After all the recent talk about the Glenbrook mushroom farming tunnel, its fate and possible restoration, it was on the cards that I’d be going down the mountain soon enough to go and have a looksie for myself. 

As per usual my trip there was partially unplanned. Sitting at a cafe over coffee, tossing around places we could haunt, we decided to head down the mountain and just see what happened. We wound in Glenbrook and found our way to the historical railway tunnel, which had been used as a mushroom farm off and on since 1913 and recently shut down and just left.

I’d been down there about 6 months ago to sus out the situation and arrived at what looked like a filthy shanty town run by a flurry of foreign workers, carrying boxes and well, working. It certainly didn’t look like a “farm”, but I figured that since I knew absolutely zero about mushroom farming, there must be some serious behind the scenes work going on. I kind of felt as though I’d just walked in on a private party, so I hopped in my car and left.

Arriving there the other day, It didn’t really look that different to my earlier mushroom farm experience, except now the party was over and the mess left in its wake was abhorrent. The feeling of recent energy and activity still hanging in the air was contrasted by the aesthetics of a place that had been abandoned a decade ago. Odd.

After being on sight for about 10 minutes, it became quite clear that this place was indeed a “dilapidated and dangerous farm” with “unsafe and illegal workplace practices” for employees, who were staying in “filthy, squalid doss houses”. As quoted by MP Trish Doyle in the Blue Mountains Gazette August 2015. Around that time an enquiry into the work practices, safety, hygiene and environmental impact of the business was launched. She was right, this would have been no place to live or work or produce food.

.

Inside what you would probably call the main building, or ‘sales office’, it was a mess. There were plastic things everywhere, presumably some kind of waste product from mushroom farming - little round red plastic things, literally millions of them, all over the ground and stacked up in crates in every room.

A large “Warehouse” which is part of the main building contained pallets of boxes and plastic wrapping and more pallets of plastic mushroom containers. There were boxes and boxes of mushroom stickers, a forklift and plenty of general rubbish strewn around too.

In another room there were chemicals and tools and more chemicals in polystyrene boxes and what looked to be a dodgy kitchen facility amongst general junk and filth.

Coming off the chemical room was a room with a bed and clothes, and boxes of toilet paper. There were no windows, so it was really dark. All of a sudden we heard a sound. We both stood dead still listening and thinking that we may have come across a squatter. Scratching, tiny, tiny, scratching is all we could hear. Looking around the room by iPhone light, there was no one there, the sound was coming from a mostly empty toilet paper box. Kittens. Brand new kittens, three of them, with their umbilicus still attached. Mumma cat had dashed outside, she wasn’t looking too great. She was emaciated and frightened. After some deliberation, I made an executive decision to take the kittens. Mainly for environmental reasons, being that this place is situated on crown land in the middle of a national park, but also because mumma cat really didn’t look up for the job. 

With the kittens safely in a box in the car, we continued to explore. Making our way down a short weed infested track, we found the entrance to the tunnel where the mushrooms were supposedly grown for the better part of a century. There was a large fuel tank and some kind of massive generator or air filter machine (or something) outside, alongside some other rusty junky looking things.

To our surprise, the door was unlocked, so we peeked inside. A single fluorescent light was on, lighting up a giant switch board and a bunch of other stuff. How could we just leave? That pitch black tunnel was calling us further in, we weren’t going to say no!

{BONUS Photography Lesson}… For those reading who aren’t photographers, I’m going to go into detail here: ‘real’ photography isn’t as easy as pressing a button and voila! It takes a certain amount of knowledge and skill.

We didn’t have much at all in the way of lighting, two iPhones to be precise, which would have been fine had we been simply exploring, but photography-wise it was going to make for an interesting experience. I was also without my tripod, the foot plate of which is the last thing to be replaced after my recent theft incident.

In low light conditions, the camera needs to receive as much light into the sensor as possible in order to take a decent picture. For this to happen, the shutter needs to be kept open for a much longer period of time. During this time you need to keep the camera super still, which is usually the job of the tripod. If the camera is not kept still, it most likely results in a blurry, unfocussed image.

In short, low light + no tripod = up shit tunnel…. Without a tripod. 

However, I decided to continue and see what I could come up with. I love a good challenge at the best of times, and this time was a pretty good challenge!

So we set off into the darkness with no idea what we were going to encounter. Not far in, it became rather… moist… and dark. Stacked down the sides to the tunnel there were old fridges, forklifts, trolleys and whole pallets of 2 litre jars. Why jars? There were lots of ladders, wire crates, fans and about 50 column heaters (which in my opinion would have been probably the least economical way to heat a tunnel).

The concrete floor was covered with water and sludge. It was pitch black and dank and smelled rather musty and organic. The further in we got, the more the humidity rose. It wasn’t overly warm in there, just humid and dank.

My glasses and lens kept fogging up and wiping them only lasted briefly before they would fog up again. We were in that tunnel for the good part of an hour, and there became a perpetual pattern… wipe lens, wipe glasses, put glasses back on face, light shot, frame shot, hold breath so not to move a single muscle, hope for the best, take shot, review, repeat. I think I drove poor Steve nuts with my constant bossing him about where the light needed to be directed in order to get the shot I wanted. 

Whats with all the bags and plastic? I had never actually seen a mushroom farm before, but I seriously wasn’t expecting that! I was maybe expecting trays of substrate or maybe even a giant mound… not plastic tubes though. 

