Deck

The timber deck at Halvorsen's Boat Yard carries the evidence of decades of hard use: grey paint stripped back by weather and wear, rust bleeding across the planking where metal and moisture have worked on the surface together. Sunlight finds the boards directly, picking out the grain and the damage in equal measure. Lars Halvorsen Sons Pty Ltd established the Putney boatyard in 1939 on a Parramatta River site that had carried industrial activity since the colonial era, when emancipist James Squire operated what is recorded as the first commercial brewery in New South Wales on the same ground. The Halvorsen family had arrived in Sydney on Christmas Day 1924, renting a Drummoyne boatshed for ten shillings a week before building through several yards to purchase this Putney site in 1937. The complex they built from 1939 comprised a timber wharf, concrete slipways, a boatshed, and associated workshops, operating five slipways capable of handling vessels up to 90 feet and 100 tons. At wartime peak, approximately 350 workers were employed on the site, producing Fairmile motor launches, fast supply vessels, and air-sea rescue boats for the Royal Australian Navy, the United States Navy, and others, with combined contract values exceeding £1,000,000. After the war, the yard continued building leisure craft and racing yachts, including Gretel (KA-1), Australia's first America's Cup challenger, launched here in 1962. Between 1925 and 1976, Lars Halvorsen Sons built 1,299 craft across their yards. The Commonwealth of Australia acquired the site around 1980 and converted it to a Royal Australian Navy repair facility. It passed to Australia Defence Industries Pty Ltd in 1989, and to Lilac Pty Ltd around 1998, operating as Putney Marina. This photograph, made in 2018, records the deck as it stood in that interval before redevelopment began in April 2025.