Battery Room

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 14mm · f/9.0 · 3s · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

The Battery Room, lined with marble-mounted switches, once housed the backup system that kept the station's control circuits alive during a supply interruption. The generators here could restart the station's systems if the main plant failed. White Bay ran from 1917 to 1983.

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

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

01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title: Battery Room
Series: White Bay Power Station
Catalogue: WBP-095
Process: Giclée
Captured: 27 May 2016
Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/9.0
Shutter: 3s s
ISO: 100
Focal length: 14 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

The battery room at White Bay Power Station is a small purpose-fitted room with the battery cells racked along all four walls in heavy timber-frame stands, the cells at floor level with the connecting busbars running across the tops. The cells are lead-acid, the kind that were standard for power-station DC battery systems through most of the twentieth century: tall glass-walled jars filled with electrolyte and lead plates, sealed with vented caps. The room is ventilated by a roof fan that ran whenever the batteries were charging. The floor is acid-resistant tile, sloped to a drain at the centre.

White Bay's battery system supplied the emergency DC bus that ran the plant's protection relays, the control circuits, the alarms, and the emergency lighting whenever the AC supply faltered. The batteries had to ride through any disturbance long enough for the protection system to operate and the standby generation to come online. The room ran continuously across the plant's three build phases from 1917 to Christmas Day 1983. After closure the batteries were de-energised. The cells, the busbars, and the racking remain in place because the cost of safe removal of lead-acid plant exceeds the residual scrap value.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

A Westinghouse motor-generator set sits bolted to a concrete plinth in the centre of the room. Rust blooms across the casing where paint has lifted. To the right, a marble switchboard covers the full wall, rows of knife switches and analogue gauges still mounted in position. Fallen plaster and grit cover the floor. Flat morning light pushes through the steel-framed window at the far end, catching dust on every surface.

Brett Patman

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.