Collage

The collage occupies an entire wall at Awaba Colliery: dozens of photographs mounted together showing the faces, vehicles, and machinery of a mine that ran for sixty-five years. Workers in hard hats look back from the frame. A white station wagon marked NSW Mine sits near the centre of the arrangement. A large red semi-trailer carries heavy equipment across another image. Group shots taken at the pit fill in the gaps. On some crew members, short shorts are visible, the kind that disappeared from Australian work sites well before the colliery's final years. Awaba State Coal Mine began development in 1947, created specifically to supply thermal coal to Wangi Power Station. NSW Premier James McGirr formally opened the mine on 14 July 1948. The operation sat at 242 Wilton Road, approximately one kilometre south of Awaba township, with underground workings reaching from the western edge of Lake Macquarie toward the foothills of the Watagan Mountains. It was a drift mine, not a shaft mine, meaning no headframe ever stood above the surface. Access ran via inclined drifts driven into the hillside. The mine passed through several owners across its life. The State Coal Mines Control Board governed it from opening; the State Mines Control Authority succeeded in March 1950; ownership transferred to the Electricity Commission of New South Wales in 1973; and the NSW Government sold the operation to Centennial Coal Company Ltd in August 2002 as part of a $331 million Powercoal portfolio sale. Centennial Coal was itself acquired by Thai group Banpu Public Company Ltd in 2011. The primary seam was the Great Northern Seam, worked by bord-and-pillar methods using continuous miners. Total production over the operational life exceeded 35 million tonnes. By the final years the workforce numbered approximately 85, producing around 800,000 to 900,000 tonnes of thermal coal annually. The last shift ran on 23 December 2011. Mining ceased entirely in March 2012 when the coal reserves were exhausted. The collage, captured in 2015, is what remained on the wall.