Tag:lightpainting
After August’s first highly successful and enjoyable light painting evening at Bradmill. Another was scheduled for October. In Yarraville, the old Bradmill Factory has been sold to a Chinese developer for $160m. It’s expected to be pulled down and redeveloped into a mini-city, but it’s a photographers mecca until then. And the Bradmill Factory and Lightpainting go hand in hand.
Bradmill
The place is massive.. and I do mean massive—all 24 hectares of it. Opening in 1927 and producing fabrics in heavy-duty cotton and canvas products it was abandoned in 2007 when manufacturing moved overseas. The main buildings are huge, open floor areas, pocked with small and alarmingly deep holes. Every wall is covered with graffiti and every window is broken. Broken glass, empty bottles, burnt mattresses, wrecked and burnt-out cars lie discarded. Not a single intact external or internal door exists. Access is beyond easy. Park the vehicle and walk in.
Exploring the furnace
The light painting was starting at dark, but I wanted to get another go at the site in daylight and my first stop was the old furnace. We crawled in through the small opening and looked straight up the chimney. Adorning the walls inside was a white walker scene. everyone’s a GOT fan 🙂
Leaving the furnace we headed to the little house..apparently, coal was unloaded here, and gone up the conveyor into the main building the fire the boilers. After deciding the conveyor was sturdy enough and seeing another two photographers and two models head up there as well, we entered the little house and walked up the conveyor. It’s not too bad a hike up there… I’m not young, and I made it though the heart was pumping by the time I got to the top 😉
The Boiler Room
At the top, we found a mesh walkway with a tantalising glimpse of stairs the floors below. This top room had machinery and rollers but we could see better machinery downstairs so we headed back down the conveyor again and found an opening on ground level. Once inside again we headed up the stairs one level and hit the mother lode on the first floor…..
Lightpainting
As it was getting close to meet-up time for the light painting, we left the machinery room and headed back over to the main buildings. Lightpainting at Bradmill is fantastic, and Bill and Deanne Holmer are the Light painting maestros. They are like the love children of Mc Gyver, where they take a bottle opener, two nails and a rubber band and create something unique.
All of their light-emitting equipment is original, designed and made by them. They put on an excellent LED light show for about 30 of us, tripods lined up in front, the camera’s on bulb, with Bill calling the ‘shutter open’ and ‘shutter closed. After the LEDs, they followed up with the steel wool spinning. The factory by now was black as pitch, and when the steel wool spins, it throws out amazing sparks, dancing across the floor and roof. And standing in the middle is our own ‘God of Fire’
The Maltings at Mittagong had been on my ‘decaying, decrepit places I must visit before they are razed to the ground’ list for some time. At the urging of my travelling companion, who seemed to think there were 30 hours of daylight each day, we added it to the travelling plan of our south coast trip. Leaving Kiama and travelling to Sydney, we took a detour to Mittagong.
History
The Mittagong Maltings Works was established initially by the Maltings Company of NSW (Ltd) and operated from August 1899. Tooth and Company Limited purchased the Mittagong Works in 1905 and produced the malt used in Tooth & Co breweries in Sydney. The early 1940s was an active period, with malt’s output being approximately 200,000 bushels annually. This output was severely restricted following a large fire in August 1942, which completely gutted No.2 Malthouse and damaged No.1. The No.1 Malthouse was returned to service early in 1943. The No.2 Malthouse was completely rebuilt during the early 1950s and recommenced active operation in 1953. The process continued until another fire gutted the No.3 Malthouse in 1969. Tooths & Co continued to operate at the site until 1980 when the works were closed and the site sold to a group of local business people [Archives Collection, Australian National University]
Location
Located in Mittagong and bordered on one side by Ferguson Cres and Southey Street, it sits among housing slowly encroaching its borders. We parked in Southey St and entered through a wide-open chain-link gate. We explored the main building, first entering under a missing door to the right of the Tooheys horse insignia. The building is beautiful despite years of neglect and vandalism. Graffiti in the main building is minimal, however. This floor contained gorgeous old arched entryways between rooms, tall roof supports and an actual exposed ceiling 😉
We could not get to the second floor. Even though it appeared solid concrete, I had left my wings at home and brought common sense instead, so we didn’t climb up there. There was a staircase, but all the steps were gone. So leaving the main building, we headed down a little path to see where it led.
The Second building
This led us to the second Maltings building, lovely brickwork with arched windows again, interesting rubble… this was looking good.
