Kedron Shire Quarry Face & Stone Crusher (former)

Porphyry is the most striking of the building stones quarried in Brisbane. The stone varies in colour with off-white, pink, purplish and green commonly occurring. It is also found in yellow and brown. Colour seems to be related to durability, the pinks and purples being more durable and the green less durable. The uniformity, porosity and blocky jointing of the tuff make it a good building stone. Brisbane Tuff is not suited to polishing and is generally seen as rough-dressed stone, commonly found in ashlar work and in base courses, retaining walls, side walls and cellars of early buildings. It has been extensively used for roadmaking, kerbing, wharfs and marine walls. Quarries were worked at Spring Hill, Herston and Fortitude Valley to produce stone used in Brisbane General Post Office (1872); St Stephen’s Cathedral (1874); St Paul’s Church, Leichhardt Street (1887); St John’s Cathedral (1909-11). 

A welded tuff like the rock at Kangaroo Point, the former Stafford Quarry produced purplish and off-white stone. The early rock was used for building stone and the quarry was then a source of crushed rock for road pavement gravels and boulder stone for landscaping. The Stafford stone has been used mainly for river bank and other retaining walls. 

A predominantly rural area with some noxious and light industry until the 1940s, Stafford was known as Happy Valley until 1886. Up until the 1940s it was not a popular residential area with many complaining about the close proximity of dairy farms, the odours from the tanneries, the effluent discharged into Kedron Brook and the dust and explosions erupting from Stafford Quarry. From 1945 to 1961 Stafford experienced a housing boom ignited when the Queensland Housing Commission erected a large number of houses in planned estates from 1945. By the 1950s private developers were beginning to develop estates on the northern boundaries of the Housing Commission area.

Local residents recall that the quarry was operated by the Kedron Shire (thus the quarry was in operation before 1925), and accidents and the installation of equipment were reported in local newspapers from 1913. The rock was blasted away and then smashed with sledge hammers. When the quarry was extended to two levels, one would frequently fill with water and was used at weekends by the locals as a swimming hole. 

After the amalgamation of Brisbane’s local councils, the Brisbane City Council took over the quarry’s operation. The stone crusher was installed in 1926, though according to Brisbane’s Daily Standard, not used:

In Nundah Ward is the famous “white elephant” quarry, situated at Stafford-on-Kedron… in July, 1926, Mayor Jolly called for tenders for a stone-crusher for the quarry. The tender of the Runalt [sic] Company, Melbourne, was accepted, the amount being 697. It was delivered in August, 1926, and although 18 months had elapsed it had not turned a wheel. (Daily Standard, 17 February 1928, p6)

The quarry was closed in 1963 as the tuff supplies were exhausted and  residential settlement was closing in around the site with the blasts, flying rock and dust from conveyor belts, rock crushing and truck movements affecting the residents.

The remaining weathered quarried cliff face runs along the Broughton Street boundary of the Depot and to the rear of the residences fronting Wood Street. The cliff reaches a height of approximately 20 metres along Broughton Street. An early timber and wire fence runs along the top of the cliff in Broughton Street.

1. Brisbane City Council, Stafford Quarry Kedron: Conservation Management Study Site Report, November 2002

2. Brisbane City Council Minutes 1926