Michael Beville with photographs of past projects, including the stone frame of his fireplace in his Southern Highlands home, which he carved with symbols telling the story of his life. Photo: John Thistleton.
Having toiled for 18 months on a crowning sandstone bell tower above St Saviour’s Cathedral in Goulburn, stonemason Michael Beville was in a hurry to return to the Southern Highlands.
By 1986 when a team of skilled stonemasons joined overseer Brian Bowen and setter-out draughtsman Ted Higgins, both seconded from England for the ambitious bicentennial project, Michael was keen to return to his business, fearing rivals might move in on his clients.
“Bowral and Robertson and surrounding areas were great,” he said. “We worked for 25 years for investment banker Mark Burrows at Kangaloon: drystone walls, gardens of Babylon. We’d get to a stage where my apprentices were handy and I would be just supervising.”
Years later after building a grand family home overlooking the Nattai Valley, and on the suggestion of his wife replicating Yorkstone flagging for his verandah, two men visited Michael. One was the head of the creative artists team working on the box office smash hit movie Babe, and the other was filmmaker George Miller.
They had heard about his stonemasonry skills and wanted his help on the set around Robertson, including a dry-stone wall that emerged as a picturesque backdrop for many scenes. While putting tonnes of stone into the project, Michael became fascinated with the scenic artistic team’s uncanny ability to change the appearance of stone.
They had a profound influence on his Yorkstone work which just about took over his business, even though his stonemasonry skills, learned in Bradford, England, were so thorough he could have branched into any related field of his choosing.
Born at Limerick, Ireland, his mother Mary Mulcahy had once been a nun in Brisbane, Australia, before leaving the order and returning home where she later met and married her future husband, Matthew Beville. Michael was six when the family moved to Bradford into a council home which they shared with Mary’s sister and her family. In all 16 people lived in the small home.
Completing high school, he found work in a worsted wool textile mill, but after seven months left for a job in a sandstone quarry next door. Its main claim to fame was providing the base for an international tourist attraction, Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.
After learning the different types of stone, geometry principles and becoming a tradesman, he became friendly with Anne, one of the girls in the quarrying village. Following their subsequent marriage they applied to come to Australia.
Arriving in their new country, and after a few weeks in a migration camp, he secured a job in Kogarah working alongside five stonemasons. They were making windowsills, engaged in restoration work on the Sydney Town Hall and contributing to the Sydney Cove redevelopment around The Rocks. Then the family moved again.
“We knew a family in Australia; they lived in Hill Top in the Southern Highlands,” he said, explaining his decision to develop his stone business there.
St Saviour’s tower rises above the sandstone landmark in Bourke Street, Goulburn. Photo: John Thistleton.
In 1986 he was among the first stonemasons to work on the St Saviour’s tower. Eight historic bells were acquired from St Mark’s – a redundant church in Leicester, UK – for the tower, which was completed in 1988.
He worked alongside Goulburn stonemasons Ernie Greaves (now deceased) and his son Jon, Brian Doyle from Crookwell, and brothers Ian and Gary Keely. Michael’s apprentice Rick Bourke also worked on the tower.
His first job was refacing sandstone. “It had to be cleaned and the best way to do it … we had been doing it in England for years – pitch the first half inch off with a pitching tool and you are left with a clean look,” he said.
He became lifelong friends with fellow Yorkshireman Brian Doyle, who came to Australia from Huddersfield.
“It’s funny with Yorkshire people, there is almost a different language; you walk out of one city into another and your language changes in about half an hour,” he said.
Michael with some of the bricks he made in his Goulburn backyard and coloured, for his man cave. Photo: John Thistleton.
Michael worked on several other memorable projects. “A good project seems to fade out nicely, but you never forget the ones that dudded you,” he said, recounting work for which he was never paid. Any money that was forthcoming went to banks because they were first in the line of creditors.
He returned to Ireland for a period and later returned to Australia and settled in Goulburn for retirement with his wife, Anne. He has built a man cave out the back where he plays his guitar and does pottery, illustrating vases with themes from the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats.
