Keeping alive a wrought art: Artists and blacksmiths
want a plan to preserve two blacksmithing bays to include working
displays. Photo: Nick Moir
British artist blacksmith Jake James has worked all over the
world, but the seven-hundredweight Massey power hammer at the
Eveleigh locomotive blacksmithing bay in Sydney’s Redfern was the
biggest he had ever used.
”I’ve never seen such an intact facility,” he said.
Now a 30-year campaign to preserve the working blacksmiths’ forge, a
slice of Australia’s industrial history, could finally be successful.
Iron man: A participant in Jake James’ workshop. Photo: Nick Moir
The facility is unique in size and scale. Anything like it in Europe,
the US or Britain had been scrapped and the equipment melted down, Mr
James said. Because of foreign competition, most large forges in NSW
have been closed.
Built in the 1880s, the Eveleigh railway workshops, where the blacksmith
bays are located, grew to become the largest industrial complex in
the southern hemisphere. By the 1950s they sprawled across 42 hectares
and employed 8000 workers, including unionists who struck and won the
rights to hot showers and a 40-hour working week.
Bays 1 and 2 at Eveleigh house massive machinery such as the Davy, a
1500-tonne steam-intensified hydraulic forging press that required a
team of nine smiths to operate it. It was capable of forging ingots
one-metre thick.
The preservation of the workshops was backed by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.
”Such turn-of-the-century railway shops, with essentially original
equipment intact, are now a great rarity worldwide,” curator emeritus
Robert Vogel wrote in 1988, when the campaign to save the bays was in
its early days.
The City of Sydney has since agreed to preserve the two blacksmithing
bays located within the Australian Technology Park, but artists and
blacksmiths want more than the static museum-style display floated in a
recent interpretation plan.
”It would be a waste to turn this working shop into another static
display with piped sounds and smells,” Artist Blacksmith’s Association
NSW president Nigel Stokes said.
The artists and blacksmiths want the council to allow architectural
metal smiths to continue to operate and run classes using the existing
Victorian equipment, plus public displays and exhibitions.
One of the commercial operators now using the southern bays, Guido
Gouverneur, said: ”Nothing can better show what a blacksmith does with
Victorian blacksmithing equipment than actually using it.
”This site contributed more to better working conditions than any other
in the country. The reason we have access to a hot shower was because
the workers struck for better washing facilities and it then became
commonplace.”
Until then, workers washed up in a bucket at the end of the day and if
they were lucky a shop boy would drop a “heater”, a scrap of metal
heated in the forge, into the water to warm it up, he said.
As a result of submissions by the community and blacksmiths, Rappoport
Heritage Consultants director Paul Rappoport said he would ask the
council to agree to change the strategy to allow both static and
working blacksmith displays.
It was important to show visitors how the different machines worked.
Videos and photos would also be used to illustrate the site’s social
history, using original recordings of workers from the site.
The council is expected to decide by the end of the year, before the
original planning approval expires. Mr Rappoport said he hoped it was
just a matter of the council ”rubber-stamping” the proposal.
Source: www.smh.com.au/nsw/smiths-want-rare-bays-to-forge-on-20130724-2qjgm.html