largely clothed in vegetation, at certain sites this lithic dynamism is evident. The You Yangs, formed when magma penetrated sedimentary strata, solidified around 365 years ago and were gradually revealed as the softer geological layers that surrounded them were eroded over succeeding millennia. These highly durable granite mountains now stand high above the much younger basalt flows that engulfed their lower slopes. And on Point Gellibrand’s coastal platform is a lava blister that formed as liquefied lava encountered shallow water. The resultant boiling generated pressure from steam that raised the surface of the lava; it swelled to take the form of a closed dome. The top of this blister has been weathered away and it now assumes the form of an elliptical open bowl, 4.8 m by 3.4 m with a rim 30–40 cm deep. Sedimentary stone too reveals its components and the time-spanning events that created it. The feldspathic Barrabool sandstone, discussed at length in Chapter 4, was laid down in the Cretaceous period roughly between 140 and 70 million years ago. The stone was formed in a

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large inland lake as rivers flowed from the heavily vegetated surrounding mountains and deposited plant and igneous material that gathered in thick layers of sand and muds over millions of years. The sandstone has revealed fossils of ferns, auracarias, horsetails and gingko that formerly thrived in the different climates of these times. The sediments were subsequently uplifted by earthquakes during the Pliocene era to form the Barrabool Hills (Bantow and Lewis 2017). The portion of Silurian cliff that has somehow remained, tucked away down a small lane in Melbourne’s city centre (discussed in Part I of this book), directly confronts pedestrians with the grit and grain of sedimentary rock. Through marine sedimentation, a layer of Silurian mudstone was deposited beneath the thick clay pits of Brunswick that formerly supplied the material out of which Hoffman’s bricks were fashioned. In the early twentieth century, the 415 million-year-old fossil of a crinoid or sea lily was discovered embedded in this mudstone and was subsequently named and classified as Helicocrinusplumosus by Frederick Chapman. An illustration of the fossil featured as a frontispiece in his Australasian Fossils: A Student’s Manual of Palaeontology (1914) and was displayed in Melbourne’s National Museum where he was the resident palaeontologist (Breudel 2017). This once living organism, one of millions that swayed and fed on a long vanished ancient seabed, summons up the dynamic incorporation of the organic and mineral that makes the stony worlds upon which we live and build. Such environments both inside and outside the city increasingly provoke affective, sensory and spiritual responses amongst a growing number of geotourists (Aquino et al. 2018). As I write this book, the ineffability of stone has been accentuated by scientific analysis of the Murchison meteorite that landed over 160 kilometres north of Melbourne in 1969. It has been discovered to contain the oldest material known to exist on Earth, dust grains around 7.5 billion years old, formed in stars that evolved long before the formation of the solar system (Rincon 2020).

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Aboriginal Stone Traces As Emilie Cameron notes, ghosts ‘unsettle the assumed stability and integrity of western temporalities and spatialities’ (2008: 383), and this is especially evident in settler colonial cities like Melbourne where human stony entanglements predate colonial city-making by many millennia. As I discuss in Chapter 3, the city and its outskirts still contain the remnants of Aboriginal quarries excavated to produce building materials, grinding stones (Pardoe et al. 2019), tools and weapons. While some are clearly evident, others may only be perceptible by shallow depressions in the land. Like the stone scatters and eel traps that persist in some places, and like Victoria’s massacre sites that are unmarked by memorials (though they are increasingly being mapped by activists—see interactive map, The Killing Times, in The Guardian), as in most of urban Australia, Melbourne occupies land that is saturated by a cavalcade of unnoticed and buried sites that summon the ghostly traces of former Aboriginal custodians. These multiple vestiges are often revealed through sustained archaeological investigation. They are also potently recreated in the art of James Tylor (Tylor, n.d.), which has been widely exhibited in Melbourne’s art galleries. In his series un-resettling, Tylor creates indigenous architecture such as stone houses, ovens, bird hides, fish traps and other objects, photographs these constructions in black and white, and hand colours the resulting prints. These photographs are exhibited as if they are old colonial images that represented the profusion of material signs of occupation in the landscape, but they also connote practices of re-learning and cultural revival. By contrast, his series of black and white prints (Erased/Deleted/Removed/Vanished Scenes) From an Untouched Landscape features images of ordinary landscapes, each containing a black rectangle or circle that obliterates such traces of prior inhabitation. As I have discussed throughout this book, urban and non-urban Australian landscapes are haunted by ways of living with stone that have been largely effaced by western symbolic, economic and pragmatic values, but that linger and interrogate such notions. For Aboriginal people, the land is conceived differently—as country—in which stones and geological forces are incorporated into an understanding of place as replete with living beings, ‘an alive nurturing terrain’ saturated ‘with meaning

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and presence’ (Instone 2019: 366). Referring to the story of the feuding volcanoes discussed in Chapter 5, Instone underlines how they ‘have personalities, motives, stories and purposes of their own’ as do other’ stony rises and rocky outcrops’ that are ‘personal, animated, meaningful and expressive’. Such stories continue to haunt the landscape, recognising the vitality and provenance of stone and offering alternative ways of grasping the productive liveliness of lithic matter. Country is not abstract space but like other indigenous conceptions of place is utterly relational, existing as an assemblage of relations that melds past, present and future (Coulthard 2014; Moran et al. 2018), and incorporates the human and non-human, the inorganic and the organic in ways that resonate with emergent ecocentric critical thinking. In alluding to how the city remains haunted by these relational ways of being with place and with stone, it is essential not to reproduce colonial imaginaries of absence, imaginaries that ideologically succoured the settler colonial state and that continue to circulate through the not yet postcolonial state, resonating with Cameron’s (2008) analogous discussion about Canada. Though much has been erased and forgotten, material vestiges and form of knowledge persist and endeavours to recover ways of knowing and acting are ongoing amongst living Aboriginal people who emphatically do not belong to an immaterial, spectral past. Indeed, the ideas that they are articulating have much to contribute to emergent critical conceptions of human and non-human relationalities.

Phantom Networks Certain places in and around cities are connected through intense flows that course along prescribed conduits; other parts of the city and its hinterland are marginalised by their lack of connectivity. Yet, as I discuss in Chapter 2, such connections are often tenuous and are liable to slip into quietude, becoming sidelined as alternative routes are established. As cities grow and change, layers of new and old conduits intersect as the world becomes progressively threaded with underground and overground roads, railways, pipes, culverts, waterways, wires and cables, channels that allow material and non-material things to flow from one place to another. Traces of arterial infrastructures beyond

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Fig. 8.1 Disused tramway, Heatherlie Quarry

the city disclose how sites of extraction and supply were stitched into networks through which resources were quarried, processed, loaded and transported to Melbourne. At different times, particular materials, financial investments, manufacture and technologies circulated between the city and these sites of quarrying, but in many cases, such dynamic distribution ceased decades ago as the infrastructures that facilitated their operation dissolved. The earliest routes were those forged by the Aboriginal stone trade, including those along the Yarra Valley. This process of ordering and reordering networks of supply, dropping certain sites of resource extraction and connecting others, is a key force for