Again ‘they’ had left the door open for us, so we went straight in. It was in pretty good shape for a building that’s been abandoned for 30 years. Kudo’s to the 1899 builders; they built things to last! We found a wooden staircase that looked safe enough, and we headed upstairs to the graffiti we could see through the cracks on the floor above.
Puddles! I love puddles and the reflections they make in these old buildings. But, unfortunately, this room must be close to a swimming pool in wet weather from mould and moss on the walls.
Heading back down, we went to the machinery shed. It still has remnants of old equipment, chains, rubble, giant cogs and tiny windows that look into a semi-subterranean level partly filled with water.
Through the arched windows above, you can see down into the lower level with its arched ceiling
Access to the Maltings
On the day we visited, the buildings were easy to get into, parking is right out front though it’s possible to drive your car right through the gate and up to the building. Security is nonexistent. None of the nearby residents was concerned with us wandering around with cameras. Both buildings are good, but the second was better, purely because there was more we could explore, unlike building one, in this one we could get to the upper floors.
Buddy System
I would definitely suggest taking a friend with you, though. It’s not somewhere I would go alone. Too many holes in the floor to fall through, debris to fall over and break a leg, etc.. It’s a great location, easy to spend a few hours there, but it is a large block with all the dangers that go with derelict buildings. The staircase in the second building is pretty sturdy; the one in the machine shop wobbled a bit when I tried it, and it doesn’t go all the way to the top floor. The staircase in the main building is gone. Someone has removed all the wooden steps.
The Shipwrecks and Wetlands of Homebush Bay are stunning. They are also a credit to the reclamation and beautification of old industrial locations, with paths, cycle tracks, wetlands, and shipwrecks.
Location
Previously a heavy industrial area, the wrecks are situated on the south bank of the Parramatta River. This was also the location of Sydney Olympic Park for the Sydney 2000 Olympics. Because the river is heavily polluted with dioxin, heavy metals and other chemicals, fishing is banned in the river. The shipwrecks were the remains of ships and barges from a ship-breaking yard in 1966. Behind are four ships’ hulls and several smaller barges protected under the Shipwrecks Act, 1976. This act applies to all shipwrecks over seventy-five years old. Relics over fifty years old and located in lakes and rivers are protected under the NSW Heritage Act, 1977.
We took a day trip down here to photograph the shipwrecks. However, after a week of sunrise starts, we were too slow getting out of bed and arrived mid-morning. Unfortunately, the sunrise had gone, and the sun was high in the sky. The shots I wanted weren’t possible due to the light, so we had to make do.
SS Ayrfield
The SS Ayrfield was a steam collier of 1140 tonnes and 79.1m in length. It was built in the UK in 1911 and registered in Sydney in 1912. Purchased by the Commonwealth Govt, it was used to transport supplies to American troops stationed in the Pacific region during WWII. She’s now far more beautiful with lush shrubs and trees growing on her decks and sits directly outside an apartment block. The best spots to photograph her are from the apartment block’s front or on the little footbridge. And at early light.
SS Heroic
A stunning display of rusting beauty, The Heroic is a steel-hulled steam tugboat of 258 tonnes and 38.1m in length. It lies just near the mangroves. The Heroic was built at South Shields, the UK, in 1909 for Thomas Fenwick [tugboat operators] of Sydney. It was commandeered by the British Admiralty, renamed Epic, and engaged in rescue work off the Scilly Isles during WWI. By 1919, it was back in Sydney as a working tug. During WWII, it towed Allara back to Sydney after that ship had been torpedoed off Sydney.
SS Mortlake Bank
The Mortlake Bank has been broken up, and only the stern section and part of the bow remain floating approximately 50m northeast of SS Ayrfield. The Mortlake Bank was a steel-hulled steam collier weighing 1371 tonnes and 71.65m long. It was built in the Wallsend-on-Tyne in the UK in 1924 and was purchased by a Melbourne company. The Mortlake operated between Hexham and Mortlake, transporting coal to the Mortlake Gasworks of the Australian Gas Light Company. On 31 May 1942, during WWII, SS Mortlake Bank entered Sydney Harbour. She passed through the anti-submarine boom net when the Japanese midget submarine (M-24) made entry under the ship’s keel.
Waterbird Refuge
If you follow the 1.3 km walking track past the shipwrecks, the other side of the path is home to the salt marshes of the Waterbird Refuge. We spotted several different bird species on our shipwreck spotting walk.
