A narrow corridor at Awaba Colliery with fluorescent lights still burning along the ceiling, light-grey tiled walls, a concrete floor, and a closed door at the far end.
A narrow corridor at Awaba Colliery with fluorescent lights still burning along the ceiling, light-grey tiled walls, a concrete floor, and a closed door at the far end.

Hallway

Provenance

Camera
NIKON D7000
Lens
14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings
23mm · f/8.0 · 0.8 sec · ISO 100
Paper
Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

A narrow corridor with fluorescent tubes running its full length, still lit. Light-grey ceramic tiles line the walls. The floor is concrete. A closed door sits at the far end of the passage. Two framed notices are fixed to the left wall. A small rectangular window opening breaks the tile beside the notices.

Edition
Open edition

Open edition
Printed to order, no fixed quantity. Each print is hand-signed by the photographer.

Limited edition
A fixed number of prints exist. Once sold, the edition closes permanently. Each print is individually numbered and signed.

$100.00 AUD
Size
Type
Colour
✓
Signed, numbered, with COA. Made to order in 10 to 20 business days (framed). Shipped in protective packaging with edition certificate, paper-stock reference and a printed care guide.
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In situ

A narrow corridor at Awaba Colliery with fluorescent lights still burning along the ceiling, light-grey tiled walls, a concrete floor, and a closed door at the far end.A narrow corridor at Awaba Colliery with fluorescent lights still burning along the ceiling, light-grey tiled walls, a concrete floor, and a closed door at the far end.A narrow corridor at Awaba Colliery with fluorescent lights still burning along the ceiling, light-grey tiled walls, a concrete floor, and a closed door at the far end.A narrow corridor at Awaba Colliery with fluorescent lights still burning along the ceiling, light-grey tiled walls, a concrete floor, and a closed door at the far end.A narrow corridor at Awaba Colliery with fluorescent lights still burning along the ceiling, light-grey tiled walls, a concrete floor, and a closed door at the far end.
01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title
Hallway
Series
Awaba Colliery
Catalogue
AWB-009
Process
Giclée
Captured
20 December 2015
Camera
NIKON D7000
Lens
14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture
f/8.0
Shutter
0.8 sec s
ISO
100
Focal length
23 mm
Paper
Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Location
Awaba
Recognised by
Highly Commended in Multimedia at the 2016 National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards
02 LOCATION

Awaba

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

03 THE STORY

About this print

The fluorescent lights in this corridor were still on. The site was alarmed, the gas monitors still running, the framed notices still fixed to the wall beside a small rectangular window opening. A closed door blocked the far end of the passage. Nothing had been cleared out. It looked less like a closure than a shift that simply ended without anyone coming back. Awaba Colliery sits at 242 Wilton Road, approximately 1 kilometre south of the Awaba township in the City of Lake Macquarie. The mine began development in 1947, its original purpose specific and practical: to supply thermal coal to Wangi Power Station and support the state's expanding electricity network. Premier James McGirr formally opened it on 14 July 1948. The method was bord-and-pillar, working the Great Northern Seam by continuous miners, a technique that left coal pillars standing to support the roof, then returned to those pillars in the mine's later years to strip out what remained. The mine operated under a succession of state owners, the State Coal Mines Control Board, then the State Mines Control Authority from March 1950, then the Electricity Commission of New South Wales from 1 July 1973, then Pacific Power and its coal subsidiary PowerCoal, before the NSW Government sold PowerCoal to Centennial Coal Company Ltd in August 2002 for $331 million. Centennial was itself acquired by Thai group Banpu Public Company Ltd in 2011. Through all of that, the mine kept producing. By its final years it was turning out 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. Underground mining ceased in March 2012 when the Great Northern Seam was exhausted. All mine entries were sealed that same year. The surface infrastructure, the administration offices, workshops, bathhouse, lamp room, was left standing, the longer-term question of what to do with it unresolved. This photograph, made in 2015, records a corridor that the mine had not yet finished with. The lights were still on.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

The fluorescent lights in this corridor at Awaba Colliery were still burning when the photograph was made in 2015, three years after the last coal came out of the Great Northern Seam. The site was alarmed, the gas monitors still running. A closed door blocks the far end of the passage; two framed notices remain fixed to the wall beside a small rectangular window opening. Awaba ran from 1947 until its reserves were exhausted in March 2012, ending sixty-five years of underground bord-and-pillar mining beneath the Lake Macquarie basin.

Brett Patman

Awaba Colliery

The series

Awaba Colliery

1947 to 2012 · 24 photographs

Awaba Colliery worked the Great Northern Seam at Awaba, on the western side of Lake Macquarie in New South Wales, from 1947 until 2012. The state opened the mine to supply thermal coal to Wangi Power Station, and from 1954 a branch railway carried the coal there. It was a drift mine, entered by an inclined tunnel rather than a vertical shaft, so it never carried a headframe. Mining ended in March 2012 when the workable coal in the seam ran out, and the entries were sealed that year.

View all in this series →

05 SIZE GUIDE

Print sizes

The anatomy view shows what this finish is as a physical object: paper margin, mat band, frame depth, acrylic profile. The comparison strip shows how each size sits relative to the others at true scale. Click a size or a finish to update both.

Anatomy · true ratio
07 MORE FROM AWABA COLLIERY

23 other prints in this series

All prints
Yellow crane isolator sign and electrical switching panels on the workshop wall at Awaba Colliery, with a metal ladder and orange electric shock warning cabinet visible.
Workshop Switchroom $100.00
Rusted workshop shelving and faint floor rail tracks inside the colliery workshop at Awaba, with a crane bearing the name "Morison Bearby" visible overhead and a white cup resting on the concrete floor.
Workshop Shelves $100.00
A large vent fan in green mesh caging in a basement workshop at Awaba Colliery, with a partial red danger sign on a brick column and a drill press with coiled hoses in the foreground.
Vent Fan $100.00
Empty shelving units and a faded fire extinguisher sign on the rendered wall of a workshop bay at Awaba Colliery, with graffiti near two windows and exposed pipes overhead.
Workshop Bay $100.00
08 BY POST · NO SPAM

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