Stickers

The storeman's office at Awaba Colliery sits at the heart of the surface pit top infrastructure, a corrugated iron and brick structure that processed the daily supply needs of an underground coal operation. Its windows are barely visible beneath layers of stickers accumulated over the mine's working life, brand labels for Ingersoll Rand, Exide, and Superfilter still readable against the light. A wooden plank leans against the wall inside. Through the open doorway, a sun-bleached exterior and a brick wall sit quiet in the middle distance. Awaba State Coal Mine was developed from 1947 on the Great Northern Seam beneath Lake Macquarie's western fringe. It was built specifically to supply thermal coal to Wangi Power Station, and a dedicated railway branch line was constructed to carry that coal from 1954. Premier James McGirr formally opened the mine on 14 July 1948. From its opening it was operated by the NSW Government, first under 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, and eventually Pacific Power's PowerCoal subsidiary through the 1990s. In August 2002 the NSW Government sold the PowerCoal portfolio to Centennial Coal Company for $331 million. Awaba continued under Centennial, and later its parent company Banpu, until the mine's final closure. By the time Centennial announced the closure in November 2011, the mine employed approximately 85 workers and was producing around 800,000 tonnes of thermal coal per year from a bord-and-pillar operation using continuous miners. The closure was not a decision imposed from outside. The Great Northern Seam was exhausted. The last shift ran on 23 December 2011, and all underground mining ceased in March 2012 after more than 35 million tonnes had been won from below the lake bed. What the photograph records is what a working mine leaves behind in its service buildings: not wreckage, but the residue of ordinary working days. Every sticker on those windows was put there by someone who needed to remember a supplier or a specification. The light still falls through the glass.