Wayne Ryan's blog: Dry Stone Wall

Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-f5.6 @ ISO 800, 34mm, f8, 1/30

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A dry stone wall forms my front yards fence. The stone wall was built around 1871by hand by James Sheard. This wall runs for about 1000 metres (3,292 feet) around the street block, forming a 65,000 square metre or 6.5 hectare (16 Acre) compound. Shown on the map below. The property originally featured an orchard and a dam. There appears to be two houses, that appear to at least partially be original buildings. The houses are surrounded by an extension of this wall to form yards that separate them from the main compound.

The house at 216 Carpenter Street was built in 1871 by pioneers of Bendigo James Sheard and Pheobe Sheard (nee Strickland) on the property of 16 acres purchased by James for 2 pounds. James was born in Halifax Yorkshire England. He came from a long line of stone masons. He migrated to Australia and arrived in Melbourne onboard the Donald McKay in 1857. He headed straight for Bendigo (called Sandhurst at the time) where he began working at the Cat Quarry, (known because of the large number of feral cats in the area) James eventually took over the Cat Quarry. James Sheard died in 1914 and is buried in Bendigo.

All the stone that went into the property came from the nearby Cat Quarry owned and worked by James Sheard. This is why the area is known today as Quarry Hill.

This area was first known as Charcoal Gully, where an Anglican school was opened in 1857. In 1873 it was replaced with a State school known as Sandhurst East, a name which lasted until 1908 when it was named Quarry Hill. The locality is generally hilly and hardly disfigured by mine or quarry workings and includes the Bendigo Cemetery site which is bounded by Carpenter Street on the east, Houston Street on the north and surveyed in 1857. Bendigo Cemetery and the the cemetery's chapel are on the Victorian Heritage Register.

Screen Capture from Google Maps

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Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-f5.6 @ ISO 320, 26mm, f16, 1/100

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Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-f5.6 @ ISO 800, 32mm, f8, 1/60

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Dry stone walling emerged in Australia in the mid 1800's in areas where a proliferation of stone in the landscape was the result of land clearing. In the case of Bendigo this activity seems to have coincided with the Gold Rush that started in the 1850's. There would have been lots of stone available from the diggings and many Anglo Celtic and European migrants for whom stone walls were historically and culturally significant in our early settlement. This availability of relatively cheap skilled immigrant labour and maybe the need to protect crops from rabbit plagues necessitated the building of these walls.

Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-f5.6 @ ISO 800, 18mm, f8, 1/40

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Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-f5.6 @ ISO 200, 170mm, f9, 1/250

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Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-f5.6 @ ISO 800, 24mm, f8, 1/60

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This broken section below shows the method called 'Hearting' where small stones and clay are used as filling or packing inside the two external walls. These “Double” walled constructions are made by placing two rows of stones along the boundary to be walled. The rows are composed of large flattish stones. The walls are built up to the desired height layer-by-layer (course by course), and at intervals, 'Throughstones' where heavy, large stones placed at regular intervals along the wall to tie the two sides together. These have the effect of bonding what would otherwise be two thin walls leaning against each other, together with 'Hearting, greatly increasing the strength of the wall and give the wall its A shape side on. It appears that the easier availability of wire and higher wages resulted in a decline in full construction of stone walls after the 1880’s.