Reflections

Water has found its way into the turbine hall at Geelong B Power Station and settled flat on the industrial floor, turning the derelict interior into something close to a mirror. The reflection doubles the stripped structure above: the mounting points, the crane rails, the bare walls of a building that has been emptied of everything it was built to contain. Geelong B Power Station opened on 8 October 1954 at 50 Mackey Street, North Geelong, on the edge of Corio Bay. It was a packaged station, the entire plant purchased as a turnkey package from the United States and erected under contract for the State Electricity Commission of Victoria. The design was unconventional by Australian standards: three boilers were positioned outdoors, with only their operating faces enclosed within the main building. The structure itself ran to approximately 22.5 metres high and 90 metres long. At the time of opening, it was the largest power station in Victoria outside the Latrobe Valley, with a total generating capacity of 30,000 kW across three 10,000 kW sets. Cooling water was drawn directly from Corio Bay via the station's bayfront position. The station ran through three fuel phases: brown coal from the Wensley Brae open-cut mine near Wensleydale, then higher-quality coal from an Anglesea mine from 1960, then Yallourn briquettes delivered by rail. By the early 1960s, rising operating costs relative to the newer Latrobe Valley stations had reduced Geelong B to peak-load generation only. It closed in 1970. The generating equipment was stripped out, and the building shell was left standing on its industrial site, largely untouched. The turbine hall sat empty for 44 years before the Powerhouse Geelong art project launched in late 2014. This photograph was made in 2011, well before that intervention. What the camera recorded then was the building in its rawest state: water on the floor, structure overhead, silence where the generators had been.