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erasure or the generation of ruined traces that disclose former uses. Like the disused railway system around the Swedish city of Lund discussed by Mattias Qviström (2012), these former networks are characterised by absences, discontinuities and broken connections. Melbourne’s shifting stone trade has resulted in quarries, points of transit, ports and jetties, routes, obsolete machines and empty sites of storage being left behind. As Amin and Thrift (2017: 61) observe, cities contain ‘cul-de-sacs, abandoned and derelict plots, roads to nowhere’, and so too, do those places outside the city that were formerly connected to it. Loading points from which the transportation of stone was initiated and conduits through which electricity, water and materials were once conveyed linger, but are now truncated, decaying, clogged up and abandoned. A minor part of an obsolete network is visible at Heatherlie Quarry: two parallel steel tram tracks that guided trucks laden with stone towards larger rail containers for transport to Melbourne (Fig. 8.1). And at Cape Woolomai, a small, heavily rusted winch lies amidst the rocks in alignment with three iron poles a short distance out to sea, all that remains of the small jetty from which granite was loaded onto vessels to set sail to the city. Cutting though the green fields that surround the disused quarries of Malmsbury bluestone once exported to Melbourne is an impression of the rail track that once accommodated the trains that carried these loads. Sometimes bearing remnants of sleepers, entirely effaced in some places, used as a farm track or simply left as a linear scar in others, the line connects the old quarries as a haunting inscription on this rural landscape (Fig. 8.2). Finally, close to the western Geelong suburb of Fyansford, a derelict linear concrete structure crosses the Morabool River. Created in the 1960s to replace a decommissioned railway, this housed a conveyor belt that carried crushed limestone from a large quarry to the nearby cement works which had supplied developments in Melbourne from 1880. The cement works closed in 2001 but the quarry still supplies limestone and fine sand. These materials are currently transported by truck, displacing the conveyor infrastructure that has joined the train and an earlier ropeway as obsolete modes of transport (Fig. 8.3). After a brief, energetic flurry of activity, these sites subsided into their former states of somnolence, superseded by new sources of supply and

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Fig. 8.2 Remnants of railway sleepers, Malmsbury

transport infrastructures that were deemed more fashionable, less costly and more practical. Yet these traces testify to how besides producing the city, such supply networks produced rural economies, transport networks, labour relations and landscapes. They resonate with the abandoned farming settlements in Saskatchewan, Canada depicted by Justin Armstrong (2011), left to rot as youths move to cities, rail services close down, small farms are absorbed by agribusiness, and stores shut down as people shop at large supermarkets.

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Fig. 8.3 Concrete cover of limestone conveyor belt to concrete works, Fyansford

Spectral Fashions Amidst the tumult of perpetual urban change, new styles, priorities and ideas rapidly replace what was previously fashionable, rendering it suddenly obsolete, archaic. Memorials are archetypes of the spectral, devised to conjure up that or whom is no longer present, to reconnect with that which has become disconnected from the present (Meyer 2012). In a spiritual context too, they are material signifiers of that which is immaterial—the spirit or soul. As Mitch Rose (2011) contends, the tomb or memorial is an all too evident material reminder of an absence that

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needs to be reckoned with, an absence that fully exceeds the relation between tomb and beholder, and that the tomb can never capture. Yet these commemorative material forms can themselves become signifiers of the absence of the cultural and political contexts in which they were created. The memorial impositions of the past provide enduring features that may be little understood, inscrutable or appear absurd. As I have discussed in Chapter 5, the stony figures on the South Bank and the neoclassical facades of official government buildings haunt the present with the cultural residues of the colonial project. Similarly, the nationalist statues scattered throughout the centre of the city, the Shrine of Remembrance and memorials to settler colonialists trouble a present that is equivocal about how to account for colonial and nationalist brutalities. As I have also discussed, more recent stony installations in Melbourne’s landscape have sought to reckon with this past, to acknowledge its violence and put back into place the stories, bodies and aesthetics of the Aboriginal people who were displaced but still remain. Yet other efforts to overtly remember colonial depredation have failed, having provoked a loss of nerve to responsibly confront uncomfortable historical figures, policies and episodes. Traces of these abortive reconciliatory projects also haunt the city. For instance, in 1995, following the emergence of moves towards reconciliation, Melbourne City Council planned, funded and installed a trail through central Melbourne to reveal its previously ‘hidden’ Aboriginal history. Incorporating seventeen inner city sites where attempts to act as counterpoints ‘to the city’s historical markers, including artworks, installations, plaques and stories’ (Pinto 2019: 199) were made, the scheme sought to redress previous exclusions and offer visions of a more progressive future (Morgan 2016). The Another View trail was designed by an Aboriginal artist, and Aboriginal researcher and a non-Aboriginal artist to foreground sites of Aboriginal resistance, spirituality and history and reveal ‘alternative histories of the city that are obscured and concealed by buildings, statues and public spaces and draws on the silences implicit in existent sites to force memory of the often-violent histories they disavow’ (ibid. 2016: 70–71). The artists asserted that ‘that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians have a shared history, and that in order to have a shared future we need to

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acknowledge successes and failures from the past in our contemporary reading of history’. However, while some were allowed, installations planned for five locations on the trail were withdrawn by the council due to their perceived over-confrontational nature (Morgan 2016). For instance, a footpath mosaic in front of the law courts building was to depict an Indigenous head skewered on the sword of justice, a reference to settler colonial practices of putting severed heads on stakes to warn intruders away from property, as well as the law’s ongoing complicity in iniquitous treatment of Aboriginal people. Other installations were to have been located next to monuments of colonial figures including Burke and Wills, John Batman, Queen Victoria and King Edward VII to foreground how the city is a ‘colonial construct’ (Morgan 2016) and to engender a process of unmaking. Persistent disquiet amongst the local authority led to the withdrawal of funding and those installations along the route that were not initially repudiated were quietly abandoned, some disappearing and decaying, although a few remain. As a connected pathway, the trail fragmented and was absorbed back into the urban landscape. Yet as Fionnula Morgan (2016: 74) states, the ‘deterioration of the trail gives the walker a further layer of meaning to explore; such as sanctioned and repressed histories’ and the absence of what was formerly disclosed. Such deliberate acts of deterritorialisation allows us to imagine what material challenges to the past might have once been found on Melbourne’s streets, what might yet be created and what meanings might still be revived and transmitted. Yet three brass inlay works wrought into bluestone paving are still very much in evidence, the sole traces of the larger route of which they were once part. On the pavement in Collins Street, inlaid in brass, are the seven sisters from the story of Karak Guruk who brought light and fire (Fig. 8.4), while the footpath in front of the State Parliament features a mosaic in which a red granite inlay of a rainbow serpent swallows its tail as brass figures perform a corroboree around it. Easily overlooked, these vestiges, detached from the signifying narrative of the trail, nonetheless possess a mysterious charge. They raise questions about the production of the built environment and disclose the numerous traces of other ways of making place and meaning that endure.

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Fig. 8.4 Seven sisters, Collins Street

A very different work, an uncompromising, six metre-high, 56 tonne minimalist concrete sculpture, Tom Bills’ With and With Each Other, consisting of two abstract symmetrical pieces, was installed on a roundabout near the Queen Victoria Market in the late 1990s. An unloved object of controversy, it was removed in 2002 and replaced by a more favoured sculpture, Island Wave, by Lisa Young, a contrastingly light, fluid composition featuring a repeating series of enamel-painted steel forms that produce the impression of movement. In 2008, after being held in storage, Bills’ sculpture was relocated at its present position in a small reserve on the busy Geelong Rd/Ballarat Rd intersection in Footscray (Fig. 8.5). With and With Each Other was originally created for the ten-day Construction in Process VI, staged in Melbourne as the sixth of a series of international exhibitions organised by artists across the world, and featuring more than 70 artworks and performances. It is

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Fig. 8.5 With and With Each Other, Geelong Road, Footscray

the only piece that endures from this event, a haunting relic of a modernist, minimalist aesthetic that has rapidly lost allure amongst planners, cultural entrepreneurs and politicians but which lingers in certain places, exemplifying how the outmoded is not always easily erased.

