This big post has been in the ground  for 30 years from 1984. It is

used to form the edges of a Garden Room outside our bedroom which

looks down into our bedroom pond.

A piece of old post and rail fence.  To  obtain this is very rare thing.

When settlers came out in that late 1880’s into the dry Australian bush,

they wanted to clear the land of trees and create open space for their cattle.

They split the trees with wedges to  form horizontal rails and bigger posts to

go in the ground. A narrow axe was used to cut slots for the rails to go in.

See this website: Images for old post and post and rail fence Australia.

 plus new fences in the theme of the old post and rail fence.

The big stone to the left of the fence  has a  story to tell in itself. When

our two children (Anthony and Claire) where little back in the mid 1980’s,

we would have birthday parties for  them and their friends. This stone would

be covered with a nice white cloth and used as a birthday  table.

I originally  obtained this  stone plus two truckloads  virtually for  nothing in 1981.  At time of our building the house, I was passing one day in 1981 down near the corner of Albert and Margaret St. near the Brisbane  Botanical Gardens. I was with my landscape contract business partner at the time, in our truck. We passed a corner block with a big pile of earth and square cut stone. There was a big drott working on the site. We stopped the truck and I went over and asked the driver what he was going to with the stone. It was from the foundations of the old Cobb and Co. Depot in the Stagecoach days of Brisbane. We were in the middle of building our house. I said to driver, `What do you going to do with the stones?. He scratched his head and said `I will probably dump them. `How much do you want for them? I asked as the inveterate scrounger. He said `Probably $50.00. I said `I will give you $75.00 for the lot. I paid him then and there and had him load on one load of dirty stone. We came back the next day to collect the other load.

This is how you recycle waste materials or scrap into useful and very valuable items. Those stones became the main wall in our bedroom and also initially one large one as an inside coffee table. This was a handcut stone 120 mm. long * 55 mm. wide * 33 mm. deep. One form the big stone table as shown above. In the last three years, the rooms in the house have been redesigned so that now what was initially a dining room has become a small sitting room with the TV and DVD sitting on the raised stone. The stone was moved by hand on bricks and a crowbar with two of us working on the moving of the stone some fifteen metres from one place to the other.

With recent research in the John Oxley Library, I have since found out that the Headquarters of Cobb and Co. were at 71 Albert St., The City. The Company had moved headquarters in 1866 from Melbourne. It had initially been formed to run from Melbourne to the Victorian Goldfields. It was in operation in Brisbane for seventy years till 1924. It didn’t survive the Great Depression and caused the Company to go into voluntary liquidation.

Competition from rail and the newly invented motor vehicle, had also produced a contracting of the extensive mail runs which ran all over Queensland and down south. At these new headquarters, there were large offices, a coach building factory and stables for the team of horses which drew the coaches. In 1866, the coach building business, was moved to Charleville. It is wonderful to know our stone has been part of early Brisbane history.

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See the next post: Post 4: The Rainforest Garden Room

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