Control Room Desks

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D7000
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 21mm · f/8.0 · 2.5s · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

Two timber desks face the sweeping panel of switches, dials, and meters in the White Bay control room. From here, operators directed the flow of electricity to Sydney's tram and suburban rail network. The station supplied that network from 1917 until the final shutdown on Christmas Day 1983.

Edition

Open edition

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

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

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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: Control Room Desks
Series: White Bay Power Station
Catalogue: WBP-038
Process: Giclée
Captured: 13 November 2015
Camera: NIKON D7000
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 2.5s 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

A row of timber desks sits at the centre of the control room at White Bay Power Station, the operator working positions facing the curved switchboard wall around them. Each desk is heavy timber, varnished darker than the floor, with drawers at the side for shift paperwork and a small reading lamp at the back edge. The varnish has worn back to bare wood at the front edges where decades of operators leaned against them. Stacked on the desks: log books, shift handover sheets, a few coffee mugs, a telephone on each desk with the receiver in its cradle. The floor under the desks is composite tile, polished by foot traffic.

The control room desks were where the duty operators worked across every shift, monitoring the switchboards, recording readings in the log books, and handling the phone traffic between the control room, the boiler house, the switch house, and the broader transmission network. Operators occupied these desks continuously across the working life of the plant from 1917 to Christmas Day 1983. After closure the desks were left in place. The paperwork on them is mostly the last shift's records.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

A curved control panel wraps the room in a wide arc. Hundreds of dials, switches, and analogue gauges cover every surface, mounted on pale green steel fascia. Two heavy timber desks sit centred on the grey tiled floor. The left desk holds a switch panel telephone, its handpiece missing. The right desk is stripped bare. Between them, a cluster of white glass lamp covers rests against the base of the panel. Paint peels from the upper walls in wide patches. Fluorescent light enters through a row of narrow clerestory windows.

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.