Boiler House Control Room

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D7000
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 21mm · f/8.0 · 0.6s · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

The control room serving the boiler house at White Bay Power Station. Instrument panels and switch consoles line the walls, left in place after the plant shut down. The station's boilers raised steam for the turbines that supplied Sydney's trams and railways from 1917 until 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 5 to 10 business days (unframed). Shipped in protective packaging with edition certificate, paper-stock reference and a printed care guide.

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In situ

Boiler House Control Room at White Bay Power Station, black-framed print displayed in situ on a wall.

Boiler House Control Room at White Bay Power Station, raw timber-framed print displayed in situ on a wall.

Boiler House Control Room at White Bay Power Station, glass print displayed in situ on a wall.

01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title: Boiler House Control Room
Series: White Bay Power Station
Catalogue: WBP-019
Process: Giclée
Captured: 13 November 2015
Camera: NIKON D7000
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 0.6s s
ISO: 100
Focal length: 21 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 boiler house control room at White Bay Power Station sits on the operator level of the boiler hall, a smaller fitted-out room from which the boiler-house watch ran the firing across every shift. The room is walled in glazed partitions for visibility into the boiler bays, with desks at the centre of the floor and control panels along the back wall. The desks carry the residue of operating paperwork: log books, shift handover sheets, a wall-mounted clock above the desk. The control panels carry the boiler indicators: drum levels, feedwater pressures, firing rates, alarm lamps. The panels are dark; the operating power was cut on the day the plant closed.

The boiler house control room was separate from the main station control room, dedicated to the firing-level operations rather than the broader generator and grid coordination. Operators on this floor controlled coal feed rates, combustion air, drum water levels, and the response to alarms across the boiler bay. The room ran continuously across the working life of the plant from 1917 to Christmas Eve 1983. After closure the room was switched off and the door locked behind the last shift. The desks and the panels are essentially as they were on the last working day.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

A heavy steel door stands open into the control room. The sign reads: *Authorised Staff Only Permitted in Control Room. By Order.* Beyond it, analogue gauges, rotary switches, and hand wheels line a cream-painted instrument panel that stretches deep into the room. Dust coats the concrete floor. Low ceiling beams press the space tight. A thin wash of light enters from the left and dies halfway across the threshold.

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.