The Blacksmith

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.

The Blacksmiths

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