Sink

A triangular sink, mounted tight into the corner of a utility room, is the entire subject of this frame. The brass tap has done what brass taps do when left alone long enough: it has left a rust-brown trail down the red wall below, a record of every slow drip across years of vacancy. Vertical and horizontal pipes cut across the same surface. Higher up, white paint has run in drips from a curved mark where the red wall meets a rough brown surface turning the corner. Nothing in the room suggests urgency or drama. It is a corner sink. It is what is left. The building around it is the former Marina Picture Palace at 409 Gardeners Road, Rosebery, designed by architect and consortium member William de Putron in 1925 and opened on Saturday 28 May 1927. De Putron was not a hired hand on this project. He was one of three men who built the cinema: he designed it, builder William Henry Rumble constructed it, and cinema entrepreneur Eric Christensen, holder of New South Wales Exhibitor's Licence No. 1, placed a gold sovereign in the brickwork during construction. The building opened with Mary Pickford in Sparrows and John Barrymore in The Beloved Rogue. The Marina ran as a cinema through silent film, talkies, television, and decline. Seating fell from its original figure to 974 by 1962. It passed through the Ward brothers, then Snider and Dean's Mascot Theatres circuit, then the Louis Film Company, which screened Greek-language and continental films for the pre-SBS era community. The cinema closed on 8 February 1984. The Louis family converted the stalls into a video shop, which ran until around 2002. After that, the building stood vacant. This photograph was made in 2019. The sink, the pipes, the drip stain, and the two shades of paint are what remain in this corner of a building that is the only surviving pre-World War Two cinema in the former Botany Bay local government area.