Showers

The corridor runs straight through the heart of the Sundell Holden workshop and service centre on Smith Street, Chatswood. Metal doors line both walls, each one buried under layers of graffiti applied during the years the building sat empty. Broken tiles scatter across the wet floor. At the far end, an open doorway lets in a shaft of light, the only source of illumination in an otherwise sealed passage. The Smith Street site was the mechanical and service arm of Sundell Motors Pty Ltd, a multi-branch Holden dealer group operating across Sydney's North Shore. While the company ran separate showroom and sales operations elsewhere, Smith Street was where the workshop business happened: Holden dealer code 610, assigned to Chatswood. The ASIC company register records Sundell Motors as incorporating on 5 January 1967, with separate entities confirming branches at Chatswood and Pittwater among other locations. By the time this photograph was made in 2015, the workshop had already been left behind. Graffiti covered the walls and doors in layers thick enough to obscure whatever was underneath. The precise date the building stopped operating as a service centre has not been confirmed, but the evidence in the frame makes the timeline clear enough: the people who worked here were long gone before a camera came through. Sundell Motors Pty Ltd was de-registered with ASIC after Holden's broader network wound down. The Smith Street site was subject to a development application filed by Woolworths in 2017; Willoughby City Council approved DA-2017/182 in March 2021 following a Land and Environment Court challenge and more than 700 public submissions. Demolition followed. Woolworths Chatswood East opened on 26 October 2022. What this photograph records is the interstitial period, after the mechanics left and before the excavators arrived, when the workshop belonged to no one and the walls belonged to anyone with a can.