Screening Conveyor

Graffiti-tagged concrete pillars and inclined conveyor frames rise through multiple levels of grated metal platforms inside the processing infrastructure at Hornsby Quarry. Purple and pink spray paint marks the foreground column, while lower sections carry blue and black lettering partially obscured by railings. Light enters from openings high above, catching suspended dust across the layered steelwork. Nothing in the frame was operating when it was made. Hornsby Quarry operated from around 1905, when the Higgins family began extracting dolerite from the volcanic neck beneath Old Mans Valley. The site passed to Hornsby Shire Council in 1912, then to Hornsby Blue Metal Limited in 1924, before Farley and Lewers acquired it in 1959. CSR Limited took over Farley and Lewers in 1980, consolidating into CSR Construction Materials by the time operations wound down. Annual extraction averaged approximately 110,000 tonnes of crushed dolerite, destined for road base and aggregate across northern Sydney. The quarry ran for nearly a century before extraction ceased in 2002. The rock beneath the machinery is no ordinary substrate. The Hornsby diatreme is a Jurassic volcanic neck, 146 to 200 million years old, the largest of its kind in the Sydney area. Quarrying cut more than 100 metres through it, exposing a cross-section that geologists have since classified as internationally significant. The dolerite that fed conveyors like this one is the same material that made the site worth quarrying at all, and the same material that drew researchers to the exposed face long after the machinery stopped. Hornsby Shire Council acquired the site in 2003 for $26,508,771.28, the figure determined by the NSW Land and Environment Court. The remnant crusher plant buildings, including structures associated with conveyors and processing equipment, are noted in the Hornsby Park master plan as heritage features to be retained. This photograph, made in 2015, records the conveyor before the rehabilitation works that followed.