Kitchen Back Wall

The kitchen service wall of Balmain Leagues Club is still tiled, floor to ceiling, in white ceramic. The grout has blackened over years of moisture and neglect. Every plumbing fitting has been pulled from the wall, leaving brackets, pipe stubs, and raw fixings. Broken tiles and debris are spread across the floor. Graffiti runs across the upper section of the wall in layered marks from multiple hands. This photograph was made in 2015, five years after the club closed. Balmain Leagues Club opened in 1957 on the corner of Victoria Road and Darling Street, Rozelle, purpose-built as a social and community venue for supporters of the Balmain Tigers rugby league football club and the surrounding neighbourhood. The club occupied a prominent 7,330-square-metre corner site approximately four kilometres west of the Sydney CBD. Its facilities included a ballroom, main bar, gaming floor, and function rooms. For more than fifty years it was the social infrastructure of a working-class institution; the football club itself had been founded at a public meeting of approximately 600 people in Balmain Town Hall on 23 January 1908, with Labor MLA and boilermaker John Storey in the chair. The club closed its doors on 28 March 2010 after Balmain Tigers sold the Victoria Road property in 2009. A NSW Government notice to vacate was issued for a proposed Sydney Metro transport project that was never built on the site. What followed was fifteen years of planning disputes, rejected development applications, a government compulsory acquisition that was later reversed, two fires, voluntary administration, and a succession of developers. By the time this photograph was made, copper wiring had been stripped, windows smashed, and squatters had moved through repeatedly. The kitchen wall records that process in ceramic and grout. The tiles held. Everything attached to them was taken.