Sydney is a sandstone city in the way that Rome is associated with marble and Bath with the beautiful calico-coloured limestone called ‘Bath Stone’.
Sydney’s Hawkesbury sandstone extends like a large donut north and south of the city. At the centre of that circle is Wianamatta, shale and clay that forms a thin layer over sandstone through the city’s western suburbs. The widest section of the Hawkesbury sandstone circle spreads across the North Shore to the Hawkesbury River from which it derives its name, and up to the Central Coast.
This vast sheet of stone was laid down 220 million years ago when Australia was one part of the larger Gondwana supercontinent, near present-day Antarctica. Like other bedrock, this bedrock influences the flora which grows above and around it, so that the North Shore is characterised by plants which flourish on poor sandy soils – flannel flowers, banksias, and angophoras among them.
The infertility of the soil around North Sydney was also one of the reasons that land there was occupied by colonists long after areas along the Parramatta River and west of Parramatta.
The Aboriginal people, from whom the Europeans took the land, had long made good use of the bounty of sandstone, namely the rock overhangs carved by wind and rain. But sandstone is also a ‘freestone’, which means it can be cut in all directions. It was an ideal building material for colonists wanting substantial dwellings and warehouses.
Colonial-era stone buildings sprinkled throughout the lower North Shore were built from sandstone which was quarried locally. In the era before motor transport, it was much too difficult and expensive to cart rock from the south side of the harbour. Sandstone ‘Carisbrook’ is the oldest house in Lane Cove surviving, as it does, from the 1880s.
But the oldest surviving sandstone buildings on the North Shore are found in North Sydney and Mosman. ‘The Barn’ was built in 1831 by Archibald Mosman as part of his whaling station in the bay which was named after him. ‘Henbury Villa’ in Neutral Bay was built in 1838 and may be the oldest extant house on the lower North Shore.
The handsome Victorian Georgian dwelling, ‘Camden Villa’, once had views up and down the harbour. Now it is surrounded completely by high rise apartments just off Alfred Street, North Sydney. ‘Woodstock’ on the Pacific Highway in North Sydney’s CBD was built in 1870 for timber merchant John Brown with money made from the forest he cleared in the Wahroonga and Turramurra areas.
These sandstone structures are among the oldest of any buildings in Sydney, a city that recreates itself through demolition and redevelopment with increasing rapidity. But 150 years is a blink in the proverbial eye in the age of the rock that made them.
Historical Services, Stanton Library