Control Room

The control room at White Bay Power Station is a tall room with a curved control desk at the centre and switchboards along three walls. The switchboards are the original 1917-onwards installations, panelled in dark Bakelite and steel, mounted with brass switches, indicator lamps, and analogue meters. Each panel covers a section of the plant: generator one, generator two, generator three, the auxiliary buses, the outgoing feeders. The desk is timber, scratched in front of the most-used positions. The flooring is composite tile, polished by decades of foot traffic. Pendant lights hang overhead.

The control room ran the entire plant from a single point. From the desk in this photograph, an operator could monitor every generator, switch every breaker, and respond to every fault on the plant's electrical system. White Bay closed in 1983, and the control room was switched off at the same time. The switchboards are still in place because they were heavy, integrated, and not worth the cost of removal. The room in this photograph is one of the most complete pre-war power-station control rooms still standing in Australia, partly because the plant closed early enough and partly because the building has been heritage-listed.