Storeroom

The upper storage floor at Awaba Colliery sits quiet now, its shelving bays long emptied. Metal units run back through the room in a steady line, broken only by a single wooden-clad unit mid-way along the right-hand wall, a different era of fitout, or a different purpose, left in among the steel. Skylights in the corrugated iron roof bring light down onto the concrete wall opposite, where water stains have spread and darkened over years of disuse. The timber floorboards below carry the worn, dark patterns of a floor that was walked heavily for decades. Awaba Colliery, formally the Awaba State Coal Mine, began development in 1947 on 8,500 acres reserved by the NSW Government for state mining operations. The mine was formally opened on 14 July 1948 by Premier James McGirr. It was built 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 using bord-and-pillar methods with continuous miners, producing over 35 million tonnes of thermal coal across its operational life. From its opening, the mine was operated by the State Coal Mines Control Board, succeeded in March 1950 by the State Mines Control Authority. Ownership transferred to the Electricity Commission of New South Wales on 1 July 1973, then passed through Pacific Power and its coal subsidiary PowerCoal before the NSW Government sold the PowerCoal portfolio to Centennial Coal Company Ltd in August 2002 for $331 million. Centennial Coal was itself acquired by Thai group Banpu Public Company Ltd in 2011. By the time of closure, the mine employed approximately 85 workers and was producing around 800,000 to 900,000 tonnes of thermal coal per year. The last shift ran on 23 December 2011. Mining ceased entirely in March 2012 when the coal reserves in the Great Northern Seam were exhausted. The storeroom photographed in 2015 records what that closure left behind: the structure intact, the fittings in place, the contents gone.