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Hampton's Cheeses'
A few decades after the settlement of the Swan River colony, locals were regularly complaining about the condition of Guildford Road, which is known today as Great Eastern Highway. Many of the road users at the time were “Belmont’s potteries, horse traders, Chinese market gardens, piggeries, poultry farms and dairies”.
Whilst most farmers initially relied on water transport, the mud flats in the Swan River made navigation difficult. In 1843, the Causeway Bridge was constructed, as well as one in Mt Helena, increasing the road traffic on Belmont Road.
Guildford Road was troublesome to the point of being unusable during the winter periods, due to heavy rainfalls and flooding. Carts attempting to traverse this stretch of road would find themselves sinking axle deep.
The Government attempted to repair the road numerous times and implemented various solutions to the many issues that arose from this.
With convicts arriving in the Colony from 1850, Governor John Hampton decided to use convict labour in 1867 to experiment with improving the road’s condition, using a successful method he’d seen in Canada. It involved cutting thick discs of timber from trees and laying them over the road in sawpits. Convicts were transported over to a convict station established in Redcliffe, where they began cutting discs of jarrah, some 30cm thick. Once they were positioned alongside each other on Guildford Road, the space between them was compacted with soil or crushed up limestone.
These thick discs became known as Hampton’s Cheeses and most lasted until 1915, when they were torn out and replaced with “tarmac enhanced by electric lights”.
Guildford Road was renamed to Great Eastern Highway in 1935.
In August 2012, road engineers uncovered a number of these remnant blocks of Hampton’s Cheeses and donated them to the Belmont museum, where they can be viewed today. They are the last known remnants of a convict-built road.
