The Blue Room

The blue paint is peeling off the walls in broad, slow sheets, each layer pulling away from the one beneath it. Sunlight comes through windows that have not been cleaned in years, landing on tools left where someone put them down and never came back. The room is small relative to the scale of the yard around it, the kind of space that exists in every working facility to serve some practical purpose and accumulates its own quiet history. Lars Halvorsen Sons Pty Ltd built this Putney boatyard from 1939, on land the family had purchased two years earlier on the Parramatta River. The site itself runs deeper than the boatbuilding: beneath the industrial structures lie the archaeological remains of James Squire's colonial brewery, established on this same waterfront around 1798. By the early 1940s the complex was complete, with timber wharf, concrete slipways, boatshed, and associated buildings. During the Second World War the yard turned out military vessels under contract to the Royal Australian Navy, the Royal Netherlands Navy, the United States Navy, and the RAAF, with a workforce that peaked at approximately 350 people. Post-war, the yard returned to leisure craft and racing yachts, including Gretel, Australia's first America's Cup challenger, launched here in 1962. Between 1925 and 1976, the Halvorsens built 1,299 craft across their various yards. The boatbuilding ended. The Commonwealth of Australia acquired the property around 1980 and converted it to a Royal Australian Navy repair facility. It later operated as Putney Marina. By the time this photograph was made in 2018, the yard had been quiet for years. The blue room records what was left: paint applied in coats over decades, now separating from the wall in the order it was put on, working backwards toward something original that no longer holds.