Group of boys with carts and hessian bags full of discarded wood blocks on Cooks River Road near St Peters station22/4/1935

Wood blocks were widely used in Sydney for street paving by municipal councils from the 1890s. By the early 1930s councils started ripping up the worn wood blocks on some roads and replacing them with asphalt or concrete, often in large-scale Depression-era programs that provided employment for out-of-work men.