A one-way walk from St James Station to Circular Quay, past the city’s main sandstone buildings and through The Rocks to Dawes Point. It also takes in bare bedrock, old quarry faces and tool-worked walls, along with the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, which aren’t sandstone.
9.4 km, 28 stops.
The Archdiocese says the two spires, finished in 2000, are sheathed in Gosford sandstone, so compare their colour and sharpness with the older towers they sit on. Carving on these main doors was never finished. The transept doors you passed on College Street were completed, and their carving includes waratahs.
Across the road is James Barnet’s wing, finished in 1866, with carving by Walter McGill and long and short blocks locking its corners. It was planned as a side entrance to a much larger building that was never built. To the left on William Street is Mortimer Lewis’s earlier wing, which had a third storey added in 1890 to 1892.
Only this front and its two towers are stone, recorded as Pyrmont, and the body behind is brick. Between the two entrance arches, look for Thomas Wran’s carving: a Hebrew inscription in a frame of foliage, with a bunch of grapes. The trees can hide the upper front in leaf, so cross at the lights if you want a closer look.
Decay was reported here by the 1890s, and pinnacles, roofs and the south transept were rebuilt between 1942 and 1960, so the pinnacles above you are younger than the walls below them. Look at how the deep mouldings around the great window catch shadow. The coursed blocks run from honey to orange-brown.
Look at the top of the clock tower, where masons lifted blocks of up to 2 tonnes to crown the columns during work from 2012. In 2020 the City said the south and west fronts would be repaired with yellowblock dug from city building sites such as 200 George Street. New stone starts paler and crisper than the old and darkens with time, so look for sharp edges as well as colour.
Above the awning line the walls are the 1890s stone, heavily conserved, while almost nothing inside is original. Compare them with the drum of the great dome, which is rendered concrete painted to look like stone. Sources disagree on where the walls’ stone came from: Waverley, Pyrmont or Maroubra.
Look at the join between the polished Moruya granite columns and the Pyrmont sandstone they carry: James Barnet used granite here because the arches put so much weight on small points. Above the columns, each arch has a carved keystone head by Thomas Wran. The spandrel figures at this Pitt Street end, by Tomaso Sani, caused a row in parliament in 1883.
These sandstone blocks, finished in 1894, replaced the central wing of the Rum Hospital and were built in two campaigns, stopping in 1884 and resuming in 1892. To the right is a surviving wing of the old hospital, now the Mint, so compare its colonnade with this later stone front. No quarry is named in the sources consulted.
The centre you’re facing is the newest part, begun in 1939, with fluted Ionic columns and PUBLIC LIBRARY OF NEW SOUTH WALES lettered in the frieze. The wings came first, from 1906, so the front was finished from the outside in. A NSW Government history says stone from the 1920s came from eastern-suburbs quarries rather than Pyrmont, so compare the centre with the wings.
The house sits behind a fence and trees, about 100 m away, so from here you may see only its battlements, turrets and tall chimneys. The Dictionary of Sydney says Vernon replaced the facade in Pyrmont stone from 1896 to 1901. Photographs show a patchwork of paler and browner blocks on the garden front, which is inside the grounds.
This sheer sandstone wall takes its name from the Tarpeian Rock in Rome, and the steps you came down date from the 1880s. Local histories describe it as a quarry face, left when convicts cut stone for Fort Macquarie and other early works, though one account credits the fort’s stone to a Domain quarry. Look at how tall and flat the face is compared with a natural cliff.
This one isn’t sandstone: the podium is faced with aggregate panels made with granite from Tarana, NSW, and the shells are tiled concrete. In 1853 sandstone for the Water Police buildings was being quarried on this same point, so the next stop is partly built of stone from here. From the east side of the podium you can see Fort Denison on its island, about 1 km away.
This has the strongest banding on the walk: cream and orange beds alternate through the walls, showing the iron in the rock. Look at the three-arched portico, with POLICE COURT and SUMMONS COURT lettered on it, which James Barnet repeated in 1885 to 1886 for the second court. The heritage text mentions stone from Bennelong Point and Pyrmont, without saying how much came from each.
