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Glen Davis Parking Station is a special place where industrial architecture of the 1940s melts into the natural beauty of the Capertee Valley. The abandoned mining town of Glen Davis, located 200 kilometres from Sydney, is as dramatic as the magnificent valley the township rests in.

This painting, Parking Station from the Glen Davis series, draws its source from a photo I’d taken while strolling down deserted Canobla Avenue in the 1980s. My walk on the avenue was thirty-five years after the town had ceased production of Shale Oil and people had left it abandoned in 1952.

I was able to track down the make of the car thanks to the chrome boot handle featured in the painting. The abandoned car, parked next to the Exhauster House and pointed towards Retort No. 1, is an early 1950s Chrysler, either a Dodge Kingsway or Plymouth Cranbrook. My guess is that it’s a Chrysler Plymouth – Australia built 4,382 examples of the Cranbrook from 1951 to 1953.

Through my research I was happy to find that the car was still at Glen Davis in September 2014 and pictured on Wikipedia media. It’s a great photo and can been seen by cutting and pasting this link into a web browser.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glen_Davis_old_Mining_town.jpg#/media/File:Glen_Davis_old_Mining_town.jpg

In this photo I can see the Plymouth has been pushed back towards the Primary Cooler building and is now covered in dead branches. When I saw the photo on Wiki for the first time, after spending hours painting the car, it felt like I was being re-united with old friend from my travels in the 1980s.