Worked Surfaces: Vestiges of Others Much urban stone, brick and concrete bears the marks of that which was engraved upon, affixed to and embedded within it, signs that mark the

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presence of long-gone people, fixtures and technologies. Such inscriptions haunt the walls, kerbstones, gateposts and setts of the city. Some, like vestigial quarry faces, conjure up those who laboured on them. The stones in bluestone buildings have been finished with finely chiselled drafted margins, rusticated surfaces created through rough hammering and machine-smoothed textures. Chiselled surfaces are engraved into the Barrabool sandstone that clads St Paul’s Cathedral while older, cruder chevron designs are chiselled into the Yorkshire sandstone of Cook’s Cottage. More discreet but numerous are the unique symbolic signatures of mason’s marks. Lithic facades also summon the repetitive manual manoeuvres of those who laid the bricks and stone, who lifted blocks into the most suitable places, slapped on the grainy mortar with trowel and checked levels and alignments. The weighty cornerstones would have required more strenuous lifting, cradling them into the body and twisting them into place, straining the muscles of back, legs, chest and arms. Attunement to these signs of skilled work may conjure a scene of busy labour through which a building was created (Edensor 2013) or maintained, as with the numerous reparative interventions wrought on the fabric of Newman College. These lively material milieus induce sensory attunements to those who encounter them regularly, generating what David Bissell (2014) refers to as a kind of exterior memory through which a surge from the past is solicited by the material constituency of worked stone, but is not part of a personal recollection. The powerful sensory charge experienced in encounters with lithic materials that were fashioned long ago can be humbling. John Harries (2017: 113) describes how an encounter with a cache of old stone tools in Newfoundland provokes ‘an ecstasy of knowledge felt in the tactile encounter with that which is present to hand and yet, in its presence, reveals an absent other’. This tactile experience invokes an intimacy with the rhythms and routines of a long-vanished people. Harries maintains that ‘touch inaugurates a more “proximal” way of knowing which recognizes our sensuous being in the world and the unfolding relational becoming of entities’ and this ‘proceeds from a reflexive appreciation of the bodily experience of dwelling in the world’. In our touch, he contends, ‘we rediscover the lively being of stone and clay and, through this tactile understanding, some appreciation of the lived experience of

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long-ago peoples’ (ibid.: 115). This sense of reanimation is conveyed by the stone’s shape, texture and weight, since it has been shaped for use by humans from the past who share our particular handedness and our capacities to manually use tools, producing a weird communion with long dead others. Absent labouring bodies are also evident in the more than 300 skilfully wrought dry stone walls found in Melton Shire on the western fringes of Melbourne. Most were constructed during the 1860s and 1870s when the area was settled for agriculture, and their various styles reflect the cultural origins of early settlers. While many of the traces of toil residing in stone are overlooked, these time-worn constructions have been identified as of heritage value, important elements of the landscape. Desires to preserve elements of stony fabric similarly reside in the City of Port Phillip’s guidance (2012) for the preservation of bluestone laneways, justified on the grounds of cultural significance. According to the guidance, these laneways demonstrate superseded ‘road engineering practices’ that include ‘the butt jointing method’ and ‘early examples of fine mortar joints’, while the drainage channels disclose the ‘construction of Melbourne’s underground stormwater system’ and ‘high quality of workmanship and bluestone finish’ amongst stonemasons. These ghosts are recognised. An example of the toil required for large infrastructural projects is the large bluestone blocks that line the Maribyrnong River for several kilometres between Footscray and Avondale Heights. In the early 1930s, the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board implemented flood control and mitigation works on metropolitan waterways and seawalls. Along the Maribyrnong they removed rocks and debris before laying the banks with bluestone. The Depression had created a surplus of idle workers and the scheme provided short-term remunerative work for some as well as cheap labour for extensive infrastructural improvements. I imagine them in the hot sun, shirtless, wiry and muscular, methodically placing the weighty rocks along the river banks with winches and cranes, glad of some financial sustenance. They chat and laugh but are somewhat subdued because of these straitened times. Some vestiges act as metonyms for infrastructural elements discarded long ago. Around the perimeter of Carlton Gardens is a low bluestone

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boundary wall, embedded with small diamond-shaped holes, each about two centimetres in diameter and four centimetres apart (Fig. 8.6). These mark the former presence of the railings that were created at the time of the 1880–1881 Melbourne International Exhibition. They were removed in 1928 when it became fashionable to open up public parks and remove barriers to access. They were not melted down but relocated to various sites around the city, and presently adorn one side of the grounds of

Fig. 8.6 Holes of former railings in bluestone wall, Carlton Gardens

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Melbourne High School and the perimeter of the National Herbarium at the Botanical Gardens. Other signs disclose the vanished mobile routines and modes of transport that coursed along Melbourne’s streets. Many bluestone laneways are imprinted with cart ruts (Fig. 8.7), conjuring up a once familiar mobile experience and an extinct soundscape dominated by the rhythmic clatter of iron clad cartwheels and the clip-clop of the hooves of the horses that pulled them, now replaced by the drone of mechanical vehicles and the pliant hum of rubber on asphalt. They also summon up the rich aroma of plentiful horse manure that once pervaded everyday

Fig. 8.7 Cart tracks, bluestone laneway

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urban space and the extensive infrastructure of stables that housed the ubiquitous horses. Other traces in lithic matter testify to a succession of technologies and fixtures that have become superseded. A stone wall on a city centre laneway, covered over with thick layers of paint and cement, bears the traces of old and new infrastructural features. A thin protruding metal line circumscribes an oval hole, partly filled in, which once contained an extractor fan. A similarly sized square niche perhaps housed some other appliance, and two pieces of abbreviated and cracked drainpipe are sunk into the wall, accompanied by two other obscure protrusions and circular shapes that mark the absence of something formerly attached. A security camera of more recent vintage is affixed in an adjacent location (Fig. 8.8). Discarded inscriptions can also remember baleful episodes from the past. Part of the sea wall along the foreshore at Brighton constructed in the 1920s is composed out of bluestone transported from parts of Melbourne Old Gaol that were demolished in 1929 and 1937. Strikingly, some of these stones are engraved with the initials and dates of execution of six former inmates. Denied the right to mark their death with tombstones, these roughly carved inscriptions were deployed to mark the locations at which they were interred in the prison burial ground. Formerly disregarded, these blocks have now been listed as of historical and archaeological importance by the Heritage Council of Victoria. While these signs of prior life may be decoded to stir up impressions of distant times, other inscriptions in stone are more obscure. Across the bluestone kerbs of the city are engraved a plethora of arcane symbols and marks: arrows, letters, numbers, crosses and other symbols (Fig. 8.9). Some claim that they mark the presence of the convicts who laid them, others that they signify the presence of utilities beneath the pavement. But for the uninitiated, their provenance is a matter for speculation and as with other traces, they are examples of what de Certeau and Giard (1998: 133) describe as pervasive urban elements: In the debris of shipwrecked histories still today raise up the ruins of an unknown, strange city. They burst forth within the modernist, massive,

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Fig. 8.8 Traces of utilities in wall

homogeneous city like slips of the tongue from an unknown, perhaps unconscious, language

Absences and Apparitions These scattered stony oddments are accompanied by peculiar absences and inexplicable lithic forms that seem to belong to another time and place. A particularly glaring absence is found in Fitzroy’s Edinburgh Gardens amidst a rose bed, where an empty concrete and bluestone plinth is

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Fig. 8.9 Inscriptions on bluestone

bereft of the wooden statue of Queen Victoria that is once hosted. Similar in design and style to the numerous other statues of the monarch scattered across the British Empire (Edensor 2019), the memorial only stood here for three years before mysteriously disappearing in 1904. A nearby cast-iron plaque, bearing the caption ‘We are not Amused’, explains the absence of the wooden queen. The plinth was restored in 1972 yet remained empty until recent years, since when it has served as a base for temporary sculptures installed as part of a rolling programme (Fig. 8.10).

