This was an ABC Central West feature with Kia Handley on three regional NSW shoots: Blayney Abattoir, Bathurst Gasworks, and Kandos Cement Works. The audio companion is here.
The Blayney Abattoir gallery was one of the first Lost Collective posts to go properly viral on Facebook. What pulled it past the photography-feed crowd was the comment thread: people writing from decades back, telling stories from when the abattoir was the backbone of the town.
That gallery seeded the Blayney Abattoir Facebook Group, which grew past 400 members within weeks and started planning a reunion. Some of those members hadn't been in the same room as each other in decades.
The conversation was rarely simple. Stories about people who weren't ready to leave; people who were too old to find new work; families who had to move away because the work disappeared with the building. The closure of a major employer reshapes the town that grew around it, and the closure-reports written by major media at the time rarely follow the long tail of that change.
None of which is to say a loss-making business should keep operating indefinitely. Time and time again, though, the company moves on to more profitable work while the community that supported it for fifty or eighty years is left to absorb the cost. Whatever support is offered tends to be the support that's already required. Few ever go back to check.
"It was more than a decade ago when Brett Patman, working as a fitter and turner on infrastructure such as public utilities, first fell in love with abandoned industrial buildings. While working on a new power station, his attention was drawn to the old one it had replaced. 'It was this hulking, rusted steel structure still sitting there and I just thought it was amazing,' Mr Patman remembered."
Read the full ABC News piece at abc.net.au.
