Bathroom

The green tiles are still there. Cracked in places, a few missing, but largely intact along the walls of this disused bathroom inside the Putney boatyard complex. The plumbing fittings are gone, pulled out at some point, leaving rust stains on the tile surface as the only record of where they stood. Paint has peeled back from the upper walls. The room has been empty long enough that it no longer reads as a bathroom so much as a tiled shell. Lars Halvorsen Sons Pty Ltd began constructing the Putney complex in 1939, on a site at 20 Waterview Street that the family had purchased two years earlier on the Parramatta River. The yard grew to include a timber wharf, concrete slipways, a boatshed, engineering workshops, and associated buildings. At the peak of wartime production, around 350 workers passed through the gates each day, building Fairmile motor launches, fast supply vessels, and air-sea rescue boats for the Royal Australian Navy, the United States Navy, and others. A facility that size needed amenities to match. The family operated the yard until around 1976, when the last of 1,299 craft was completed across their Drummoyne, Neutral Bay, and Putney yards. The Commonwealth of Australia subsequently acquired the property and converted it to a Royal Australian Navy repair facility. Australia Defence Industries Pty Ltd took over in 1989, and Lilac Pty Ltd ran the site as Putney Marina from around 1998. By 2018, when this photograph was made, the boatyard had been through several decades of changed hands and altered purpose. The tile work in this room dates to an earlier industrial life. What the photograph records is not ruin exactly, more the residue of utility: a room that served a working yard, outlasting the work itself.