Quarrying is a noxious industrial activity necessary for the provision of stone and clay, utilised predominately in building activities as the city grows. In post-industrial Melbourne, the extraction of these materials has left a pock-marked landscape, reflecting the fact that the city was settled upon an opportune juncture of sand-and-clay, basalt, and mudstone fields. Although quarry holes vary significantly in scale and depth, resolution of this complex landscape is often found in their re-use as tips, and this is especially true for basalt quarries located in Melbourne’s western suburbs. The refuse of city-dwellers and industry returns the void to a planar or flattened state, with soil often un-stable due to decaying fill. Options for re-use of such sites are thus limited, and may warrant creative solutions. Large tracts of formerly industrial land are considered ‘brownfield’ sites, and quarrying creates particularly complex examples of these spaces. Their proliferation throughout specific geological areas such as Melbourne’s west underlies institutional desire, and in some instances public sentiment, to locate a new purpose for disused post-industrial land. As such, former quarry-tips have been historically remade as open space, and in one rare and unsuccessful instance, housing. This paper identifies two individual cases of quarry-and-tip re-use, and explores their development: the Newport Lakes park, and Yarraville’s notorious ‘Sinking Village’. The historical narrative constructed by this paper makes use of newspaper publications, and reveals the processes by which the remnants of past industrial activity have become accommodated in the contempo-rary post-industrial city. This will also demonstrate the rationale for each project, in addition to public and institutional discourse surrounding the reuse of a quarry site, and its subsequent post-industrial iteration. These are linked to the presentday condition of the site, reinforcing the connection between historic land use and what exists today.