Conserving The Dry Stone Walls Of Kiama

Dry stone walls as prominent features in the Australian landscape are found most commonly in our eastern states, the most notable areas being Kiama and Lismore in NSW, the western districts of Victoria and a few places in Tasmania. Kiama Council has recently been looking at conservation issues for the striking stone walls of the Kiama Shire, the most extensive walls in NSW. Warick Mayne-Wilson describes the results of a recent heritage study.

Dry stone walls have been built in Britain, Ireland and Europe for hundreds of years, but the practice was greatly intensified during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was inevitable that this means of enclosing private property - especially farms - and solidly defining their boundaries, continued to be pursued by Australian settlers from the British Isles in the mid-19th century.

The wall types built throughout the Kiama region are closest to those prevalent across Ireland and parts of Britain, especially in the Yorkshire Dales. It is said that Kiama's first dry stone walls were built by convicts in the 1830s and 1840s, following the earliest grants of land in the area in the 1820s, but negligible traces of those remain. Many of these early grants were subdivided in the 1840-70s, creating modest sized farms. After settlers had finished clear-felling the area for cropping, they found their fields strewn with polymorphic stone, the result of millennia of weathering of the volcanic lava flows in the region.

As it was not practical to grow crops or run livestock on the land without first clearing the stones, the settlers laboriously piled them into heaps. To disperse them, owners decided to use the stone for fencing walls to demarcate their land holdings and contain stock. As tilling further exposed quantities of rock below the surface, stone continued to be used for defining boundaries around and between allotments and along roadways, as well as for animal pens and retaining walls.

Fortunately, wall-building skills were at hand. Twenty-two year old Thomas Newing arrived in the district in 1857 from Kent as a ploughman, but was shown how to build walls by a local settler in the Foxground area. He began building walls there that year, using the double-dyke or twin-skin technique. Newing quickly developed great skill in selecting and incorporating the local, irregularly shaped rock into this type of construction, and was much sought-after by other settlers. In addition to Newing, other wall builders soon emerged in the area, using Newing's techniques in their own work. Stone walls were built extensively until 1880, when wire became cheaply available for fencing.

Until recently, Kiama's dry stone walls were mostly ignored and suffered from decades of neglect and dilapidation. Limited attention was paid to their heritage significance until it was recognised by concerned locals that they gave Kiama Shire a most distinctive sense of place.

Although the century old walls had been listed in 1986 as heritage items in the Regional Environmental Plan for the Illawarra, they were not mapped, researched or assessed individually, and no measures were drawn up to conserve them.

Kiama Council responded to community interest and concern for the walls by forming a Dry Stone Walls Committee in 1992. Still active today, the committee is chaired by Deputy Mayor Les Davey and comprises local interested residents and community group representatives.

When development schemes proposed removing some of the walls in the late 1990s, Kiama Council engaged conservation landscape architects, Mayne-Wilson & Associates to undertake a pilot study of walls in West Kiama. The resultant study was adopted by Council, and subsequently won a commendation award by the National Trust in 1998.

Council soon recognised that the walls were increasingly valued by the community as a cultural asset and as a tourism resource for the region. Encouraged by the success of the pilot study, Council again engaged Mayne-Wilson & Associates, working with them to locate, record and assess the heritage values of every wall within the shire. The project received joint funding from the NSW Heritage Office and Kiama Council, totalling about $40,000.

This wall displays typical features of Kiama's dry stone walls: large base rocks, a tightly-knit
wall face and large coping stones to bind the two skins together.
Photographs by Warwick Mayne-Wilson & Associates

The consultants gathered as much local knowledge as possible about the whereabouts of all walls from land owners, old maps and the Council. For the complicated task of mapping them, a Global Positioning System which uses satellites to obtain close-to-exact ground siting was employed, as well as an odometer wheel to measure exact wall lengths.

But to adequately record, position and photograph every wall it was necessary to physically examine the often overgrown stonework. The field work was completed entirely on foot by a small team of young university landscape architecture graduates and a geographer, often with the assistance of landowners as guides around their properties. The owners also provided helpful background historical information on their walls. Over a three-month period 379 walls were located and recorded.

Five different types of walls were identified: roadway boundaries, lot and paddock boundary fences (the most numerous), holding yards (often found surrounded by stands of cultural plantings), retaining walls (uncommon), and modern examples (including town markers and private constructions in suburban subdivisions). To supplement the consultant team's gathering of piecemeal historical data during the course of their field work, Kiama Council commissioned a local historian, Ms Robyn Florance, to undertake more detailed historical research.

Armed with this information, which gave indications of the dates, builders and original owners of many walls, and using the data in their field assessment sheets, the consultants completed a detailed heritage assessment of each wall.

The plotted walls now provide the community with an indication of the pattern of land settlement history in the region, and an awareness of how many of these regionally significant landscape icons surround them. In addition, Kiama Council now has detailed guidelines on how assessments are arrived at, and how the walls should be conserved and maintained into the future.

A further outcome of this project has been the production of a technical manual showing how to build, repair and maintain Kiama's walls. The manual was produced by the Royal Botanic Gardens for Kiama Council and was written and illustrated by the British-trained but Illawarra-bred horticulturist Geoff Duggan, in consultation with Council's Dry Stone Wall Committee and Mayne-Wilson and Associates. It is nearing completion and will be published later this year.

In Kiama a once neglected resource has been revived to benefit the local community and remind them of the toils and craftsmanship of the district's early settlers. The walls are also now attracting an increasing number of tourists.

Another use of local stone, this time to build a causeway over a gully.
Photographs by Warwick Mayne-Wilson & Associates