Find the words Public Entrance cut above the Bridge Street door, and the state arms dated 1877 in the central pediment. On the Phillip Street corner are Achille Simonetti’s Art, Science and Labour, stacked in niches. His Mercy, Justice and Wisdom are on the Macquarie Street corner, and the dome and mansard roof are Vernon’s 1890s additions.
Look at the statues in their niches, with names on the pedestals, and at the niches still empty: only about half were ever filled, and several hands carved them. This yellowblock is known for flaking, so look for surfaces lifting away. A bench-mark plug set into this front once provided the origin of all levels in New South Wales, though the sources don’t say exactly where on the wall it is.
Greenway’s 1818 obelisk is built of fine-grained white sandstone in several blocks, not one stone. This north face lists road distances to places such as Bathurst and Parramatta. Walk round to the east side, where panels were replaced after a vehicle hit the base (1966 or about 1970, sources differ), and compare their lettering with the originals.
Three government architects built this up between the 1840s and 1917, and kept to the same materials and proportions, so try to find where one stage stops and the next starts. Over the entrance, look for the royal arms, the carved head on the keystone and the clock in its wreath. The grey speckled columns at the door are a different stone from the walls.
This is the rock itself: look for bedding, staining, ferns and the vertical grooves down the faces. No survey of the tool marks was found, and blasting left marks as well, so don’t assume every groove is convict work. On the south wall is a stone naming Mayor Charles Moore and 1867 to 1868, moved here from a bridge demolished in the 1920s.
Look at the long and short blocks at the corners of the astronomer’s house, and the octagonal stone drum under the telescope dome. A major stone repair project ran from 1999 to 2008, so look for blocks that differ from their neighbours, though the sources don’t say which they are. The time ball on the tower still drops at 1 pm.
Look for sets of slanted lines between the flat partings in the rock. This is cross-bedding, made as sand slid down the fronts of bars in a Triassic river, and a UNSW field class has used this face to teach it. The Dictionary of Sydney says quarrying the edges of this hill is what left the high cliffs facing Argyle Place.
The blocks range from honey to brown, a good example of natural variation in one local stone, and up close their faces are pitted and look tooled. Look for the carved foliage on the window heads. The church’s masons were among the first in Sydney to win the eight-hour day, in 1855.
This was built by a stonemason, George Paton, who also worked on the Garrison Church, and the walls are plain ashlar cut into a splayed corner. Look along the top of the wall: its corbels and carved relief were removed in the 1980s. The stone is credited to the Argyle Cut or to a lease on Observatory Hill, and sources don’t agree.
Look for tool marks: most blocks are smooth-dressed, but some are sparrow-pecked, covered in small pits from a pointed tool. The wall was first built around 1830 to 1840 and rebuilt on this line in 1911 to 1912. The cement in the joints is a later repair that stops the wall breathing and is speeding up its decay, and the small openings are weepholes.
This curved floor is the bedrock itself, levelled for a gun battery in 1819. Look for the circular cuts made for swivelling cannon in the 1850s, the covered drainage channels, and the scars where walls once stood, some now filled with paving and mortar. A ramp cut into the rock leads away from the north-west corner.
The pylons aren’t sandstone: they are concrete faced with Moruya granite, from the same place as the columns at the General Post Office. Compare the hard, speckled granite with the sandstone you’ve been looking at, and look for the courses stepping back as they rise. The pylons carry nothing, because the abutments at their base take the load of the arch.
Find where the stone stops: the bays are sandstone up to the top of the second level with brick above, including the gable ends. The building had only two storeys when finished around 1860, and the third level was added between 1882 and 1887. The back of the building is terraced into the hill.
Limewashed rubble fills the walls, and dressed stone is kept for the plinth, string course, pilasters and door surrounds. The walls were sandblasted in 1972, so little original tooling is likely to survive on them. The cottage was built against a rock shelf at the water’s edge, and the water is now about 100 m behind you.
The last sandstone on the walk is one of the latest: opened about 1952 as the Maritime Services Board offices, it’s smooth-dressed orange stone above a base of rusticated pink granite. A UNSW-based walk gives the stone as Maroubra, in the eastern suburbs, from after Pyrmont’s supply had run down. Compare these flat, plain surfaces with the carved walls earlier in the walk.