Boring Machine

The boring machine sits where it was left. Its rotary cutting head, ringed with carbide-tipped teeth, has settled low on a stained concrete slab, crawler tracks visible underneath. White hydraulic hoses still coil between the machine's sections, connected but long dormant. A 'Fire depot' sign on a concrete pillar and a corrugated iron building with multi-pane windows place the machine squarely within the surface infrastructure at Awaba. Nothing has been disconnected or removed. It simply stopped. Awaba Colliery began development in 1947, when 8,500 acres in the Awaba district were reserved for state mining operations and gazetted in the NSW Government Gazette. The mine was formally opened on 14 July 1948 by Premier James McGirr. It was built from the outset to supply thermal coal to Wangi Power Station, and a dedicated railway branch line was constructed to carry that coal from 1954. The mine operated as a drift access operation, driven into the hillside rather than sunk vertically, which is why there is no headframe in any photograph of the site. The primary seam was the Great Northern Seam, worked by bord-and-pillar continuous miners. In the later phases of operation, crews returned to earlier workings for pillar extraction, quartering and stripping, recovering what remained from the pillars left during first-workings development. By the final years the mine was producing approximately 800,000 to 900,000 tonnes of thermal coal per year with a workforce of around 85. The last shift ran on 23 December 2011. Mining formally ceased in March 2012 when the coal reserves in the Great Northern Seam were exhausted. Across sixty-five years of operation, Awaba produced more than 35 million tonnes. The surface infrastructure remained. The corrugated iron workshops, the concrete pillars with their operational signage, the machinery that extracted the last of the coal, all of it stayed in place after the underground was sealed and the workforce transferred to other Centennial Coal operations. This photograph, made in 2015, records the boring machine as it was found: complete, connected, going nowhere.