Rozelle, New South Wales — 1912

White Bay Power Station

They built it to power the trams. Every cable car that crossed the Harbour Bridge, every worker who rode to the city from Glebe or Pyrmont, was moving on electricity generated here. The turbine hall at White Bay handled the load for sixty years before the work was done and the doors were sealed.

The station opened progressively from 1912, designed by the NSW Government Architect's office. Six generating units. Brick vaulting forty metres high. The kind of construction that assumed the work would last indefinitely. The machinery it housed was state of the art in 1912 and decommissioned in 1983, and in the intervening seventy years the building barely changed. It was built to perform, not to impress — and yet the scale of it makes the turbine hall one of the most significant industrial interiors in the country.

After closure, the site sat. Heritage listed, fenced off, largely inaccessible. The city grew around it. What happened inside — the accumulated grime of coal combustion, the rust on the overhead cranes, the way light comes through the upper windows and catches the dust — was not designed to be seen by anyone. It happened regardless.

The photographs in this series were made inside White Bay before recent changes to the site began. They are a record of a building in a specific state — not ruin, not restoration, but the long pause in between. The machinery is still there. The control panels are intact. The ammeter wall in the switchroom still has every instrument in place, calibrated for a load it will never carry again.

Sixty-two prints from the station. Each one documents a specific part of a building that most people will never see the inside of.

About the prints

All White Bay Power Station prints are fine art editions on Ilford Smooth Cotton Rag 310gsm paper, hand-signed and numbered. Medium editions run to 100. Large to 50. Extra-large to 25. Each size has its own edition — once they're gone, they won't be reproduced.

Framed prints are custom-framed in Sydney using conservation-grade materials. Acrylic-mounted prints use Ilford Galerie Metallic Gloss 260gsm face-mounted on 6mm acrylic — the luminance in the original comes through differently on that substrate. Both options include a certificate of authenticity.

The site today

White Bay Power Station is heritage-listed under the NSW State Heritage Register. The site has been subject to ongoing redevelopment discussions, including proposals to relocate the Powerhouse Museum to the station. Whatever happens, the building that existed when these photographs were made — the untouched interior, the original instrumentation, the decades of accumulated industrial history — is already gone in parts. The series exists as a record of it.