Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia 15/11/08 8:16 AM

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Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

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Saturday, November 15th, 2008

Time Event
7:22aRottnest Island: The sandstone resource

On 23 September 2008 I wrote about how sandstone from Rottnest

Island had been used on the facade of Western Australia's Parliament
House during it's initial early twentieth century construction phase.

The western facade of WA's Parliament House

Rottnest sandstone was also used in parts of the facades of at least two
other old buildings in Perth, the Royal Mint, and the original Western
Australian Museum.

Not all the sandstone facade on Parliament House is from Rottnest,

only the lower level. You can see a colour change with the upper level
because that material comes from Donnybrook which is on the
mainland well south of Perth.

Stone is no longer quarried on Rottnest. During our recent visit to the

island I tried to visit all the old quarries I could find. Most are quite
small and provided more friable Tamala limestone for buildings and
other works on the island during the nineteenth and twentieth century.
Understandably these sites tended to be convenient to where the stone
was required.

The limestone is geologically known as Tamala eolianite. The word

'Tamala' is a derivative of Damala, the name of the Aboriginal group
which in the past ranged in the southern vicinity of Shark Bay, well to
the north of Perth.

The geological formation can readily be seen in cliffs in the lower

reaches of the Swan and Moore Rivers and along much of the coastline
between them, as well as on all the offshore islands near Perth. The
deposits are still consolidating and geologically are relatively young,
perhaps as recent as the late Pleistocene glacial period, or about
120,000 years BP, which is the oldest age determined for formations on
Rottnest Island. I know this from literature research for my PhD thesis.

The Rottnest sandstone is much harder than the commoner form of

Tamala stone, which is why it attracted the attention of the Federation-
era architects. Some of it may have come from the waterline at Nancy
Cove where there are clear indications that stone was fairly carefully
removed from the reef platform:

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Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia 15/11/08 8:16 AM

The reef platform at Nancy Cove

Stone has similarly been removed from the reef platforms elsewhere on
the island, for example at 'Natural jetty' at the southern end of
Thomson Bay.

But there were much larger lumps of sandstone ashore at Nancy Cove.
There are a few shattered remnants on the beach which were probably
broken up with explosive. As mute testament to the durability of the
stone, the exposed surfaces look as fresh and hard as the day they were
split apart a century or so ago.

Remnant sandstone at Nancy Cove

This hard form of sandstone was also used in the 1890s to construct the
central lighthouse at Wadjemup Hill. It was completed in 1895. The
recognition of the quality of the stone probably inspired it's later use on
Parliament House. Its export was a short lived activity, in all likelihood
because it became much more practical to utilise the Donnybrook
source.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.

Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio

website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description
and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually
be enlarged several times by clicking them.

About the writer

Click here to see our backyard.

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my
"common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia –
plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days
as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words.
Zzzzzzzz!

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Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia 15/11/08 8:16 AM

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