A grease gun and its hose reel lie on the grimy floor of the former service centre. Rust covers most of the barrel. The nozzle is crusted with dried grease and grime. Open metal lockers line the wall behind, their doors marked with graffiti. The tool appears undisturbed, left in place rather than removed.
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A grease gun lies where it was last set down. Rust has spread across the barrel in uneven blooms, and the nozzle is packed solid with old grease, dark and hardened. It lies with its hose reel on the grimy floor of the former Sundell Holden service centre on Smith Street, Chatswood, open metal lockers marked with graffiti lining the wall behind. It is the kind of scene that accumulates gradually, one tool not returned to its hook, one job left half-finished, until the building itself is the thing that has been abandoned. Sundell Motors Pty Ltd was registered with ASIC on 5 January 1967, holding Holden dealer code 610 for Chatswood, NSW. The business operated a multi-branch network across Sydney's North Shore, with the Smith Street site in Chatswood East serving as the mechanical and service arm of the operation, distinct from the showroom the company ran on the Pacific Highway. The Smith Street workshop sat within land zoned IN2 Light Industrial under the Willoughby Local Environmental Plan 2012, part of a precinct that had been shifting toward retail and commercial use for years before the building came down. By the time Brett photographed the site in 2015, the service bays had gone quiet and the walls had begun collecting layers of street art. The tools remained. General Motors announced the withdrawal of the Holden brand from Australia on 17 February 2020, ending the franchise arrangements that had given businesses like Sundell Motors their reason to exist. The Holden brand ceased trading in Australia on 31 December 2020. Woolworths filed a development application for the Smith Street site in 2017; council approved it in March 2021 following a Land and Environment Court challenge. The building was demolished around 2021. Woolworths Chatswood East opened on the site on 26 October 2022. What the photograph holds is the interval between those two facts: the workshop emptied, the grease gun left on the floor, the rust doing its quiet work.
04·FROM THE FIELD NOTES
A grease gun and its hose reel lie on the grimy floor of the former service centre. Rust covers most of the barrel.
Brett Patman
The series
Graffiti & Urban Decay
54
photographs
Buildings don't stay empty. Once the owners leave, somebody else arrives. Walls that were blank become a record of who came through and when. Graffiti isn't vandalism on these surfaces , it's the only remaining evidence that anyone cared enough to be here.Urban spaces mid-collapse. The gap between what a building was built for and what it became.
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