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Worm, Edinburgh Gardens, plinth formerly occupied by Queen Victo-

Both in its occupied and unoccupied state, the vacant plinth draws attention to what is not there—Victoria—while also conjuring up the outmoded, banal infrastructure installed by colonial rule across the city and the antiquated fashion of erecting substantial stone plinths. The queen was not intentionally removed, at least officially—this was an ‘unexpected departure’ (Bissell 2009: 96), but her absence continues to reverberate. There are also stony objects that find themselves in places through processes that seem to have been ‘unexpected and unwilled’ (Bissell 2009: 98), detached from the aesthetic traditions, symbolic meanings

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or functional networks to which they once belonged. An unanticipated encounter with such a remnant or detached object has the potential to produce a moment of affective and emotional intensity as well as bemusement or enchantment. One of the most inscrutable stone relics in Melbourne lies alongside the busy Walker Street in Northcote on the adjacent nature strip. A strange, squat, three feet high form akin to a kiln is wrought out of earthenware pipes, cement and bluestone (Fig. 8.11). The roughly fashioned sculpture contains a small cavity at its base and a larger recess on the side that faces the road, but no inscription provides a clue to its function or meaning. Yet a photograph from 1925 of a very similar object positioned at the north-west entrance to Johnson Park, a kilometre away, gives a clue to its purpose, seemingly showing a tap in the alcove. This accords with a council document that states that it may have been a water fountain and a newspaper report from July 1919 that relates that the East War Progress Association had permission to build a drinking fountain in the park. However, no trace of any elements commensurate with a fountain remains. A further council document claims that the Parks and Gardens department ‘found’ the folly in 2003, inferring that it had been removed from Johnson Park and placed in a service area. Sometime later, it was moved to its present position for unknown reasons and by unknown persons. More mysterious still is that on the early photograph, the three small stone heads that now adorn the apex of the structure are clearly not present, and though these seem to be of nineteenth-century vintage, they must have been added at a later date. At one stage, a buddha was placed within the cavity and occasionally the structure is decked with plants. Here is an unheralded example of vernacular creativity, perhaps a memorial, coexisting with the more recognisable formal monuments, more obscure but equally integral to the experience of the city (see Lesh 2013, for a comparable example). Also seeming out of place are two similar sculptures sited in a front garden alongside a busy road in an inner suburb. Two large marble and steel sculptures, part of now unused fountains, depict a pair of highly eroded winged creatures, perhaps phoenixes or other mythological creatures. The denuded white marble has been heavily coated by thick rust that has coursed down the stone

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Folly, Northcote

from the decorative steel supports to which it is attached, creating a curious hybrid material composition. According to the householder, these enigmatic forms were rumoured to have been displayed at Melbourne’s Great Exhibition, staged between 1880 and 1881 at the city’s venerable Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton Gardens. They have somehow found their way into this suburban setting. The exhibition displayed an enormous array of diverse objects,

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including hundreds of sculptures from Europe and Australasia. It is open to speculation whether some of these lithic forms continue to circulate around the museums, private collections, gardens, attics and basements of Melbourne, in various states of disrepair and with little knowledge about their provenance. Caitlin DeSilvey (2013) discusses two bookends that were discovered in a hedge in Cornwall, UK. They had been fashioned from the granite that previously formed part of the 19th century London Bridge, much of which was exported to Lake Havasu City in Arizona, USA, in 1967, to clad a new concrete bridge constructed there. This reveals how like all things, manufactured objects can be considered as a process rather than a fixed entity, are provisional in meaning and function, mutate over time, and are continuously emergent. Like these bookends, the marble phoenixes belong to complex material histories that invoke ‘potential paths of enquiry, speculative histories, complex and mobile geographies’ (DeSilvey 2013: 147). The twin phoenixes have changed from undistinguished geological and mineral matter to skilfully sculpted prestigious exhibits imbued with artistic and national status, and from garden ornaments to a mutating, hybridising, emergent material entity. The marble used for the sculptures was perhaps quarried in Carrara, Italy. Once sculpted into two forms, they were affixed to ornamental metal supports, labelled and displayed in a vast temporary exhibition, purchased or otherwise acquired, perhaps subsequently traded, proudly installed as vernacular garden adornments and since then, have been subject to the depredations wrought by the weather as they change their material constituency and form. These still identifiable stone and metal ornaments have transitioned through different material states according to the diverse agencies that have acted upon them. They remain mysterious and in the absence of any precise narrative about their origin and placement, they solicit conjectural narratives.

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Material Revenants: The Buried, the Hidden and the Forgotten I have elaborated upon the presence of the numerous quarries in the city, most of which have been filled in and turned into parks and sports grounds, and latterly, into housing projects and shopping centres. Yet their visual absence does not so easily occlude their previous existence and they remain present in immaterial and material traces. Like the landscape of Chennai described by Beth Cullen (2019) that is troubled by the ghosts of the water tanks, or eris, that have been infilled and destroyed through urban expansion, Melbourne’s quarries will not lie quietly. The parks that they became delineate the land that was formerly quarried, as do the compact wooded areas untouched by farming that intersperse the fields near Malmsbury. Elsewhere, certain infrastructural elements such as walls, tree-lined borders and machine relics remain. At the derelict Heatherlie Quarry, winching and sawing machines idly rust, collapsed derricks lie in the grass, steam powered engines take on the appearance of metal sculptures amidst the scrub, while old engine sheds slowly crumble into the earth. Spoil heaps of unsuitable stones containing xenoliths and piles of worked material have been gathered in large mounds, while other stones bearing deep, parallel grooves and holes created by traditional plug and feather stone-splitting techniques testify to manual labour (Fig. 8.12). In the silence, the busy soundscape of chisels and mallet on stone at the height of late nineteenth-century production can be imagined. These stones, once intended to be transported to the city, are now colonised by plants, inhabited by animals and festooned with lichen. Smaller stones grooved with the marks of nineteenth century quarrying are found at Cape Woolamai on Phillip Island, strewn across the foreshore, coated with splashes of bright orange lichen, while much of the cliff face from which it was quarried is disguised by grassy slopes and bushes. Remnant quarry faces also obdurately remain in some settings such as at the Westfield Reserve in Fairfield, along the Merri Creek, where a little further south, basalt stones extracted from a still evident quarry face at Clifton Hill have been fashioned into an elaborate labyrinth pattern. Quarry Park in Footscray reveals the former use of the site as do two byways named Quarry Road, in the outer suburb of Mitcham and on

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Fig. 8.12

Plug and feather traces, Heatherlie Quarry

the edge of the Melbourne Airport complex. In Brunswick, close to the site of several former sites of extraction, is the Quarry Hotel, founded in 1857 to cater to the workers in the nearby quarries, conjuring up visions of dust covered men who slaked their thirst here after a day’s toil. Photographs reveal them to be short and stocky fellows, grimly serious, moustachioed, attired in cloth caps and waistcoats, and holding the implements of their trade: shovels, mallets and pick axes. In addition, the unseen effects of quarrying can return to haunt sites where infilling was inadequate, as at the sinking village referred to in Chapter 5, where the legacy of material deposited into the former quarry

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in Yarraville came back to haunt residents, speculators and the local council, defying plans to forget what lay beneath. As Myra Hird reminds us, while landfill management is concerned with ensuring that waste does not leak, to ensure that this is perpetual is unrealistic, for as she asserts, landfills ‘are particularly vigorous: bacteria relentlessly metabolise discarded objects into leachate, which in turn percolates into soil and groundwater, where it moves into and through plants, trees, animals, fungi, insects and the atmosphere’ (2012: 457). The containment of waste is not everlasting, especially when viewed within a geological temporal scale. It may become compressed into stony strata, leach away or return to the surface. Disposed lithic materials consigned to landfill, along with multiple other forms of waste, enter the underground realm of the wholly inhuman. These seething undergrounds will generate future geological legacies.

