The Australian Quarrying Industry
People and History
(Source: "Quarrying for Our Customers, Past and Present," by Doug Prosser)
Quarries have existed in Australia for as long as people have been here. Australian aborigines did not possess metals and relied on carefully selected rock or stone to make cutting implements or weapons. Spear points, knives and scrapers could only be made from particular rock types that were amenable to fashioning by percussion and flaking techniques. Certain hard, river worn stones were suitable for grinding to form axe heads. Where such materials were in short supply, they were imported along networked trade routes. The need for cutting implements and weapons many tens of thousands of years ago resulted in the first quarries in Australia. And the transport of suitable rock and stone products to where they were in demand, gave rise to the first transportation routes.
The arrival of Europeans in the first fleet gave rise to a different set of needs - shelter and community infrastructure. Members of Captain Cook’s expedition of 1770 noted the rock formation of the Botany Bay headland as being "eminently suitable for working into building blocks". Despite the availability of sandstone, demand for low cost housing necessitated the use of lower cost construction materials so wattle and daub and bricks for the better class homes were used. Sandstone was extremely expensive and labour intensive to quarry and was initially confined to use in foundations, and sills and hearths.
By 1810 the need to improve the quality of building led Governor Macquarie to open a government quarry at the present day Rocks area at Circular Quay. As Sydney expanded, so did the country’s first formal road systems. Rock other than sandstone was needed to provide a road surface that could withstand the grinding of coach wheels and the impact from iron shod horses hooves. This led to the sourcing of hard, durable rock for construction purposes (most probably at Prospect just west of Parramatta). So began the legacy of quarrying in the modern era of Australian history with similar needs and circumstances repeated in each of the population centres that established across the country.
The evolution and development of the Australian quarrying industry was by no means static in the intervening 100 or so years between the discovery of gold in the 1850’s and the end of World War II. But to understand the modern face of the Australian quarrying industry, it is to post war Australia, the great influx of migrants from war-ravaged Europe, and an artificial stone called concrete that we must turn.
Prior to World War II, concrete was almost a specialist construction material in Australia — its use confined to major public works like dams or harbour works and perhaps the occasional bathroom or laundry floor in a domestic dwelling. Demand for aggregates was small and met to a large extent by small family owned quarrying enterprises.
The return of servicemen and arrival of migrants at the end of the war in combination with the pent up demand for a better standard of living after the deprivations of 6 years of war, led to an unprecedented demand for housing, community infrastructure and major public projects such as the energy schemes of the Snowy Mountains. Advances in civil and structural engineering design and the technology to use materials like reinforced concrete became available. But it was the migrants from Europe with their skills in building and construction that, when combined with their powerful work ethic, provided the resources and impetus to transform Australia’s urban and civil infrastructure. Their expertise in the manufacture and working of concrete led to its widespread adoption as the ubiquitous building and construction material we know today.
As demand for housing, civil infrastructure and thus concrete increased, so did the need for quarry materials, of higher quality and in larger volumes. Quarrying necessarily became more capital intensive. The industry responded with ownership and structural changes. Mergers led to the formation of larger publicly owned quarrying companies that in turn acquired smaller, family-owned quarries. Construction companies built concrete batching and manufacturing facilities. Competition was intense with quarrying companies seeking to secure downstream concrete manufacturing capability as outlets for quarrying materials and concrete companies seeking secure and low cost raw material supplies in the form of aggregates and cement.
The desire to maximise profitability and customer utility by the integration of activities and processes within what we would call today the supply chain, heralded the arrival of the modern construction and building material company. Australian companies were amongst the first to identify the inherent value of the integration of quarrying with downstream construction material manufacturing such as pre-mixed concrete and concrete product. In the space of several decades, Australian quarrying and construction materials companies have applied this model, not only nationally, but also globally, to forge an international presence and identity to become pre-eminent amongst the world’s integrated construction materials companies.
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