- The Brisbane Powerhouse is also the name of an unrelated cultural centre
located on the north bank of the Brisbane River in the inner city suburb of
New Farm, in Brisbane, Australia. Like its Sydney counterpart it is housed in a large former
electricity station.
The Powerhouse Museum is the major branch of the Museum of
Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney, the other being the historic Sydney Observatory. Although often described as a science
museum, the Powerhouse has a diverse collection encompassing all sorts of technology including Decorative arts, Science,Communication, Transport, Costume,
Furniture, Media, Computer
technology, Space technology and Steam
engines.
It has existed in various guises for 125 years, and is home to some 400,000 artifacts, many of which are displayed or housed
at the site it has occupied since 1988, and for which it is named — a converted electric tram
energy generating station in the Inner West suburb of Ultimo, originally constructed in 1902. It is well known, and a
popular Sydney tourist destination. It has a quarterly magazine sent free to members and available at the museum called
Powerline.
History
The Powerhouse Museum's origins date to 1879, when the Sydney
International Exhibition was held in the Garden Palace, a purpose-built exhibition
building located in the grounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens. At the
conclusion of the Exhibition the Australian Museum (Sydney's museum of natural
history) appointed a committee to select the best exhibits, with the intention of exhibiting them permanently in a new museum to
be sited within the Garden Palace. The new museum was to be called The Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum of New
South Wales, and its purpose was to exhibit the latest industrial, construction and design innovations, with the intention of
showing how improvements in the living standards and health of the population might be brought about.
Unfortunately, in September 1882 before the new museum could be opened a fire completely
destroyed the Garden Palace, leaving the museum's first curator, Joseph Henry Maiden with
a collection consisting of only the most durable artefacts including a Ceylonese statue of an
elephant carved in graphite that had miraculously survived
the blaze despite a 5-storey plunge.
Undaunted, Maiden commenced rebuilding the collection, but for the subsequent decade the new museum found itself housed in a
large tin shed in the Domain — a facility it shared with the Sydney Hospital morgue. The ever-present stench of decaying corpses was
not the best advertisement for an institution dedicated to the promotion of sanitation, and eventually, after intense lobbying
the museum was relocated to a three storey building in Harris Street, Ultimo, and simultaneously given a new name — the
Technological Museum.
The new location placed the museum in Harris Street, adjacent to the
Sydney Technical College, and as such it was intended to provide material
inspiration to the students. As time passed it also established branches in some of New South Wales' main industrial and mining
centres, including Broken Hill, Albury, Newcastle and Maitland. It also quickly outgrew the main Harris Street site and by 1978 the situation had become dire, with many exhibits literally stuffed into its attic, and left unexhibited for
decades.
On August 23 of that year, New South Wales Premier Neville Wran announced that the decrepit Ultimo Power Station, several hundred metres north of the Harris
Street site had been earmarked as the museum's new permanent home. The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences spent an interim period exhibiting as the
Powerhouse Museum - Stage One in the nearby tram sheds before re-opening as the Powerhouse Museum at the new site
on the 10th of March, 1988. The main museum building encloses a space larger than that of the Sydney Opera House, the whole complex containing five levels, three courtyards and a cafeteria, as
well as offices, workshops, library and storage in the annexed tram sheds (still known in-house as "Stage One") - however the
size and continually expanding nature of the museum's collection means that offsite storage facilities are also maintained.
Following its closure as a working observatory in 1982, Sydney Observatory was incorporated into the Powerhouse Museum.
Eastern side of Powerhouse
Key attractions
The Powerhouse Museum houses a number of unique exhibits including the oldest steam
engine in the world with a rotating action that is still in operation. Dating from 1785, it
is one of only a handful remaining that was built by Boulton and Watt and was acquired
from Whitbread's London Brewery in 1888. Another important exhibit is Locomotive No.1, the
first steam locomotive to operate in New South Wales, built by Robert Stephenson in
1854. The most popular exhibit is arguably "The Strasburg Clock Model", built in 1887 by a 25-year
old Sydney watchmaker named Richard Smith. It is a working model of the famous astronomical clock in Strasbourg's Notre Dame Cathedral. Smith had never actually seen
the original when he built it but worked from a pamphlet which described its timekeeping and astronomical functions.
