Wangi Power Station: Photographs from Inside

I have been inside a lot of stopped buildings. Places that were running full tilt when the decision was made to close them, then locked up and left. Most of them have something in common: the evidence of the last shift. Tools left in a particular position. A logbook entry that does not have a following entry. The specific residue of work that stopped without ceremony.

Wangi Power Station has all of that, and more of it than almost anywhere else I have been.

The station was built on the southern shore of Lake Macquarie in 1948. The first generating units came online in 1953. More were added through the late fifties. At its peak the plant was running four steam turbine generators fed by coal barges crossing the lake, producing power that went into the NSW grid and came out as light and heat in homes from Newcastle to Sydney. It ran continuously, three shifts a day, for thirty-eight years before the last unit was decommissioned in 1986.

What that means, in practice, is accumulation. Thirty-eight years of coal combustion worked into every surface. Thirty-eight years of maintenance records, equipment modifications, the particular patina that forms in spaces where heavy industrial work happens continuously for decades. The turbine hall at Wangi does not look like a museum. It looks like a place where the work stopped very recently, and where the evidence of thirty-eight years of work is still fully present.

The A and B stations were built to different specifications. The men who worked there knew the difference by feel long before they could articulate it. The boiler house ran hot year-round. The administration block kept a different kind of record - the paperwork of a large operation, the logistics of getting coal barges across a freshwater lake in all weathers. The workshop held the tools. All of it is still there.

I made the photographs in this series over several visits to the site. What I was trying to do was not document the building in an archival sense - that work had been done - but photograph the specific quality of what happens to a working building in the years after the work stops. The turbines are not rusting in any dramatic way. The structure is sound. The cranes are still on their rails. What is happening is slower and more particular: the light, the dust, the way the lake sits outside windows that were not designed to be looked through for their view.

Wangi Power Station is heritage listed and on the state heritage register. There are plans for the site. In the meantime, it stands on the lake in more or less the condition it was in when the last turbine went quiet in 1986.