Stones for a Garden
As with Australian cedar, Sydney sandstone is fast becoming a lost resource
It was sad to see my neighbour's eighty-year-old house disappear, dismantled from roof joists down, a delicate operation which I found fascinating yet tinged with nostalgia. She had been "old Eastern Suburbs", when people lived slower lives around the harbour, the outer reaches of which were regarded by many, as almost the countryside.
My neighbour had been an institution in the municipality, running private hospitals, later devoting her retirement to charity. She had gone through a war and a depression yet lived in a beautiful home overlooking the harbour viewed from a tangled back garden and a small porch from which whiskies and soda were enjoyed in the twilight.
An era was dying before me and I felt the pull of time. When first arriving in this tight enclave, I was regarded as the new 'kid on the block'. Now my nearest neighbours were slowly dying and I was climbing closer to the top of a nebulous list as homes were bought by developers who paid for position, not an old house and rambling garden with no sweeps of plate glass to capture the view, and incidentally, a hot-setting western summer sun. Gardens of eloquent oleanders and lemon trees were uprooted to make way for swimming pools and box edging and native angopheras suspiciously died, revealing an uninterrupted view.
Eagle-eyed I watched a slowly-revealing treasure in Sydney sandstone (traditionally used in foundations and exterior walls), appear on the denuded property; the foundations of sandstone, once quarried from surrounding hills and the land on which our houses sat, were being pulled apart; great sandstone blocks broken were piling up in corners. My excitement grew with the mounting mounds of sandstone and I approached the supervisor asking what was intended for it all? His, 'why, do you want it?' and my reply, 'it had to be carted to the Southern Highlands', to his assurance 'otherwise it will go to landfill on the outskirts of Sydney, or to Mosman Council', sealed a fortuitous contract. I was to pay for cartage which amounted to four double trucks loaded with one hundred tons of stone for $4,000.
I was ecstatic and called Farley, my stonemason.......this quality sandstone was special as many developments were crushing the sandstone, against council regulations.
Farley is an old friend from Oran Park days, and soon we were planning great things for our hefty treasure.
