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What is a quarry?

A Quarry ... is a place where rock, gravel or sand is dug from the earth to build or make things that we need, such as materials for our house, or for a road or sports field. A quarry is therefore a type of rock and sand 'supermarket'!

Quarrying refers to the method of digging and processing rock or sand and gravel. Mining is similar in some ways to quarrying, but mining usually refers to digging for metal minerals or coal. Quarries are also usually smaller than mines and much nearer to our towns and cities where we use most of the rock materials they provide. When quarrying has finished, the site is rehabilitated. Many old quarries are used for entirely different purposes such as landfill and recycling centres, nature conservation and residential development.

Open cut hard rock quarry

Quarries have existed in Australia for as long as people have been here. Australian aborigines did not use metals and relied on rock or stone to make many of the weapons and tools they needed to live. So they established the first quarries and showed great skill in working with rock and stone.

A friable sandstone quarry

Today, we also use rocks to make the very important things on which we depend. Just about everything we make or build can be traced back to rocks. Rock is one of our most abundant natural resources and quarries provide rock products including crushed rock, sand ,gravel, clay and building (or dimension) stone.

Old Quarry - Rehabilitated

There are more than 2,500 hard rock and sand and gravel quarries in Australia today. They range in size from very large 'metropolitan' quarries near big cities making hundreds of thousands of tonnes of quarry products a year, to very small quarries that supply rock products for use in remote areas when needed.

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