Ghosts of the Lithic Future Doreen Massey (2005: 9) conceives place as a ‘temporary constellation’ that contains a multiple ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’. In focusing upon the stony constituents of place, she draws upon the image of a glacial erratic to interrogate misplaced notions of ‘intrinsic indigeneity’ where things are assumed to have been ‘eternally present’, to have always been ‘essentially and only local’ (Massey 2006: 35). Hence, places and landscapes should be conceived as ‘events’ because ‘rocks’, like the erratic, are perpetually ‘on the move’, and may ‘be imagined as provisionally intertwined simultaneities of ongoing, unfinished, stories’ (ibid.: 46). I have disclosed numerous narratives and fragments of stories that are entangled with the lithic matter of Melbourne, but stone also provokes us to consider the tales that wait to be told. Indeed, the future stalks the city and it is present in its stony remains, which though many were installed to be present for perpetuity, like everything else, they are subject to decay and erasure according to divergent human and non-human agents, and according to different temporalities. It is in this anticipatory spirit that Hugo Reinert (2016: 22) writes of the seidi stones scattered across Norway’s landscape, ancient entities that

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can grant good fortune if honoured with small gifts. They may be conceived as kinds of ‘earth beings’ ‘whose geological existence weaves into and intersects with the lives of their human denizens in complex ways, irreducible to a geological understanding of stone’. Such stones, Reinhard considers, might be construed as ‘nonhuman entities that regulate human behaviour, inculcating protocols of fairness, politeness, honesty, and respect that fashion appropriately relational human subjects’. These non-human and human entanglements shift across time and space as meanings, practices and routines change. Yet according to another temporal perspective, we can be certain that much of the city’s stony fabric will persist for millennia, and perhaps long after human life has been extinguished. Here, we return to the uncanny geological calculations that comprehend stone as enfolded by extensive earth processes that last many, many millennia. But this raises a further thought: that the stony constructions, the layers, deposits and buildings created through human activity as part of what has been termed the Anthropocene will leave traces aeons after it has been superseded by subsequent geological periods. This is curiously foretold in a modest collection of stone sculptures installed in 1998 that cluster around outside State Treasury buildings along Macarthur Street. ‘Invented Fossils’, created by sculptor Paul Blizzard, consist of several rough bluestone boulders embossed with bronze fossils, audaciously conjuring an impossible scenario: fossils are not contained within igneous rock (Fig. 8.13). A close look at these ‘fossils’, of the skeletons of platypus, bat, birds, rodents, scorpions and reptiles, reveals that they are accompanied by anachronistic inconsistencies: a bicycle tire print across a snake’s fossilised skeleton, a small padlock with a bird fossil, and human artefacts, toy parts, cogs and plastic six pack rings accompany the fossilised remains of other creatures. They signify both that contemporary global capitalist culture, like all previous civilisations, will become extinct, and that its traces will be mixed up with the fossilised remains of creatures in the rock strata of the future, part of a lithic archive of the long departed. Blizzard’s sculptures conjure up a future in which random relics of human existence are transmuted into stony form; the work foregrounds how the future haunts the present. Perhaps several millennia hence, the

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Invented fossil, Paul Blizzard

lithic mass of the city, subject to a range of earth processes, will leave only a thin stratum in the geological record. A ‘trace fossil system’ that evidences the buildings, infrastructures and surfaces laid down in cities will be embedded in stone in addition to sites of extractive industry and underground mining. Bronislaw Szerszynski (2017: 125) discusses how lithic layers will also be imbued with uniquely ‘“anthropogenic minerals” such as pure metals and alloys, bricks, concrete, slags, polymers and plastics’, and by sedimentary deposits laid down from the 1950s that will display a sharp jump in artificial radionuclides released from atom bomb tests, and shifting nitrogen isotopes due to accelerating artificial fertiliser use. Future strata will also leave vestigial traces of calcium from ‘the spines of millions of intensively farmed ungulates, and the faint outlines of some of the billions of plastic bottles we produce each year’ (Macfarlane 2019: 76).

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These discarded things and their future traces in the lithic mater of the future join the host of other material entities that ‘become mobilised in the accounts and the cultural histories of our pasts, of periods and places, people and events, change and continuity’ (Pétursdóttir 2019: 7). Yet as they move towards a dissolved and fragmentary future in which they are catalysed into stony matter, these things, become something other. Detached from human assignations and purposes, released into the swirl of a non-human future, things become unrecognisable, uncanny and unknowable. Like the drift matter discussed by Dóra Pétursdóttir (2019: 10), in the future they ‘will exceed our momentary ideas of them’. Removed from a tethering to human designs, they return to the withdrawn, alien state that typifies matter, and is emblematic of stone’s mysteries, its ‘inhuman animacy’ (Springgay and Truman 2017), as it enters once more ‘an interstitial field of non-personal, ahuman forces, flows, tendencies, and trajectories’ (Bennett 2010: 61). The residues of human material will enter the realm of ‘intractable seismic, volcanic, meteoric, atmospheric, and other earth-moving, earth-shattering, and earth-changing forces’ that ‘attest to the limits of the human’ (Tyszczuk 2016: 443). This continuous material becoming, and the emergence of a posthuman stony materiality, is exemplified at a former industrial site in Melbourne’s west. Pipemakers Park, Maribyrnong, commemorates a large factory on the site that manufactured reinforced concrete pipes, many of which were deployed in Melbourne’s water supply and sewage systems. The factory closed in 1979, with most parts demolished but some buildings and rusting, relic machinery remaining, along with dozens of pipes, large and small. These remains are situated on lightly wooded land that gently slopes to the nearby river. In the now demolished moulding shed, concrete was poured into moulds and shaped into pipes, and the residues from this production process trickled down the hill to accumulate in a thick pool on a flatter part of the terrain. Over the years, this has built up into a deep layer of sediment. When a side of the slope was cut away to make space for the creation of some gardens in the 1990s, the remnant concrete residue was exposed in the form of a 4-metrehigh, dazzlingly white cliff. Thick steel cables, thinner wires and crushed stones are embedded in and protrude through the sedimented layers of

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Fig. 8.14

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Concrete strata, Pipemakers Park

this human-made geological form, its inadvertently hardened concrete mix a visible signature that foretells of stony futures in the absence of humans (Fig. 8.14). The brief period in which humans have deployed stone is a blip in geological time.

