Main Conveyor

The main conveyor at Hornsby Quarry rises steeply through the steel frame of the processing structure, its rollers still seated along the belt, mesh stairs climbing parallel to it on one side. Cross-bracing fills every opening in the frame. Dust has settled across all of it: the rollers, the stair treads, the structural members, the belt itself. Nothing has moved through here for some time. Hornsby Quarry sits in Old Mans Valley, off Quarry Road in Hornsby, within the cone of a Jurassic diatreme, a volcanic neck roughly 146 to 200 million years old. The dolerite it contains, the same rock the Higgins family began extracting around 1903 to 1905, became the blue metal aggregate that built road base across northern Sydney throughout the twentieth century. Hornsby Shire Council recognised the strategic value of that material early, purchasing the operation in 1912 to secure supply for the local road network. Ownership changed hands several times after that: Hornsby Blue Metal Limited from 1924, then Farley and Lewers from 1959, then CSR Limited following its acquisition of Farley and Lewers in 1980, with CSR consolidating the operation into what eventually became CSR Construction Materials. At the production rates documented in the early 1990s, the plant was moving approximately 110,000 tonnes of crushed dolerite per year. The conveyor in this photograph was part of that process, carrying material up through the structure after it came out of the crushers below. Quarrying ceased in 2002. The remnant crusher plant buildings were still standing when the Hornsby Park master plan was adopted in 2021, and are noted in that plan as heritage features to be retained within the new park. This photograph, made in 2015, records the conveyor in the years between closure and rehabilitation, rollers idle, the belt carrying nothing but dust.