Bombo Quarry

Dark basalt columns rise from the intertidal platform at Bombo Headland near Kiama on the Illawarra coast, the columnar jointing split clean by cooling and by wave action. A long exposure has smoothed the incoming swell into white mist that curls around the bases of the rock. Orange and pink cloud sits low on the horizon to the north-west. The contrast between soft, blurred water and hard, fractured stone is the whole argument of the frame. Photographed just after six in the morning on 28 August 2016.

The stone is the Bombo Latite member, a grey-black porphyritic basalt laid down in the late Permian as part of the Gerringong volcanic facies. The columns the frame admires are partly exposed because the headland was quarried: blue metal was cut here for paving, road base and rail and tram ballast, and the stone was moved out first by jetty and later by rail. The Geological Society of Australia nominated the quarry for protection in 1979, a Permanent Conservation Order followed in 1983, and the site was transferred to the NSW State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999 as a geological site. It is an industrial landscape that became a listed natural one, on the strength of what the industry uncovered.