Turbine Hall Panorama

Red-painted railings run along the upper level of the turbine hall at Geelong B Power Station, looking out over a floor pocked with puddles and rubble below. Concrete columns recede into the background, their surfaces marked by water staining and graffiti, including lettering across a green electrical box near the base. Grimy windows run the full perimeter of the upper walls, admitting pale light across the width of the hall. The photograph was made on 8 January 2012, forty-two years after the last generator turned. Geelong B opened on 8 October 1954, officially commissioned by the Hon. J.W. Galbally MLC, Minister in Charge of Electrical Undertakings. It was a packaged station: the entire plant was bought as a turnkey package from the United States and erected under contract for the State Electricity Commission of Victoria. The arrangement was unconventional by Australian standards, with three boilers positioned outdoors and only their operating faces enclosed within the main building, which removed the need for a conventional boiler house. The structure runs to approximately 22.5 metres high and 90 metres long, on the edge of Corio Bay at North Geelong. At the time of opening it was the largest power station in Victoria outside the Latrobe Valley, with three generating sets of 10,000 kW each for a total capacity of 30,000 kW. Each boiler produced 110,000 pounds of steam an hour at 625 psi, and cooling water came straight out of Corio Bay. Coal reached the bunkers on belt bucket and scraper conveyors, and mechanical spreader stokers fed the boilers. The fuel changed three times: brown coal from the Wensley Brae open-cut near Wensleydale, higher-quality coal from an Anglesea mine from 1960, then Yallourn briquettes delivered by rail. By the early 1960s running costs had relegated the station to peak-load generation only, and it closed in 1970. The generating equipment was stripped out and the building shell was left derelict. The turbine hall stood empty for 44 years before an art project occupied it in late 2014, two years after this frame was made.