Entertainment Hall

The hall opens wide beneath a pitched timber-truss roof at White Bay Power Station. Corrugated sheeting filters grey daylight between the rafters. Bare fluorescent fittings hang motionless from the beams. Wooden floorboards run the full length of the space, thick with dust and grit. Concrete walls carry dark stains of moisture. A raised timber stage sits at the far end. Long benches line the side walls. The hall has the proportions of a country town hall built into the side of an industrial complex. Nothing is on the stage. The benches are empty.

White Bay was built by the NSW Government Railways and Tramways from 1912 onwards, ran from 1917 to Christmas Day 1983, and at peak employed around 500 to 600 people in shifts that ran around the clock. A station of that scale carried its own welfare infrastructure: lunch rooms, a workshop entertainment hall, dart boards, a bar billiards table, sports facilities. The hall in this photograph was for the workforce. After-shift functions, retirement parties, union meetings. The plant is the longest-serving of Sydney's metropolitan power stations and the unofficial origin point of the Lost Collective project, where a first unauthorised entry through a fence began the work this print is part of.