Power of Place: Merilyn Fairskye’s Yesterday New Future (Liddell)
Powerhouse photographic commission Yesterday New Future (Liddell) by Merilyn Fairskye captures Australia’s oldest coal-fired power station on the cusp of generational change.
‘My big interest has been in looking out at the world and what’s going on, rather than plumbing my own personal stories. There’s so much there that is so utterly engaging in terms of contradictions and paradoxes that are really interesting things to tackle.’
Commissioned by Powerhouse to document the last days of the Liddell Power Station in early 2023, artist Merilyn Fairskye felt herself travelling TARDIS-like through time and space. Not only was her commission to encompass Liddell’s half-century as Australia’s oldest coal-fired power station, but as an artist who has long explored the nexus between place, people and power, Fairskye felt compelled to reckon with the Hunter Valley site’s many thousands of years of history as an important hunting and gathering place for the Wonnarua Nation. ‘It was a seriously interesting project,’ she says, ‘and one where I felt I had no idea how it would unfold.’
With a methodology honed since the early 2000s for documenting challenging industry-forged environments – from Pine Gap to Chernobyl and Maralinga – and for interrogating place through a combination of lens-based media and social history, Fairskye felt primed for any outcome. Yet for her first day at Liddell in February 2023, she was unexpectedly transported back 50 years to her days as a painting student in the early 1970s. Then living in a share house in Sydney’s Ultimo, she had stumbled across a vermiculite factory down the road which she photographed at night with her Minolta SRT-101 camera. Walking into Liddell half a century later, ‘I felt an overwhelming sense of familiarity with this dirty, smelly, noisy place that took me right back to the vermiculite factory,’ Fairskye recalls. ‘It’s something about when the story of a place is simply embedded in its walls and in its floors and in the sounds that you hear.’
What Fairskye saw and heard in residence at Liddell has been captured in Yesterday New Future (Liddell), a new body of work as multisensory and layered as the place it records. The first Powerhouse Photography commission to be supported by the Australian Centre for Photography Fund, it comprises a suite of five photographic prints, a three-channel video installation and a Process Archive that includes additional imagery and interview material gleaned by Fairskye during her time at Liddell. ‘As an artist who’s not going to be around for that many more decades, you start to think about what are the important things you want to leave behind,’ Fairskye says. ‘I saw the Process Archive as being as much a part of the work as the actual deliverable artworks.’
Experienced collectively through Yesterday New Future (Liddell) is a multidimensional sense of place brought alive through a shifting chorus of voices and perspectives that leave open the possibility of Liddell’s transformation into a future renewable energy hub. In its last days, ‘Liddell had that empty, slightly decrepit mausoleum-like quality to it, which for me totally encapsulated the idea of a coal-fired power station, with coal-based energy on its way out – even if it didn’t completely know it yet,’ Fairskye says. ‘And so, there was a matching of my experience with a poetic understanding of the bigger thing that was taking place.’
The commission’s title comes from the slogan of a T-shirt worn by one of Fairskye’s dozen-or-so interviewees – a musician living off-grid on the shores of Lake Liddell, and whose drumming provides a palpable echo along with the rhythm of the coal trains throughout the video installation soundscape. Indeed, sound plays a key role in the artist’s evocation of place, with Kate Coates, a former general manager at Liddell, telling Fairskye: ‘The place was always rumbling and vibrating and it was almost like it was alive.’
Liddell is equally brought alive through Fairskye’s painterly eye. In her five pigment prints, the photographer delineates the vastness and claustrophobia of the plant’s almost dystopian interiors with colour, from the Léger-like turbine tubes, with tangerine turning deep chrome yellow, to the coal conveyor and basement steam pipes captured in glittering shades of Caravaggesque black. Just as painterly are the Google Earth Pro aerial tracking shots that Fairskye employs in the three-channel video, conjuring the contaminated surrounding landscapes, including a toxic ash dam and amoeba-ridden lake, in shimmering vistas of silver. ‘I could not believe how the view from above resembled Aboriginal paintings of Country,’ Fairskye says. ‘The colours, the ochres, the formation, the patterning.’
This artistic sensibility is deepened by Fairskye’s skills as a social historian, providing a longer view to this portrait of place. Each of the 19 people she interviewed for the project has an intimate connection to the life of Liddell, and no-one more so than James Wilson-Miller, Senior Elder of the Gringai clan of the Wonnarua Nation. ‘We did not know that much about what the mines were doing to our Aboriginal lands,’ he tells Fairskye. ‘And, of course, when you see it now, you can see that the mining industry has changed the whole concept or format of the land.’
Despite these long-term impacts on the environment, most of those interviewed speak of Liddell as a positive social force in the region (as well as having supplied 35% of the electricity needs of New South Wales), often referring to the plant as ‘she’. Brendan Pyne, for instance, who began as an electrical apprentice at Liddell and now an outage scheduler at neighbouring Bayswater Power Station, is a hopeful player in this energy transfer. ‘You can see the shift needs to happen and it is happening, obviously, for our climate and our children’s children and all that jazz,’ he tells Fairskye. ‘I’m quite excited to end up transitioning into renewables. I don’t know what that will be – 10 years away. I’ll be in my thirties ...’
Meanwhile, Pyne was there to witness the shutting down of the final unit at Liddell on 28 April 2023, and it is his iPhone footage of the turbine’s last gasps that Fairskye poignantly uses at the end of her video installation. ‘In the final moment she just didn’t want to go,’ Pyne tells Fairskye. ‘She just wanted to keep fighting.’ As a testimony to the power of place, this young witness to Liddell’s past is now its future.
