Screening

Perforated metal grating covers the floor of a screening chamber deep inside the processing plant at Hornsby Quarry, where crushed dolerite was once sorted by size before leaving the site. A red smiley face dominates the lower left wall, layered over older tags. Bolted steel panels line the right wall, pitted with corrosion, and a narrow vertical gap at the far left cuts a bright seam of daylight into the dim interior. By 2015, when this photograph was made, the structure had been idle for more than a decade. Hornsby Quarry sits within a Jurassic diatreme in Old Mans Valley, at Hornsby. The diatreme is the largest volcanic neck in the Sydney area, its dolerite intruding through sandstone deposits of the Sydney Basin. Quarrying of that dolerite for road aggregate began around 1905 under the Higgins family, who had farmed and timbered the valley from the 1830s. Hornsby Shire Council purchased the operation in 1912, recognising the strategic value of local volcanic rock for building and maintaining road networks across the shire. Operations passed through several operators over the following decades. Hornsby Blue Metal Limited held the quarry from 1924 to 1932. Farley and Lewers restarted extraction in 1959. CSR Limited acquired Farley and Lewers in 1980, and the operation continued under CSR Construction Materials until quarrying ceased in 2002. At peak extraction the site processed approximately 110,000 tonnes of dolerite per year. The remnant crusher and screening plant buildings were noted in Hornsby Shire Council's master plan as heritage features to be retained within the redeveloped Hornsby Park. This photograph records the screening chamber as it stood in the years between closure and rehabilitation, the steel framework still holding its form, the process it was built for long since stopped.