New publicly accessible storage facility
Ninety five percent of the Powerhouse Museum's collection is maintained in storage at any one time. Sixty percent of this was
due to be moved in late 2004 to a new three hectare site in the northwestern Sydney suburb of
Castle Hill. Built at a cost of AUD $12 million, this facility consists of
seven huge sheds, including one the size of an aircraft hangar, within which are to be housed such recently-rediscovered
artefacts as a section of the mast of HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship at the Battle of
Trafalgar, and the spare wheel from Bluebird, the car Donald Campbell
drove to break the world land speed record on Lake Eyre in the 1960s.
The Powerhouse Discovery Centre at Castle Hill opened to the general public on March 10, 2006.
Exhibitions
The museum hosts a number of permanent exhibitions including:
Cyberworlds
This exhibition is about computers and connections through them, and looks at the very first computing machines to the latest
designs at the time of launch.
Space - beyond this world
This exhibition looks at space and man's discoveries relating to it. It includes a life size model space-shuttle cockpit. It
has a feature on Australian satellites and joins the Transport exhibit through an underground temporary exhibit walkway and two
side entrances.
Steam
This exhibition is remarkable in that nearly all of the engines on display are fully operational and are regularly
demonstrated working on steam power. Together with the Boulton and Watt engine, and the Museum's locomotives, steam truck and traction engines, they are a unique working
collection tracing the development of steam power from the 1770s to the 1930s. Engines on display include an 1830s
Maudsley engine, a Ransom and Jeffries agricultural
engine and the Broken Hill Fire Brigade's horse drawn pump-engine. The
museum owns a collection of mechanical musical instruments, of which the fairground
barrel organ is located in the steam exhibition, where it is powered by a small fairground
engine.
Experimentations
This Science exhibition is very popular with children because of the many interactive displays demonstrating aspects of
magnetism, light, electricity, motion and the senses. These
include a machine that explains how chocolate is made and lets one taste four 'stages' of chocolate. There is a full-sized model
of the front of a firetruck that measures the pedal-power used to sound its horn and lights, and a hand-powered model railway
using a magnetic system to provide electric current to the track. One of the most popular features is a Plasma ball that shoows the electric current passing through the glowing gas inside it, and changes when
touched.
Transport
This exhibition looks at transport through the ages, from horse drawn carts through steam engines, cars and planes to the
latest hybrid technology. There is a setup of a railway platform with Steam Locomotive No. 1243, its 87 years of service being
the longest in Australia. On the other side of the platform is the Governor of New South Wales 's carriage, of the 1880s. Also in
this exhibition is the original Central Railway Station destination board, relocated to the museum in the 1980s when the station was refurbished. Sydney's last Hansom Cab was donated
to the Museum by its driver, who left it at the gates of the Harris Street building. There is also a tram, a horse-drawn bus as
well as a collection of motorbikes. Suspended aeroplanes, which can be better viewed from balconies, include the Catalina that Sir Patrick Gordon Taylor flew on the
first flight from Australia to South America and in which he brought home 29 soldiers from
New Guinea in 1945. There is also a Queenair Scout, the first Flying Doctor Service plane. Among the cars is a 1913 Sheffield Simplex, one of only 8 in the world. A four minute film shows old footage of public transport.
EcoLogic
This exhibition focuses on the challenges facing the environment, human impact, and ways and technologies to stop this effect.
There is a house setup called Ecohouse where people toggle light variables to see the outcome as well as other energy use
simulators and a 'ecological footprint' game. The ehibition includes a section of a tree with a time line marked on its rings, dating back to the 1600s.
Blockbuster exhibitions
The museum has also hosted a number of blockbuster exhibitions in recent years. Among the most popular of these were those
based on popular cinema franchises such as Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars.
Other blockbusters have been Arts orientated and have included the Faberge exhibition,
the "Strictly Mardi Gras" exhibition, the Christian Dior exhibition and the Audrey Hepburn exhibition. From
September 2007, the Powerhouse began showing a Princess Diana exhibition with items including her royal wedding gown and
tiara.
Online collections
See also
External links
References
- "Treasure Trove: 125 Years of the Powerhouse Museum" by Steve Meacham, Sydney Morning Herald (Spectrum), 18-19
September, 2004, pp 1-4
Coordinates:
33°52′43″S, 151°11′58″E
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