Boat Stands

The timber boat stands at Halvorsen's Boat Yard in Putney are simple structures, built to do one thing: hold a hull steady while the work goes on around it. Photographed in 2018, a large wooden hull rests on timber chocks at the centre of the main workshop, its planking partly stripped back to bare timber along the port side. Sunlight from a row of 5 rectangular windows set into a yellow-painted wall cuts across the concrete floor, picking out dust and scattered debris, and steel roof trusses span the full width of the shed above. No workers. The yard is quiet in the way that places go quiet when the purpose that shaped them has been removed. Lars Halvorsen Sons Pty Ltd established the Putney yard in 1939, building the complex of boatshed, concrete slipways, and associated workshops on a Parramatta River site that had already carried more than a century of industrial history. James Squire had operated a brewery on the same ground from around 1798. By the time the Halvorsens arrived, the family had already worked through Drummoyne, Careening Cove, and Neutral Bay since Lars and his eldest son Harold first arrived in Sydney in December 1924. The Putney yard went to work immediately on wartime contracts. Over the course of the Second World War, the family's workforce, which peaked at around 350 people, produced 16 Fairmile motor launches, 43 sixty-foot fast supply vessels, and 147 thirty-eight-foot air-sea rescue boats for the Royal Australian Navy, the United States Navy, the Royal Netherlands Navy, and the RAAF. The combined contract value exceeded £1,000,000. After the war the yard turned back to leisure craft and racing yachts. The five slipways could handle vessels up to 90 feet and 100 tons. In 1962 the yard launched Gretel, a 12-metre class yacht designed by Alan Payne, which became Australia's first America's Cup challenger. Across the full working life of the Halvorsen yards from 1925 to 1976, the family built 1,299 craft. The boatbuilding wound down around 1980. The chocks in this photograph record what the workshop looked like with the last hull still up on them.