Shelving

The photograph looks down a narrow storeroom aisle at the pit-top precinct of Awaba Colliery. Metal shelving units run the full length of both sides, their surfaces streaked with rust where moisture has worked through over years of vacancy. The floorboards beneath are darkened and warped from water ingress, their surface no longer flat. On the left-hand unit, a sign survives in fragments: '000' is legible, and what reads as 'FIR RIG E', the rest worn or obscured beyond recovery. Whatever instruction or warning it once carried, it is gone. Awaba Colliery, officially the Awaba State Coal Mine, began development in 1947 on 242 Wilton Road, Awaba, in the City of Lake Macquarie. The NSW Government reserved 8,500 acres in the district for state mining operations in June that year, and the mine was formally opened by Premier James McGirr on 14 July 1948. 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, opening on 25 May 1954. The mine worked the Great Northern Seam by bord-and-pillar method, using continuous miners. Later operational phases involved pillar extraction, pillar quartering, and pillar stripping, going back into previously worked areas to recover what the earlier passes had left behind. Over its operational life, Awaba produced more than 35 million tonnes of coal. Ownership passed through successive state authorities, 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, before the NSW Government sold the PowerCoal portfolio to Centennial Coal Company Ltd in August 2002 for $331 million. Centennial was itself acquired by Thai group Banpu Public Company Ltd in 2011. By November 2011, Centennial announced closure. The mine had around 85 workers at that point, producing approximately 800,000 to 900,000 tonnes per year. The last shift ran on 23 December 2011. Final cessation of all underground mining came in March 2012, when the coal in the Great Northern Seam was exhausted. The storeroom in this photograph had been sitting undisturbed for three years when the image was made in 2015.