STONEWORK

 

I have been involved in building with stone since I started as a landscape architect. My father built fountains and waterfalls and he would give me the smaller jobs to do during my holidays. So I was invariably mucking about with rocks, and trying to get water to do what I wanted it to do. Later I had a job with the Sydney Harbour National Park and I was put with their stonemason Michael Lunjevich, to build the access tracks through South Head. Michael taught me to dress the raw Sydney sandstone blocks.

We became good friends and went into business together. We did several large sandtone flagging projects in Northbridge, and waterfalls, retaining walls and gates.

At that time it seemed impossible to do a garden that did not contain some rock, and rockwork set of the planting so well.

When I later moved to the north coast the available rock couldn't be worked like Sydney sandstone. It was all hard basalts and granites, and often large river pebbles rescued (to my way of thinking) from being crushed into gravel by the Readymix quarry on the Bellinger River. These rocks were best dry-laid.

I was asked to build a bridge for a friend at Mt. Wilson in the Blue Mountains. All the rock came from their excavation for a water tank. Tom had only one leg but he had a vision and provided his labour, making sure I didn't run out of rocks. We used a concrete pipe over which the bridge was built, but Tom didn't want to see any concrete, so the diameter of the keystone arch had to be smaller than the diameter of the pipe in order to conceal it. At the same time upstream a similar bridge was being built in sight of ours, in one of the famous Mt. wilson gardens, and they took no care to conceal the pipe with poor results. I will never forget Tom's British Bulldog, Boadicea falling into the crystal clear water of the spring and sinking (Bulldogs can't swim) and looking up from the bottom until Tom jumped in and rescued her.

In 1997 I worked in Medan Indonesia and we used the local batu besar (big rock) and batu kelapa (coconut-sized rock) to make walls to edge the greens at waterside. The rock wasn't pumice but it was very light for its size and must have had air bubbles trapped inside.

The photo below shows a semi-circular garden retaining wall built from stone that we found in a nearby paddock that had been pushed into a heap by bulldozers. Each day we would stop on the way to the job site to pick up suitable rocks.

This photo shows part of an enormous wall that I built with stonemason Heath Maguire and Rod Bird (excavator driver with his own custom-made rock grab). The treads of the stairs are recycled sawn slabs of concrete from the demolished verandah of the house. The top-level accomodated the vege gardens and the stairs lead down to the chook shed. One of a series of walls in a garden on a steep site, this is the roughest of the walls as it is farthest from the house.