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.

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Mewburn, Thomas

By his own admission, Thomas Mewburn was the earliest brick maker in Ballarat. Little information is available about him other than him operating in Inkerman Gully (Ballarat North). It is likely, although not certain that his brickworks was in Simpson Street on the site of the Inkerman Gully Playground and reserve. At the time, he would have made bricks by hand. I have seen one example that is hand made and stamped with a metal brand “T Mewburn” on one face. This was most likely made in a Scotch Kiln, like many other makers of the day.

Thomas, a brick maker (1816 - 1902) was born in Huxworth on Tees, County Durham. He married Jane Hurst on the 21^st of August 1837 at Deanne Bolton, Lancashire. They had 9 children, including a son, also named Thomas Thomas (Snr) died in 1902 in Ballarat, Australia at 86 years of age. He is buried in the Old Ballarat Cemetery, Area Private D Section 13 Graves 16 & 17. His son George (1846-1918) was also a Brickmaker in Ballarat.

He advertised his bricks often and invited people to visit his brickworks to see the quality of his bricks compared to other makers. He says the brick works was the “top brick yard Inkerman Gully.” In 1858, he began making fire bricks, advertising them as being “tested in five successive meltings of a blast furnace; the result is in every way, satisfactory.” The number of blast furnaces in use in Ballarat at that time would not have been large.