A GREAT advantage for the development of Tilligerry was that the area had its own quarry.

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This meant that the cost of the road base was very low and the damage to the main road was minimal because there were no heavy long haulage trucks breaking it up.

The remains of the old quarry are still there and can be accessed from behind the Marine Rescue Base Station on top of Whitbread Drive.

You can also get there via a track behind the Industrial Estate which winds its way to the old tailings dam at the bottom of the site.

Kids used to fish for yabbies there and probably still do.

The area was also very lucky to have a large deposit of conglomerate rock.

This formed an excellent foundation for local roads.

It had large rounded stones inside it and broke up easily after being ripped by a bulldozer and run over by the tracks.

Jack Boyd held the lease to the quarry with PSSC having a small interest as well.

Mr Boyd used the rock to put in most of the town’s roadworks for a real estate developer in the 1960s.

They even named a road after him.

He also had a sand pit along the rutile road between Tanilba Bay and Oyster Cove.

On top of this, he had the contract to mine the sand dunes behind Tanilba Golf Club for ACI, a glass maker, which processed the sand at Tanilba Bay.

Like his father, Jack served as a councillor on Port Stephens Shire.

He was also president of the Lemon Tree Passage Volunteer Bushfire Brigade.

He retired and sold both his quarry lease and his ACI contract in the 1980s and spent his later years deep sea fishing, a lifetime passion of his.

If you wander around the foreshore you may come across some large boulders which comprise sandstone mixed with rounded rocks.

These have come from the old quarry and were put there to help control foreshore erosion, many years ago.

By Geoff WALKER