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Hawkesbury Sandstone
Long before the arrival in Australia of outsiders, the soft Hawkesbury Sandstone of the Sydney basin was used extensively as a canvas for the art of the indigenous population. With no written language, they recorded their tribal heritage in the form of figures carved into the overhangs and on flat slabs of sandstone.
The new settlers, who came from a land where stone was used to build dwellings, soon found in the Hawkesbury sandstone a raw material that was perfectly suited to building. The first fleet's lone stonemason, Samuel Peyton, a Londoner who was transported for larceny, was put to work training a number of unskilled convict labourers in his craft. He established the first quarry on what was to be known as Bennelong Point, setting in motion the systematic quarrying of Sydney's Hawkesbury Sandstone.
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