Conclusions This book has sought to escape any theoretical straitjacket by organising chapters into discrete themes through which the stone of Melbourne

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might be investigated. I have explored how stone has been used over time to assemble the city from a range of ever-changing sources; I have looked at the interrelated processes of quarrying, demolition, disposal and remediation as another part of the tale of lithic circulation. I investigate the particular properties possessed by certain kinds of stone and how this material is subject to multiple agencies that call forth programmes of maintenance and repair to secure valued building assemblages against entropy. Subsequently, I have examined how stone has been deployed to create a growing range of durable memorials and monuments; I have enquired into the sensory affordances and affective capacities of stone and how these qualities contribute to our inhabitation of the city. Finally, I have discussed the sensuous ways in which skilled artisans and artists come to intimately know stone in different ways. Each of these chapters has drawn on distinctive theoretical perspectives through which to analyse the theme under discussion. I have cited actor network and assemblage theories, conceptualisations of repair and maintenance, notions of heritage and memory and commemoration, theories of extraction and waste, sensory ethnographies and affect theory, and academic accounts of skilled working. In each case, I consider that these particular theories accord with the subject under discussion but cannot provide useful explanatory perspectives when applied to the other themes of the book. Mitch Rose (2011: 120) insists that dominant theories of materiality focus on how ‘subjects and objects are perpetually caught in a dance of remorseless reciprocity, perpetually owing each other the means to their ongoing existence’. It is through such relations that the meaning and purpose of things is secured, and it is implied that nothing lies outside of this relationality between people and things. Yet he asks how we might grasp elements of objects that remain unattainable, are mysterious, exceed presence, suggest an ungraspable alterity. In this sense, things offer us ‘a concrete form we can hold onto in the face of an alterity more radical than any identifiable or knowable difference’ (ibid.: 124). This is an alterity I am happy to accept despite weaving a range of stories around stone, as is apparent in this last chapter, where tales of ineffable and ghostly qualities are featured. Emphatically, throughout this book, I have adopted a heterogeneous approach to exploring stone in Melbourne. I could have focused on a

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particular theoretical tradition, but this would indubitably have reduced the richness of the account as a whole. Implicit in my approach is a rejection of theoretical and conceptual purism. Rather, explorations of stone, like all studies of materiality, can be best approached from a pluralist perspective, through a collage of stories and ideas. Through this pluralism, I have sought to convey the extraordinary richness of urban materiality in general and of the relationship of stone to Melbourne specifically. Yet though I have produced a rich account that underscores the myriad, complex relationships we have to stone, I emphasise that this can only touch on these multiplicities. In other words, we can know stone, but only partially, and through spinning particular stories that focus on specific themes. That is why in this final chapter I have sought to complicate and augment my account with diverse shorter stories of fleeting, ghostly experiences and understandings that can be provoked by encounters with lithic matter. These scrappy, short stories have underpinned the contention that stone is always mysterious, extraordinary and excessive, always enfolded with ambiguity, polysemy and multiplicity. There is always more to tell, but in the telling it is wise to be circumspect and modest, while being open to conjecture and fabulation. For the signs disclosed by stone can motivate us to celebrate the mysteries, heterogeneous sensations and surprising associations of the past in the present and encourage a wanton speculation towards objects and places. Encounters with stone in the city foster narratives that construe a fluid, multiple and imaginative urban heritage, acknowledge the multitudes of both human and non-human agencies that have been entangled with stone, recognise the sensory and affective intensities that radiate from and towards stone, and solicit alertness to the limits of knowledge and the ghostly and eerie events that remain inscrutable.

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9 Epilogue: Scholar Stone

I am sitting in the Tianjin Garden on Spring Street. It borders the eastern entrance of Chinatown and acclaims the connection between Melbourne and one of its six sister cities, Tianjin. Collaboratively created by designers from Melbourne and Tianjin in the 1990s, the garden offers a site for quiet contemplation in the midst of the city. Elevated above the pavement and road, the garden contains generous paving, a large wooden paifang or entrance gate, two bronze lions, shrubs and a pool. I am looking at what is mounted on a low, square plinth of bluestone in the centre of the pool: a large, rounded, wildly contorted limestone boulder replete with crevices, clefts, holes, protuberances and a creased surface. This is a scholar stone, or gongshi, a found piece of karstic limestone, characteristically hollowed and rounded by water into extravagant, complex forms and situated as the centrepiece of a garden. This exhibit was likely sourced from Lake Tai in Jiangsu Province, one of the key locations from which such stones derive. These fantastically shaped stones offer an irregular counterpoint to the strict geometrical designs of tiled paving and are often accompanied by trees and bamboo. They have a long history in Chinese Garden design. By the Tang Dynasty (618–907), these accidental sculptures were regarded. © The Author(s) 2020 T. Edensor, Stone, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1_9

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Tang Dynasty (618–907) Art objects, with particular qualities esteemed, including form, substance, colour, surface texture, transparency, openness and wrinkling. Idiosyncratic, evocative forms that were vertically oriented, riddled with cavities and richly textured were especially valued. During the Han dynasty, 2200 to 1800 years ago, they were mythically associated with the heavenly or subterranean paradisiacal realms of immortals and since then have accumulated a wealth of further symbolic qualities. They testify to the dynamic changes wrought by non-human forces, their wild distortions considered to incarnate vital energy, constituting a microcosmic metaphor of the universe. More prosaically, their characterful forms conjure up phantasmal creatures and people. The tortuous sculptural scholar stone of Melbourne strikes a powerful contrast to the rectilinear buildings and byways that surround it, soliciting visitors to pause, and like numerous intellectuals before them, meditate upon the multiple meanings and qualities of stone. I am delighted and humbled to realise that my musings on stone are far from exceptional; they belong to a continuous human tradition that stretches back millennia (Fig. 9.1).

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Fig. 9.1 Scholar stone, Tianjin gardens

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Index

A

Aberdeen 233 Aboriginal artists 193 Aboriginal conceptions 13 Aboriginal cultures 211 Aboriginal guides 188 Aboriginal history 310 Aboriginal meeting place 244 Aboriginal people 186, 272 Aboriginal protest 6 Aboriginal quarrying techniques 262 Aboriginal stone networks 46 Aboriginal stone traces 304 Aboriginal stone trade 306 Aboriginal understandings 23, 30 Absences 31 Absences and apparitions 319 Actor Network Theory (ANT) 16 Aesthetic contestations 155 Aesthetic priorities 151

Affect 221 Affective dimension 18 Affective experiences 23 Affordance 23, 27, 30 Aggregate 66, 93 Airflow 144 Akio Makigawa 199 Alabaster 276 Alterity 22 Angaston 61 Angkor Watt 143 Anthropocene 117, 328 Anzac 179 Anzac Day Dawn Service 180 ANZ Bank 55 Archaeosphere 100 Architectural Fragment 202, 245 Arthur’s Seat 115 Artificial stone 152 Artisanal ways 25

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 T. Edensor, Stone, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1

367

368

Index

Artisans 30, 259 Artists 30, 259 Assemblage 17, 28, 29, 39, 41, 45, 135 Assemblage theory 18 Atlantic Wall 64 Atmospheres 226 Attunement 30, 223, 230, 248, 287, 314 Australia Day 186 Australian Hellenic Memorial 181 Australian War Graves 182 Authentic design 150 Authenticity 155

B

Bacchus Marsh 65, 94 Bacchus Marsh Permian sandstone 57 Bacchus Marsh sandstone 62 Backfilling 106 Ballast 49, 50 Barkly Square 103 Barrabool sandstone 56, 62, 133, 143, 234 Basalt plain 302 Bassett Reserve 102 Batman, John 185, 197 Beaudesert sandstone 152 Beech Forest 112 Bell Rock 277 Bench planting restoration 106 Biofilms 146 Birrarung Marr 193 Blarney Stone 15 Blasting 106 Block Arcade (1892) 60

