Warehouse

The warehouse at Halvorsen's Boat Yard in Putney is a large, bare room now. Concrete floor, grimy windows letting through columns of flat light, structural framing overhead. Nothing has been left behind. The shadows on the floor are the only indication that this space once held something substantial, hulls in various stages of construction, workers moving between stations, timber and machinery filling every usable metre. Lars Halvorsen Sons Pty Ltd established the Putney yard in 1939 on a site with a far longer industrial history. James Squire had operated what is recorded as the first commercial brewery in New South Wales here from around 1798. The Halvorsen family acquired the land in 1937, relocating from Neutral Bay, and construction of the boatyard complex began in 1939. The yard covered 1.58 hectares with 300 metres of Parramatta River waterfront. It operated five slipways capable of handling vessels up to 90 feet and 100 tons, and included engineering workshops, blacksmithing and lumber shops, machine shops, and sheet metal fabrication areas. A 1949 Daily Telegraph article described the Ryde yard as "the most modern of its kind in the British Empire." Wartime production ran from 1939 to 1945 and included 16 Fairmile motor launches, 43 sixty-foot fast supply vessels, and 147 thirty-eight-foot air-sea rescue boats, with contracts exceeding £1,000,000 in total value. At the yard's wartime peak, approximately 350 workers were employed on site. Post-war, the company turned to leisure craft and racing yachts. Gretel, Australia's first America's Cup challenger, was launched here on 19 February 1962. The last vessels were completed in 1976. The Commonwealth of Australia acquired the site around 1980 and converted it to a Royal Australian Navy repair facility. By 2018, when this photograph was made, the warehouse had been empty for years. The concrete floor, the windows, the overhead framing: these were what remained.