Workshop Sunset

Late afternoon sun enters the workshop at Halvorsens Boat Yard in Putney at a low angle, turning the dust in the air orange and throwing long shadows across machinery and tools that have not moved in years. The concrete floor, the worn surfaces, the disorder of a workspace abandoned mid-task: the photograph holds all of it in warm, unsparing light. The facility at 20 Waterview Street was built from 1939 on a site with a longer industrial history than the boatyard itself. Around 1798, emancipist James Squire had established what has been described as the first commercial brewery in New South Wales on this same Parramatta River frontage. Lars Halvorsen Sons Pty Ltd purchased the land in 1937 and relocated their operations from Neutral Bay to Putney in 1938, constructing the boatyard complex through the early 1940s. The facility included engineering workshops, blacksmithing and lumber shops, machine shops, and sheet metal fabrication areas, supporting a yard that operated five slipways capable of handling vessels up to 90 feet and 100 tons. During the Second World War the workforce peaked at approximately 350, producing military vessels for the Royal Australian Navy, the Royal Netherlands Navy, and the United States Navy, with total wartime contracts exceeding £1,000,000. The 1949 Daily Telegraph described the yard as "the most modern of its kind in the British Empire." Post-war, Lars Halvorsen Sons built racing yachts including Anitra V, winner of the 1957 Sydney to Hobart, and Gretel, Australia's first America's Cup challenger, launched at Putney on 19 February 1962. Between 1925 and 1976, the family's yards built 1,299 craft in total. The boatyard closed around 1980. The Commonwealth of Australia subsequently converted the site to a Royal Australian Navy repair facility. This photograph, made in 2018, records the workshop as it stood in the years before redevelopment began in April 2025.