Bluestone 30, 73, 89, 91, 181, 195, 199, 233, 239, 269 boundary wall, 316 laneways, 315, 317 paving, 311 Botanical Gardens 284 Box Hill Brickworks 102 Braybrook 90 Brick 62, 76, 90, 235, 271 Brighton 318 Brisbane 228 Britannia and Neptune 76 British 173 Brownfield 111 Brunswick 90, 101, 102, 326 Brutalist 64, 95 Buchan Granite 61 Buchan Marble 62 Bucharest 177 Budj Bim Gunditjmara 129 Building material 128 Burke and Wills 185 Burke and Wills memorial 60 Burra Charter 72

C

Caleula 61, 62 Caleula marble 174 Canada 305 Canal network 44 Capacities 18, 137 bodily, 25, 226 Cape Woolamai 307, 325 Capital accumulation 12 Captain Cook 5 Carlton and Fitzroy 89 Carlton Gardens 246, 315 Carrara 324

Index

Carrara marble 62, 174, 209, 264, 273 Carter, Paul Nearamnew 202 Cart ruts 317 Cement 65 Cement works 307 Centre for Education and Research into Environmental Strategies (CERES) 102 Ceppo di Gre 70 Champs Elysees 177 Chennai 325 China 65, 69 Chinese stone manufacture 68 Chisel 265 Chiselled surfaces 314 Choreographies 249 Chromophobia 232 City of Port Phillip 72 Classic realist 173 Clay pits 108 Clifton Hill 102, 325 Cobbles 242 Coburg 90 Colonial commemoration 173 Colonial figures 176 Colonial imaginaries 305 Colonial installations 29 Colonialism 13 Colonialist 20 Colonial memorials 188 Colonial Mutual Building 136 Colonial Mutual Life Building 60, 76, 97, 246 Colonial rule 321 Colonial sources 49 Colonised land 278 Colour 23, 30, 133, 153, 231

369

palette, 233 Colour matching 151 Commemorative impulses 171 Commonwealth War Graves Commission 183 Compressive strength 143, 148 Concrete 64, 142, 243, 307, 312, 330 Consolidants 150 Container logistics technology 68 Coode Island 102 Cook, James 187 Cooks Cottage 5, 137, 187 Coolamon 196 Cotton mills 139 Counter hegemonic practices 192 Country 211, 304 Cranbourne Botanical Gardens 284 Creative destruction 12, 95, 131 Crete 181 Crinoid/sea lily 303 Critical regionalism 71 Cross of Sacrifice 184 Cruikshank Park 102 Cultural turn 13 Customs House 136

D

Debris 100 Decay 129, 142, 156 Decoding 14 Degeneration 130 Dematerialisation 14 Democratisation of memory 189 Demolition 16, 19, 94, 97 Demolition process 28 Demolition waste 100 Deterritorialize 19

370

Index

Disembedding 69 Disposal 16 Disposal process 28 Dja Dja Wurrung 212 Docklands 99 Domain Parklands 174 Dome 133 Douglas Mawson 185 Dreamtime 47 Dressage 262 Drift matter 330 Dry stone walls 315 Duisberg Landschaftspark 111 Durability 39, 148, 171 Durable element 127

E

Ecocentric critical thinking 305 Edge-bedded 148 Edinburgh Gardens 319 Eel traps 48 Eerie 297–299 Eight Hours Monument 192 Emergent 20, 135 Encoding 14 Enduring stability 139 Engineered surfaces 240 Enigmatic 31 Entropic tendencies 139 Entropy 21 Environmental Protection Agency 104 Excessive meanings 298 Explosives 263 Exterior memory 314

F

Face-bedded 148 Fashions 309 Federation 61, 199, 202 Federation Square 202, 243 Fitzroy 90, 244 Fitzroy Gardens 5, 9 Flattened ontology 18 Flinders Street Station (1910) 60 Flint-knapping 272 Flow 41, 261 ‘Follow the Thing’ 17 Footscray 90, 102, 195, 312, 325 Fossil 21, 303, 328 Frank Lloyd Wright 133 Fritsch Holzer 102 Frontier Wars 180 Fyansford 307

G

Garden of Unity 199 Gendered critiques 180 General Post Office 58 Gentrification 98 Geological events 10 Geological perspective 25 Geologic memory 302 Geology 26, 301 of body, 26 Georgia 51 Ghost 298, 299 Glenn Romanis 244 Global inequalities 13 Globalisation 11 Goldfields 56 Grampians 57 Granite 273 Granite quoin 267

Index

Gravestone 171, 205 Great Ayton 5 Greece 181 Griffin, Walter Burley 234 Grinding stones 49 Gum arabic 282 Gunditjmara 48

H

Habit 223 Habitat 145 Half Moon Bay 49 Hanging Rock 47, 212 Haptic attunements 261 Harcourt Granite 59, 62, 93, 174, 176, 181, 185, 209, 234, 268 Haunt 31, 298 Haunting 296, 297, 299 Hawkesbury 50 Hawthorn 102 Heat 237 Heatherlie 57, 90 Heatherlie Quarry 307, 325 Heatherlie sandstone 234, 267 Heritage 72, 98 Heritage Council of Victoria 153 Heritage from below 189 Herring Island 105 Highpoint City 103 High road buildings 96 History 310 Holding together 140 Holocaust memorial 209 Hornfels 93 Housing Commission of Victoria 98, 236 Hylomorphic memory 209 Hylomorphic model 14

I

I.M. Pei building 70 Improvisational repair 130 Indigenous architecture 304 Indonesia 65 Ineffable 31 Ineffable qualities 298 Infrastructure 42, 305, 321 Injurious effect 269 Inscriptions 318 Italy 69 J

James Joyce Seat Of Learning 191 Japan 65 Jewish 208 K

Kaaba 15 Kangaroo Bay 50 kanju and manju 15 Kapadokia 45 Kimberley sandstone 204 Kings Domain 174 Kings Domain Resting Place 194 King’s Lynn 50 Kyneton 56, 111 Kyneton sandstone 62 L

Lake Condah 48 Lalgambook 213 Landfill 107, 327 Landfill sites 28 Landmark (Charles Robb) 199 Landscape memory 302 Laneways 238, 241

371

372

Index

Latrobe University 199 Lay geographical knowledge 225 Leanganook 212 Leongatha 104 Licence 115 Lie of the Land 197 Light 231 Lilydale 109 Lithographic limestone 281 Lithography 281 Liveliness 264 Local 43 Logistics 68 London Bridge 324 Low-road buildings 95 Ludic 245 Luminosity 236

M

Machine-cut 270 Maintenance and repair 16, 18, 29, 128 Mallet 265 Malmsbury 109, 307, 325 Malmsbury bluestone 55 Manchester Unity Building 61 Manual labour 325 Marble 276, 322 Maribyrnong 48, 330 Maribyrnong River 315 Marion Mahony Griffin 133 Marxian perspectives 12 Material agency 22 Material obduracy 299 Material vitality 222 Mecca 15 Mechanical saws 269 Melbhenge 236

