Context

Historic context

Victoria has developed exponentially since European settlement. Originally timber huts housed a small but growing population. A legacy of the gold rush of the 1850s was an oversupply of underemployed miners. The extensive basalt plains of Victoria were a fertile ground for stonemasons who built the magnificent cities we see in Victoria today. These masons could not keep up with the demand as working basalt is a slow process. Brick makers then filled this gap and brick works popped up all over the colony as the population grew more affluent and wanted a better standard of housing.

This cultural and industrial heritage has largely been lost. The brick kilns are now gone. But the bricks remain. They are everywhere. Australia is now, as has been for a long time, the world’s largest per capita consumer of bricks. Nobody gives them a second thought. Many new arrivals in post-war Australia worked making bricks. Maybe one of your relatives was such a person. Almost nothing has been done in Victoria by the State Government to record this history, except a half-hearted attempt in the early 1980s by the Victoria State Archaeological Survey to record a few brick that came their way at a few sites. What ever became of them? Although some good came of it because a paper on “The Analysis of Bricks from Archaeological Sites in Australia; IAIN STUART” was produced. See it at http://www.jcis.net.au/data/23-04-Stuart.pdf


Even half the bricks we use today smash like China tea-pots if you drop them from any sort of height. Not like the old Victorian bricks. Oh no, they knew how to build houses in those days.

“Blue Collar”, P16, Danny King



What I want to do here is to show pictures of some of the bricks I have come across in my travels and give a short story about their maker. If you have anything to add, please let me know. PS: I do not collect bricks, only photographs of bricks. If you have some old bricks, let me know and I may come and photograph them and maybe find a story about them.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Hammill, Avoca


When picking up old bricks around the place, context is everything.  Most are not stamped with a maker and where a hand made brick is found can be the only way to reasonably determine a maker.  Such is the case with this one.  I found it in a hotel car park in Avoca recently.  People don't value individual bricks as part of their heritage so they can be found just lying around, or dumped in skips.  The only person that I know of who was making this type of brick in this town was John Hammill.

John Hammill (1832 – 1899) arrived in Victoria in November 1852 with his family aboard the ship “Nuggett”; an appropriate name for potential gold diggers.  John however went into brick making, a profession he practiced with his son, also named John, for many years.  He was active from at least 1855 when he is remembered as doing the brick and stone-work for the Avoca Hotel where around 100,000 bricks were used.  From the look of buildings around town, he made both red and cream bricks. 


Chances are that they also made the bricks for the Post Office, Victoria Hotel, Albion Hotel (now closed), the former Hollands Drapery Shop, the former Bank of Victoria building, the Police Residence, the Uniting Church Complex, the Presbyterian Church Complex, the Powder Magazine, the Newsagency, the Pyrenees Cellar building, the former National Schools building and Lalor’s Pharmacy, as well as numerous homes and brick chimneys on timber homes.  Distinctive features of some of Hammil’s work appears to be the use of corbelled brickwork and dark headers.

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