Workshop Shelves

Inside the workshop at Awaba Colliery, faint rail tracks run the full length of a concrete floor toward a corrugated metal doorway. Light floods in from outside, catching the rusted tiers of shelving that line the right-hand wall. A white cup sits on the floor in the foreground. The lower shelves hold scattered industrial debris. Overhead, a crane structure carries the name "Morison Bearby" in bold lettering, a manufacturer's mark on equipment that outlasted the operation around it. Awaba Colliery, known formally as Awaba State Coal Mine from its opening, began development in 1947 to supply thermal coal to Wangi Power Station. The mine was formally opened by NSW Premier James McGirr on 14 July 1948. It operated as a drift mine, meaning access to the underground workings ran via an inclined drift driven into the hillside rather than a vertical shaft, there was no headframe. Surface buildings included administration offices, workshops, a bathhouse, a lamp room, and a coal handling and crushing plant. The primary seam worked was the Great Northern Seam, with bord-and-pillar methods using continuous miners, and later pillar extraction as reserves diminished. Ownership passed through successive state and private operators: the State Coal Mines Control Board, the State Mines Control Authority from March 1950, the Electricity Commission of New South Wales from 1 July 1973, and Pacific Power's PowerCoal subsidiary 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. Mining ceased in March 2012 when coal reserves in the Great Northern Seam were exhausted. The last shift had been worked on 23 December 2011. Total production across the mine's operational life exceeded 35 million tonnes. At closure, approximately 85 workers remained on site. This photograph, made in 2015, records the workshop as it stood three years after the last shift. The tracks in the floor, the shelves on the wall, the cup on the concrete, the accumulated detail of a place that ran for sixty-five years and then stopped.