Who would have thought that the mushroom industry was so bloody unsustainable. As an avid mushroom consumer, I was quite disturbed. Not only were they grown in plastic, they were grown in single use plastic, and it was being dumped in a giant pile at the end of the tunnel. When I say a giant pile, I mean freaking huge pile of approximately 200+ one ton bags of industry waste that were piled up high at the end of the tunnel. Naturally, we felt the need to summit ‘mount shroom’.

This was quite possibly one of the most disgusting things I’ve done in my entire life. We were clambering over these massive bags of waste with the goal of reaching the other end of the tunnel, there were creatures scuttling out of the bags and the further we went, the worse it smelled. The bags were coated in spider webs, thick creepy spiderwebs and everything was coated in dew, because down this end of the tunnel it was both warm and humid to an extreme, we could actually see the humidity, it was like a fog. I just had to take of my glasses because there was just no point wearing them. I’ve included some of the photos that I got down this end of the tunnel, but they’re not great. With the lack of light, and the humidity fogging my lens, and without a tripod, I was surprised I captured anything at all!

Then there was sludge. Smelly, disgusting, sludge. Probably about knee height, but we weren’t going to test it. We stood in disbelief unable to cross the revolting cesspit that lay before us. We were so close, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it was severely overshadowed by the horrendous environmental impact of what we could see and smell. Standing in silence, we could hear a waterway, my heart broke. How could this happen in our “sustainable”Blue Mountains, right under our noses? We’ve been paying for their product all these years, and this.

The end of the tunnel comes out 660 meters away from where we first entered on the opposite side of the highway, somewhere near the end of Lucasville Rd. The water flow is such that the run off from the industry would be flowing indirectly into Glenbrook creek. That’s 100+ years of nutrients and chemicals, sediment and industrial waste being fed into a native, “protected” eco system that isn’t naturally equipped to deal with such. It would have affected the water quality and the biodiversity of plant and animal life on a scale higher than anyone will be willing to admit, because something should have been done about this a long long time ago. There needs to be a massive clean up effort to get this place back to its natural state and then some, but in my opinion, I doubt that it will ever be the same.

After being disappointed that we couldn’t actually get to the end of the tunnel and upset at about what we’d discovered, we had to now vacate, which meant climbing back over the gross mountain of waste, and making the trip back through the filthy tunnel. It felt twice as long as it did when we were going in. We were gross. We were so, so gross. Like coated in filth gross. I went home and had two showers gross.

Some tunnel history:

- The tunnel was built in 1892 as a railway tunnel but its use was ceased in 1913 because it was too steep and had a seepage problem (by this stage becoming quite apparent), which kept the rails wet and caused trains going up through the tunnel to slip and stall.

- Once the tunnel was closed, it became a mushroom farm, which has continued on and off for over 100 years, making it Australia’s oldest mushroom farm.

- It was also used during WW2 by the RAAF to stockpile bulk for mustard gas in case of Japanese chemical weapons attacks, This was when the concrete floor was installed. After the war, the RAAF ceased use of the tunnel and it again became a place for growing mushrooms.

- The 1891 construction of the tunnel is captured in a famous painting by landscape artist Arthur Streeton. The painting ‘Fire’s On’ depicts a critical moment in the construction of the tunnel where a worker was killed in a dynamite blast. The painting gives an interesting insight into the landscape at the time of construction and also the construction methods of the time it was built. You can check it out here.

Kitten update: 

I took them home, I did have guilt about taking them away from their mother, who at the time I did try to persuade to come in the car with us, but to no avail. I went to the vet, because by this stage the RSPCA was closed. The vet told me that it was a  probability that no matter where I took them, they would be euthanised because they were so young and require so much attention to keep them alive. 2 hourly feeds to be precise…. Which is exactly what I did for the night. 

The next day, my lovely friend Ramana, who is a ‘cat person’, unlike myself (did I mention that I hate cats?), went back with me and helped catch the mumma cat. 

She was so happy to be back with her kittens and is a lovely mumma. I’m still supplementing some of the kittens feeds, simply because she’s so skinny and malnourished. She’s got a whole room to herself with her kittens, and as much food as she needs, she even uses the litter tray, which I found rather impressive for a cat found on a squalid mushroom farm. Her name is Shiitake, and she will probably stay with me. When her kittens are big enough, I’ll be taking them to the RSPCA where they will be desexed and responsibly re-homed.

(Please excuse the shitty iPhone photos below)

UPDATE 16/4/1026

The part for my tripod arrived! So we went back to the tunnel yesterday with the tripod, boots, a big torch and plastic bags (So our boots didn’t stink up the car afterward) to try and get some better shots. On the way, we realised that the torch didn’t work (even though we’d bought more batteries for it prior).

When we got inside the tunnel, a unanimous decision was made to try and turn on the power to the rest of the tunnel and provide light. Steve drew the short straw and fronted up to the giant switch board. We all held our breath. LIGHT! The tunnel lit up and Steve was still alive, bonus! Single spiderweb coated work lamps, strung together by dodgy extension cords and double adapters lined the right side of the tunnel. Some of the lights sizzled and popped overhead in the damp environment.

It looked different with morel light. It became apparent exactly how huge this operation was, and exactly how much mess these people had left behind. 

The light stopped about 150 meters before the end of the tunnel.

We once again summited ‘Mount Shroom’ by iPhone light and started off into the muck on the other side. It was still gross. Once again, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel, but the muck was too deep, and stinky and bubbling. It was too yucky to go any further. We were already so grossed out and filthy and we would have been wading through that cesspit. It just wasn’t going to happen. Sorry guys, we tried!

I did happen to get some pretty wicked shots though: