Magazine Looking Down

The view plunges downward into one of the munitions magazines at Newington Armament Depot and Nature Reserve, the concrete walls rising on all sides in the dim light of 2019. The surfaces are marked by the long accumulation of damp and stillness: the kind of decay that sets in slowly once a space stops being maintained and starts being simply preserved. The depot was established in 1897 on the Parramatta River at Homebush, constructed under four contracts totalling £17,793 with master builder John Howie. It passed from the NSW Military Forces to the Royal Australian Navy on 22 July 1921, enabling the transfer of high explosive ammunition from Spectacle Island, and remained under Navy operation for the rest of the twentieth century. The last ammunition operation was conducted over the wharf on 14 December 1999. One hundred and two years of handling things that could kill you, then silence. The magazines at Newington Armament Depot and Nature Reserve were not ordinary storage buildings. Every design decision was shaped by the nature of the contents. Double walls with internal lamp passages kept naked flames away from the explosive stores. Concrete floors, copper earthing strips, and lightning conductors throughout the structures managed the risk of static and spark. Earth mounds banked around the exterior were designed to direct any accidental blast upward and away from surrounding buildings. The 1897 Gunpowder Magazine measures 24.4 metres by 24.4 metres, with approximately 8 metres of height, and contains three barrel-vaulted store rooms. The narrow-gauge rail tracks that once carried ammunition trolleys through these chambers are gone from this frame. What the photograph records is the structure stripped back to its essentials: concrete, geometry, and the particular quality of light that barely penetrates a space built to contain catastrophe. The depot was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register on 14 January 2011. It is part of the Newington Armory series.