Storeroom

Inside a storeroom at Halvorsen's Boat Yard in Putney, tiered timber shelving runs the full length of the left wall, emptied out. A makeshift counter and low cabinetry occupy the right, and red and blue fabric hangs in loose lengths from the ceiling beams above bare concrete walls and dusty floorboards. Late light enters through a wire-griddled window at the far end, picking out a yellow support column near the centre. The shelving is plain and functional, built to hold stock within reach of workers rather than to impress anyone. A room like this existed to keep everything else moving. Lars Halvorsen Sons Pty Ltd operated the Putney yard from 1939. The company had arrived in Sydney at Christmas 1924, renting a boatshed in Drummoyne for ten shillings a week to build their first Australian commission. By 1937 the sons had incorporated as a company, purchased land near Ryde Bridge on the Parramatta River, and began constructing the Putney complex. The yard was described by the Daily Telegraph in 1949 as "the most modern of its kind in the British Empire." During the Second World War, the yard produced 16 Fairmile motor launches, 43 sixty-foot fast supply vessels, and 147 thirty-eight-foot air-sea rescue boats, with total wartime contracts exceeding £1,000,000. The workforce peaked at approximately 350. Vessels were supplied to the Royal Australian Navy, the Royal Netherlands Navy, the United States Navy, and the RAAF. The facility included engineering workshops, blacksmithing and lumber shops, machine shops, and sheet metal fabrication areas. A storeroom was not incidental to any of that; it was central to it. The yard built 1,299 craft across its Drummoyne, Neutral Bay, and Putney yards between 1925 and 1976. The boatyard closed around 1980. The Commonwealth then acquired the property for use as a Royal Australian Navy repair facility. This photograph, made in 2018, records what the storeroom held onto: the shelving itself, cleared out and still standing.