Control Desk

Inside Hornsby Quarry, a heavy industrial control desk sat abandoned on the quarry floor. Its angled panel carries rows of rotary dials and switches, the kind of instrumentation built to run for decades under continuous use. Spray paint covers the surface in overlapping layers, and the concrete walls and timber boarding behind it are thick with graffiti. Whatever the desk once monitored is no longer running. Hornsby Quarry operated from around 1905, when the Higgins family began extracting dolerite from the volcanic neck beneath Old Mans Valley in Hornsby. Hornsby Shire Council purchased the operation in 1912, recognising the strategic value of local dolerite for building and maintaining the road network across northern Sydney. Hornsby Blue Metal Limited took over in 1924, operating until 1932. Farley and Lewers acquired the site in 1959, and CSR Limited took control in 1980, consolidating operations through CSR Readymix and eventually CSR Construction Materials. The quarry produced crushed dolerite at an average rate of approximately 110,000 tonnes per year. Quarrying ceased in 2002. Hornsby Shire Council acquired the site in 2003 after the NSW Land and Environment Court determined a compensation amount of $26,508,771.28. The quarry void, roughly 300 metres across and up to 120 metres deep at the southern face, was subsequently filled with more than one million cubic metres of clean spoil from the NorthConnex tunnel project between 2017 and January 2019. This photograph was made in 2015, more than a decade after the last extraction. The control desk was what remained of the working infrastructure: solid, purposeful in its construction, entirely out of context. The dials and switches were still in place. The graffiti was the only record of who had been there since.