Conveyor Drive

A cast relief in the shape of Australia, lettered 'Bliss Welded Products Ltd.', is raised on the side of a conveyor drive housing inside one of the surface buildings at Awaba Colliery, with a 'LOT 23' label still fixed to the casing above it. At the far end of the building, a corrugated metal door stands open, bright daylight pushing through the gap and throwing the debris-scattered floor into sharp relief. The rest of the space sits in shadow, the relief and its label the clearest things in the frame. Awaba Colliery operated as a drift mine, meaning access to the underground workings came via an inclined drift driven into the hillside rather than a vertical shaft. There was no headframe. The surface infrastructure included an overland conveyor drift, a tunnel conveyor drift, an 800-tonne in-seam bin, and two vertical ventilation shafts. Raw coal that required washing was conveyed to the adjacent Newstan Colliery washery. The buildings above ground, corrugated iron and functional, housed workshops, a bathhouse and change-house, a lamp room, and a coal handling and crushing plant. The mine began development in 1947, built by the NSW Government specifically to supply thermal coal to Wangi Power Station. Premier James McGirr formally opened it on 14 July 1948. Through successive owners, from the State Coal Mines Control Board to the State Mines Control Authority, then the Electricity Commission of New South Wales from 1973, and finally Centennial Coal Company from August 2002, the colliery worked the Great Northern Seam for sixty-five years. In its last years it produced approximately 800,000 to 900,000 tonnes of thermal coal annually, with a workforce of around 85. The last shift ran on 23 December 2011. Mining operations ceased entirely in March 2012 when coal reserves in the Great Northern Seam were exhausted. The underground workings were sealed, and the surface pit top was retained as a service facility for the adjacent Newstan Colliery. The 'LOT 23' label on the drive casing is a remnant of that process, a tag from the asset disposal that followed the end of sixty-five years of production.