Oxley Side Plates
Photographer
Anthony Browell
Date2003
Object number00037263
NamePrint
MediumPaper, ink.
DimensionsSight: 450 x 670 mm
Image: 670 x 1040 mm
Overall: 670 x 1040 mm
Image: 670 x 1040 mm
Overall: 670 x 1040 mm
Copyright© Anthony Browell
ClassificationsPhotographs
Credit LineANMM Collection
DescriptionThis photograph is one of a series of images by Anthony Browell titled 'The Waterfront'. It depicts the side plates, with painted markings, of the SS JOHN OXLEY under restoration at Rozelle Bay on Sydney Harbour. Superimposed on the image is a ship mast clouds and cranes.
In 'The Waterfront' Browell captures, in appropriate scale, the surreal grittiness and spirit of Sydney's rapidly disappearing waterfront. He focuses on silos, container terminals and wharves of Glebe Island, White Bay and Pyrmont, west of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Browell explores a fairyland of buildings, 'corrugated cathedrals, huge, beautiful and crude'. He has photographed some scenes through glass to capture the reflections of the water and industrial features nearby.
HistorySydney's harbour is often acknowledged as its heart and its prize. But a vital part of it, the old industrial waterfront, is much undervalued and fast disappearing. These almost-redundant industrial areas west of the Harbour Bridge particularly around Pyrmont, White Bay and the remains of the old naval dockyard on Cockatoo Island - are extraordinary testimony to our recent past.
These were extraordinary places, where mountains of coal were converted to electrical power in vast and ever - expanding corrugated cathedrals, and where that power was applied to the heavy engineering trades. It was a world of belching smoke, soot and stench; of iron ships, steam railways and continuous wharves. Sydney's very survival depended on what was loaded and unloaded there. These surreal landscapes, which were built, rather than designed, evolved over decades of adaptation into an environment of huge contraptions of stunning variety.
The few buildings that remain - silos, cranes, chimneys and sheds - are massive and purposeful. They were put up where they were needed, and very few were ever finessed in anyway. These grand visions were beyond the
design regulations and aesthetic considerations that applied to civic and domestic buildings at the time - there was a kind of open slather attitude to waterside constructions.
In his The Waterfront series Anthony Browell has represented the huge silos, container terminals and wharves of Glebe Island, White Bay and Pyrmont as surreal emblems of a past industrial age. The series reveals the concerns of a quickly disappearing industrial waterfront in the face of residential development and the detailed examination of the strangeness and immensity of waterfront structures.
Anthony Browell worked on the series in 2001 and many of the buildings represented have since been or are in the process of being demolished. The Waterfront series features a wonderful eccentricity of detail - the works are
framed and shot through glass to capture the reflections of the waterfront and of other industrial features nearby. Anthony has printed the works on large format textured paper with grainy digital printing - a technique which accentuates the grittiness of the industrial environment.
SignificanceAnthony Browell's The Waterfront series is significant as a contemporary photographer's response to the changing shape and profile of the waterfront - a prescient issue which Sydney shares with port, harbour and river cities around
Australia. Shot in 2000 and 2001, the strange yet atmospheric images are both a record of recent loss and a plea for the preservation of what remains.
