Bailey Meters at White Bay Power Station, a slow and steady record of movement, measured in thousand-pound hours.
Bailey Meters at White Bay Power Station, a slow and steady record of movement, measured in thousand-pound hours.

Bailey Meters

Provenance

Camera
NIKON D7000
Lens
14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings
24mm · f/8.0 · 10s · ISO 100
Paper
Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

Decaying Bailey Meters fill a control room at White Bay Power Station. These intricate instruments, once crucial for power generation, now stand as monuments to industrial decline.

Edition
Open edition

Open edition
Printed to order, no fixed quantity. Each print is hand-signed by the photographer.

Limited edition
A fixed number of prints exist. Once sold, the edition closes permanently. Each print is individually numbered and signed.

$100.00 AUD
Size
Type
Colour
✓
Signed, numbered, with COA. Made to order in 10 to 20 business days (framed). Shipped in protective packaging with edition certificate, paper-stock reference and a printed care guide.
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In situ

Bailey Meters at White Bay Power Station, a slow and steady record of movement, measured in thousand-pound hours.Bailey Meters at White Bay Power Station, a slow and steady record of movement, measured in thousand-pound hours.Bailey Meters at White Bay Power Station, a slow and steady record of movement, measured in thousand-pound hours.Bailey Meters at White Bay Power Station, a slow and steady record of movement, measured in thousand-pound hours.Bailey Meters at White Bay Power Station, a slow and steady record of movement, measured in thousand-pound hours.
01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title
Bailey Meters
Series
White Bay Power Station
Catalogue
WBP-006
Process
Giclée
Captured
13 November 2015
Camera
NIKON D7000
Lens
14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture
f/8.0
Shutter
10s s
ISO
100
Focal length
24 mm
Paper
Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size
290 × 200 mm
Location
Rozelle, New South Wales, Australia
Authenticity
C2PA verified provenance →
Recognised by
Highly Commended in Multimedia at the 2016 National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards
02 LOCATION

Rozelle, New South Wales, Australia

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

03 THE STORY

About this print

A bank of Bailey meters at White Bay Power Station is set into one of the control panels, each meter a circular dial face housed in a brass-rimmed cabinet. The dials are calibrated in the units the operators read: pressure, flow, temperature, level. Each meter carries a hand-painted label above its face naming the parameter it monitored. The needles sit at the positions they were in when the plant shut down on Christmas Day 1983. The Bailey Meter Company supplied instrumentation to industrial plants worldwide through most of the twentieth century; their meters were a standard fit-out for British-empire municipal generating stations of White Bay's era. The brass has darkened with patina. The faces are mostly clear.

White Bay Power Station was built by the NSW Government Railways and Tramways from 1912 onwards and operated from 1917 until Christmas Day 1983. The Bailey meters in this photograph were among the instruments operators read continuously through every operating shift. After closure, the meters were left in place because they were small, integrated with the panels behind them, and not worth the cost of individual removal. The needles have stayed put since the last reading.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

A slow and steady record of movement, measured in thousand-pound hours. The Bailey metres once tracked the rhythm of White Bay Power Station’s feed water pumps, their inked needles gliding over spinning paper, translating power into a tangible record of time.

Brett Patman

White Bay Power Station

The series

White Bay Power Station

2015–2018 · 124 photographs

Bricklayers laid 3.7 million bricks at White Bay across three and a quarter years of Phase 1 construction, on Wanngal Country at the western edge of Rozelle. The New South Wales Government Railways ran the build through its own Construction Department. By 3 July 1913, boilers and alternators were running before the buildings that housed them were complete.

View all in this series →

05 SIZE GUIDE

Print sizes

The anatomy view shows what this finish is as a physical object: paper margin, mat band, frame depth, acrylic profile. The comparison strip shows how each size sits relative to the others at true scale. Click a size or a finish to update both.

Anatomy · true ratio
07 MORE FROM WHITE BAY POWER STATION

123 other prints in this series

All prints
Control Room at White Bay Power Station, a curved control console wraps across the room in a wide arc.
Control Room $100.00
Turbine Hall at White Bay Power Station, reinforced concrete walls rise three storeys on each side, their surfaces stained.
Turbine Hall $100.00
Glass Curtain at White Bay Power Station, a towering mosaic of glass and steel, where light filters through dust-streaked.
Glass Curtain $100.00
Turbine and Condenser at White Bay Power Station, a steam turbine and its condenser sit on the operating floor of White Bay.
Turbine and Condenser $100.00
08 BY POST · NO SPAM

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