Basement

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D7000
Lens: 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 24mm · f/8.0 · 25s · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

A concrete-floored basement interior. Pools of water collect across the floor surface. Light enters from above, falling on deteriorating walls and the water below. Structural surfaces show widespread decay. The space is enclosed and subterranean.

Edition

Open edition

Open edition
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Limited edition
A fixed number of prints exist. Once sold, the edition closes permanently. Each print is individually numbered and signed.

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Colour

Signed, numbered, with COA. Made to order in 5 to 10 business days (unframed). Shipped in protective packaging with edition certificate, paper-stock reference and a printed care guide.

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In situ

Basement at Hornsby Quarry, black-framed print displayed in situ on a wall.

Basement at Hornsby Quarry, raw timber-framed print displayed in situ on a wall.

Basement at Hornsby Quarry, glass print displayed in situ on a wall.

01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title: Basement
Series: Hornsby Quarry
Catalogue: HQU-002
Process: Giclée
Captured: 7 November 2015
Camera: NIKON D7000
Lens: 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 25s s
ISO: 100
Focal length: 24 mm
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size: 290 × 200 mm
Location: Hornsby, New South Wales, Australia
Authenticity: C2PA verified provenance →
Recognised by: Highly Commended in Multimedia at the 2016 National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards

02 LOCATION

Hornsby, New South Wales, Australia

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

03 THE STORY

About this print

Beneath the main level of Hornsby Quarry, a concrete basement sits below the water line. Pools collect across the floor, still and reflective, fed by whatever seeps through the structure above. Light reaches the space in diffuse bands, catching the water surface and the rough texture of deteriorating walls. The ceiling presses low. Nothing moves. Hornsby Quarry sits within Old Mans Valley, off Quarry Road in Hornsby, NSW. The site is a Jurassic diatreme, a volcanic neck pushed through Sydney Basin sandstone between 146 and 200 million years ago. The dolerite it produced, hard and dense, was the material that built the road network across northern Sydney for close to a century. Quarrying began around 1905, when the Higgins family, the valley's first European settlers, began extracting dolerite from the diatreme. Hornsby Shire Council purchased the operation in 1912, recognising the strategic value of the local volcanic material for road construction and maintenance. Hornsby Blue Metal Limited took over in 1924 and operated until 1932. Farley and Lewers arrived in 1959, acquiring the quarry through a subsidiary. CSR Limited absorbed Farley and Lewers in 1980, eventually operating as CSR Construction Materials until the quarry closed in 2002. The quarry void reaches approximately 120 m deep at the southern face. The walls expose a cross-section through the volcanic neck that geologists now classify as internationally significant. Above this subterranean space, the remnant crusher plant buildings stand on the quarry floor, noted in the Hornsby Park master plan as heritage features. This photograph was made in 2015. At that point the quarry had been idle for around 13 years. The water on the floor was not recent damage; it was simply what happens to a concrete space left to its own devices. By 2019, more than one million cubic metres of NorthConnex tunnel spoil had been delivered into the quarry void. By February 2025, bulk earthworks across the site were complete. The basement recorded here exists now in a landscape being remade from the ground up.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

Below ground at Hornsby Quarry, a concrete basement holds still water across its floor, the surface catching whatever light filters through from above. The quarry itself operated from around 1905 until 2002, extracting crushed dolerite for road construction across northern Sydney. Operators came and went over nearly a century: Hornsby Shire Council, Hornsby Blue Metal Limited, Farley and Lewers, and finally CSR Construction Materials. What remains here is concrete, water, and the slow work of time on a structure no longer maintained.

Brett Patman

The series

Hornsby Quarry

2015 · 13 photographs

Hornsby Quarry was a bluestone quarry in Old Man's Valley, Hornsby, that ran under private operators from the early 1900s until 2002. Decommissioned in 2003, it was acquired by Hornsby Shire Council later that year for $26 million following a determination by the NSW Land and Environment Court. What the quarrying exposed is geologically extraordinary: more than 100 metres of cross-section through a Jurassic diatreme volcanic neck, a world-class array of volcanic features described in 2022 as a geoheritage treasure. The Higgins family cemetery, with burials between 1875 and 1925, sits within the site and is separately heritage-listed. Rehabilitation works were approved on 4 November 2020 and the site is being transformed into Hornsby Park, with the quarry void retained as a geological feature.

View all in this series →

05 SIZE GUIDE

Print sizes

The anatomy view shows what this finish is as a physical object: paper margin, mat band, frame depth, acrylic profile. The comparison strip shows how each size sits relative to the others at true scale. Click a size or a finish to update both.