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01 White Bay Power StationRozelle2015 - 2017
ISO 1001/8f/9.014mm
Series · 124 prints
Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap
White Bay Power Station is a former coal-fired power station on Wanngal Country at Rozelle, at the head of White Bay on Sydney Harbour, built to power Sydney's trams and suburban trains and in service from May 1917 until December 1983. The New South Wales Department of Railways designed it in its own drawing office and began building in June 1912. The turbine hall, boilerhouse, switch house and control room stand on a 38,000 square metre site behind two steel chimney stacks, the main steelwork stamped with British manufacturers' names.
The Department of Railways built White Bay Power Station to run its own electric trams and trains, and the heritage listing records that it once fed the largest metropolitan tramway network in the Southern Hemisphere. The first stage opened with 25 Hz turbo-alternators at 3 of its 5 positions and a bank of 4 Babcock and Wilcox boilers filling half the boilerhouse. The conservation management plan calls the turbine hall and switch house fine examples of the Arts and Crafts style adapted to industrial architecture.
By 1928 a second stage had taken the station to a rated 86 MW. After the war two 50 MW Parsons turbo-alternators and 4 Babcock and Wilcox boilers were ordered from Britain; the first set entered service on 8 April 1951 and the second in 1955, the last turbo-alternator installed in a Sydney power station. The station passed to the Electricity Commission of New South Wales on 1 January 1953 and reached its rated maximum of 186 MW in 1958.
White Bay Power Station shut down in December 1983. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the plant was stripped of everything but a representative set of equipment kept for heritage conservation; one Babcock and Wilcox boiler and the two Parsons turbo-alternators remain in place. The station was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999, sold by Pacific Power to the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority in 2000, and opened to the public for the 24th Biennale of Sydney from 9 March to 10 June 2024, when 172,000 people came through.
NSW State Heritage Register listing 01015, White Bay Power Station Conservation Management Plan Volume II (2013) and Biennale of Sydney (18 June 2024)
Hand-signed and numbered, printed from the original RAW file. Open editions in the two smallest sizes; limited editions of 100, 50 and 25 in the three larger, never reissued once they sell through.
NSW State Heritage Register · Listing 01015 (1999) · Statement of Significance
Made to order by Brett in Sydney, from the original RAW file. Each print is hand-signed and numbered before it ships.
Paper
Ilford Galerie cotton rag, 310 gsm. Acrylic on metallic gloss, 260 gsm.
Lead time
Unframed: 5 to 10 business days. Framed and acrylic: 10 to 20.
Brett Patman on working inside White Bay Power Station. The thirty-metre boilerhouse, the overhead cranes, and photographing a building that is open again.
Read the noteIn February 1917 a Master Builders' Association deputation put its case against government day labour to the Minister for Works and Railways. Its figures for White Bay power house were 3,700,000 bricks laid for 9,031 pounds in bricklayers' wages, over 3 and a quarter years of work by the Government Construction Department, against the 18 months the deputation said a private contract would have taken.
Two Government Gazette notices show how the station was tied into the Railways. In September 1945 the Commissioner for Railways resumed about 7 acres at Sydenham for a pit to take the ashes from the Ultimo and White Bay power stations, 'for the purpose of maintaining the traffic on the electrified railways in the Sydney Metropolitan area'. In 1948 he resumed an easement under Macarthur Street, Ultimo, for underground electrical cables from Ultimo Power Station to White Bay Power Station.
When the plant was stripped in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a complete 'slice' of the generating system was kept for heritage conservation. In the boilerhouse one Babcock and Wilcox boiler stands in the northern section with the pulverising mills beside it, and the first floor is a void broken by walkways, with the gaps marking where the other 3 original boilers stood. The asbestos insulation and lagging came off everything, the surviving boiler included.