Melbourne Cricket Ground 191 Melbourne General Cemetery 60, 62, 185, 206 Melbourne International Exhibition 316 Melbourne Museum 197 Melbourne Old Gaol 53, 55, 318 Melbourne Park 191 Melbourne Port Authority Building 58 Melbourne’s Great Exhibition 323 Melbourne Town Hall 58, 137 Melbourne University 76 Melton Shire 315 Memorial 29, 171, 172, 267, 310 Memory 25, 141, 225 Memoryscape 172 Menhirs 229 Merri Creek 54, 63, 90, 325 Metabolic transformation 12 Metal 148 Methven Park 102 Metropolitan Rail 99 Micro-adjustments 266 Military sacrifice 178 Minor theory 296 Mintara Slate 268 Modernist 95 Monuments 15 Mornington Peninsula 65 Mortar 149 Mount Alexander 59, 93, 212 Mount Barker 213 Mount Egbert 213 Mount Gambier limestone 274 Mount Macedon 47 Mount Tynong 179 Mount William 46 Multiple temporalities 297, 301

Index

Multisensoriality 261 Mythic worlds 301 Mythological creatures 322 M. Zacour Park 102, 103

N

Nation 178 National Australian Bank Head Office 60 National Gallery of Victoria 74 Nationalism 179 Nationalist 29 National Waste Policy 76 Natural recovery 106 Nazi occupation 181 Nearamnew 202 Network 16, 28, 40, 68, 305 Network perspectives 17 Newcastle 51 Newfoundland 314 Newman College 29, 57, 132, 144, 234 New materialism 20 Newport Lakes 107 New Zealand 50 Niddrie Quarry 108 Non-human 16 agents, 140 Non-human forces 285 Non-representational theory 221 Non-representational thinking 30 Northcote 90, 322 Northcote Plaza 103 Norway 327

O

Oamaru limestone 50

373

Obduracy-in-obsolescence 139 Object-oriented ontology (OOO) 27 Obsolescence 177 Obsolete network 307 Ochre 49 Oikos 181 Old Melbourne Gaol 53 Ordering processes 300 Orderliness 130

P

Paris 233 Park 101, 102, 111, 208 Parliament Building 238 Parliament House 57, 60 Paul Blizzard 328 Pavements 241 Pentridge Prison 55, 229 Perception 22 Percussion flaking 272 Performance artist 278 Phenomenological approach 22 Phenomenological exploration 222 Phenomenological thinking 30 Phenomenology 15 Phillip Island Granite 76 Phillips Reserve 101 Philosopher’s Stone 15 Photographs 304 Pietre sonore 277 Pinnacles 133, 156 Pinuccio Sciola 277 Pipemakers Park 330 Place ballets 225 Play 245 Playground 246 Plinths 321 Plug and feather 325

374

Index

‘Plug and feather’ technique 263 Point Gellibrand 53, 89 Polishing 75 Polyphony 203 Porosity 143, 148 Port Authority Building 60 Port Fairy 73, 107, 269 Port Gellibrand 52 Portland Stone 184 Port Phillip Bay 53 post-phenomenological approach 22 Post-phenomenological enquiry 222 Post-phenomenological thinking 30 Potentialities 28 Power 13, 17 Pre-colonial landscape 241 Pressure flaking 272 Preston 90 Princes Bridge 55, 60 ‘Progressive’ sense of place 41 Properties 15, 18, 137

Reconciliation 310 Reconciliation Convention 197 Recycled concrete 76 Recycling 75 Re-enchantment 248 Regeneration 20 Regent Theatre 58 Relationalities 135 Remediation 105, 109 Remediation process 28 Rhodes Must Fall 185 Rollover slopes 106 Roobaix 242 Rotunda 133 Roughly hewn stone 133 Roughly tooled stone 152 Rough tooling 147 Royal Exhibition Building (1901) 199 Royal figures 176 Royal Society of Victoria 185 Rubble 100, 279

Q

Quarrier 262 Quarries 53, 89, 100, 104, 109, 262, 325 as Landfill, 100 disused sites, 112 Quarrying process 28 Quarrymen 6 Queen Victoria 174, 194, 320 Queen Victoria Market 206

R

Rail networks 44 Rainbow Serpent 213 Rainwater 146

S

Sand 65, 94 Sandblasting 149 Savannah 51 Sawing 75 Scots Church 55 Sculptor 273 Sculptural groups 179 Sculpture 274, 322, 328 Sculpture workshop 274 Sediment 330 Sedimentary stone 302 Seidi 327 Sensation 22, 221 Senses 24

Index

Sensible distribution 24 Sensible, distribution of 249 Sensing place 221 Sensory and affective relationships 30 Sensory dimension 18 Sensory experiences 23, 222 Sensory practices, redistributed 269 Sensory values 24 Sensuous knowledge 260 Settler colonial cities 304 Settler-colonialism 47 Shadow 236 Shipping container 44 Shrine of Remembrance 61, 178, 243 Shrine Reserve 178 Silcrete 48 Silurian 63 Sinking village 103, 326 Skateboarders 246 Skilfully work 259 Skill 25, 259, 260 Skilled activity 137 Skilled and sensuous knowing 30 Skilled knowing 25 Skilled vision 261 Sledgehammer 280 Smith Street 244 Soil 21 Sonic engagement 277 Soundscape 317 Spatial orders 300 Speculative narratives 31 Spire 133, 156 Splash zones 144 Springvale Cemetery 182 Spronk, Petrus Architectural Fragment 202

375

State Library 54, 55, 58, 191, 202 Stawell 57 St Kilda 187 Stock Exchange 60 Stone balancer 283, 284 circulation of, 40 global supply of, 67 intimate with, 260 local, 45 plates, 282 replacement, 152 working with, 30 Stonemason 6, 265 Stony Creek 51, 89, 102 Stories 296, 327, 333 St Patrick’s Cathedral 55 St Paul’s Cathedral 55 Stratigraphic record 26 Stratigraphic relations 26 Stratigraphy 117 Subaltern 29 Suburban Rail Loop 99 Sulphuric acid 144 Superfluous landscapes 99 Supreme Court Annex 58 Surfaces 242 Surrey Dive 102 Symbolic material 14 Synthetic substances 17

T

Tactile 260 Tactile affordances 30 Tactilities 239 Taiwan 65 Tales 296 Tarrengower 213

376

Index

Tasmania 50 Technology 17 Temporalities 26 Terrain vague 112 Territorialisation 138 Territorialize 19 Texture 23, 151, 228, 238, 239 These Are The Projects We Do Together 112 Timeball Tower 55 Tools 261 Touch 228, 238, 239 Touch, manual 260 Town Hall 54, 61 Toxic 103 Traces 31 Trade 46 Trail 311 Treading 204 Tylor, James 304 Tynong 61

U

Ulam marble 184 Unequal relations 19 Urban metabolism 12 USA 51

Victorian Historical Memorials Committee 187 Victorian Parliament Building 136 Vitality 142, 229 Void 99, 101 Volcano 213

W

Wales Quarry 101 Walter Burley Griffin 133 Waste 104, 327 Water 144 Water ingress 145 Weather 144, 236 Weird 299 Welcome Bowl 246 Welfarist 20 West Gate Tunnel 99 West Preston 91 Whelan the Wrecker 97, 101 White Omani marble 70 Williamstown 90 Williamstown Library 74 Wominjeka Tarnuk Yooroom (Welcome Bowl) 195 Wonder 285 World War 182 Wurdi Youang 48

V

Value 131 Vernacular creativity 322 Vernacular memorials 190 Victoria Gardens 174 Victorian Heritage 135

Y

Yarra River 47 Yarraville 102, 103, 327 Yorkshire slate 53 You Yangs 194, 302