Stone

Stories of Urban Materiality

Tim Edensor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9789811546501
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

In undertaking a systematic analysis of urban materiality, this book investigates one kind of material in Melbourne: stone. The work draws on a range of pertinent, current theories that consider materiality, assemblages, networks, phenomenology, resource and extraction geographies, memorialisation, maintenance and repair, place identity, skill, sensation and affect, haunting and the vitalism of the non-human. In appealing to the general reader, academics and students, this book provides a highly readable account, replete with evocative examples and fascinating historical and contemporary stories about stone in Melbourne.

Part ICliff

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 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.

Fig. 1

Cliff in city centre

© The Author(s) 2020

T. EdensorStonehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4650-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Thinking About Urban Materiality

Tim Edensor¹

(1)

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

Tim Edensor

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

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).

Fig. 1.1

Cook’s Cottage, Fitzroy Gardens

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.

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, ‘26^th 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 eighteenth-century 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 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.

Fig. 1.2

Worked stone, Cook’s Cottage, Fitzroy Gardens

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 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 19^TH (SHIP’S LOG DATE), APRIL 20^TH (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 north-east 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 that stretches for 40 miles across North-East England. The nineteenth-century 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 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 colonisati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Cliff
• Part II. Tomb
• Part III. Quartz
• Part IV. Foundation
• Part V. Tree
• Part VI. Grotto
• Part VII. Garden
• Part VIII. Temple
• Back Matter