- White Bay Power Station has certainly had a chequered past.
- Once it was to be a technology hub and the HQ for Google.
- Luckily for us, it is now an events space. Peter Lynch visits and delves into its past.
There are a few places in Sydney where scale alone can stop you mid-track. The Harbour Bridge is one. White Bay Power Station is another. But unlike the Harbour Bridge, White Bay Power Station is a Sydney secret. Only now is being discovered for what it is.
Right now, you can visit to see the Biennale 2026 “Rememory” exhibition at this towering industrial complex. Grab the chance to see the inside of this great building.
You’ll enter through a modest doorway. Then, suddenly you are inside something vast and monumental. An engineering marvel, a cavern of steel and shadow, where turbines rise like sculptures and thick pipes trace the ceiling in intricate industrial lines.
For all the global artists on show at this year’s Biennale of Sydney, it is this building that commands the deepest attention. The White Bay Power Station is the real star.
The exhibits are dwarfed by its size and complexity. It is an exhibition all on its own.
History: Power to the people
Built between 1912 and 1917, White Bay Power Station was once one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in New South Wales.
Created to supply electricity to Sydney’s expanding tram network, it quickly became an essential engine of the modern city, later feeding power into the wider grid as demand surged.
For decades, it was the unseen force behind daily life, moving people, powering industry and homes across Sydney.
Inside its halls, turbines roared, generators pulsed and workers kept the system alive around the clock. Then, on Christmas Day in 1983, the switch was flicked for the final time. The machines fell silent. White Bay Power Station slipped into stillness.
For more than 40 years, the building stood largely dormant, a hulking presence on the harbour’s edge, too significant to demolish, yet too complex to transform. An icon without a role.
Its vast interiors gathered dust. Its machinery rusted gently in place. Its scale, once its greatest strength, became its biggest challenge.
Plans to transform a dilapidated power station into Sydney’s answer to Silicon Valley hit a major stumbling block when Google walked away from negotiations to redevelop the site.
In 2015 former NSW premier Mike Baird announced that the Government wanted the White Bay power station a to be turned into an international technology hub, one of the centrepieces of the revitalisation of the Bays Precinct area.
Google cited transport problems and the scale as reasons for walking away.
But White Bay Power Station is now a cherished historical landmark. It’s the only power station in Sydney that still holds machinery and equipment from before the 1950s, highlighting the evolution of electricity production.
The station was recognised for its heritage value in 1999 when it was added to the NSW Heritage Register.
It has been listed by the National Trust of Australia and the National Estate registers. In recent years, the stage government has carried out extensive remediation and conservation works to preserve the power station’s heritage, ensuring the buildings remain watertight and protected for future generations.
Home to the Biennale 2026 and more
The 25th Biennale of Sydney, titled Rememory, finds a natural home here. The exhibition explores themes of identity, migration and collective memory, ideas that resonate deeply within a building that carries its own layered history.
Across the turbine halls and adjoining spaces, contemporary works unfold in striking dialogue with their surroundings.
Large-scale installations occupy the cavernous interiors with confidence. Video projections flicker against textured industrial walls. Sculptural works appear almost temporary, as though they have been placed gently within a much older narrative.
Despite its monumental scale, White Bay Power Station offers something unexpected: a sense of scale.
Visitors move slowly through the space, pausing beneath towering machinery, gathering in pockets of light and shadow. Conversations echo softly. Children wander freely. Who is the star here: the art or the building?
Outside, a food market spill across the precinct, bringing colour and energy to the industrial setting. Food stalls offer a global mix, from Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, African and Indigenous Australian influences, reflecting both the diversity of the Biennale and the cosmopolitan character of Sydney.
There are long tables, shared plates, coffee in hand.
We find a brilliant baker. Anirban Chanda of Another Whisk made it to 5th in The Great Australian Bake-off Series 8. His date palm jaggery Basque cheese cake is a joy – not too sweet and beautifully textured. And his lemon myrtle, blueberry lamingtons sell out before we can even try them.
In a city where cultural experiences often come with a price tag, White Bay offers something quietly radical. The Biennale is free.
This is not a gallery in a traditional sense – there are no velvet ropes or hushed galleries. It’s art on an industrial scale.
Fact file
Biennale of Sydney – White Bay Power Station
Location: Rozelle, Sydney
Dates: 14 March – 14 June 2026
Entry: Free
Experience: Large-scale contemporary art, installations, performances, markets
Beyond the Biennale
If the Biennale marks a beginning, it is only the first chapter in White Bay’s next life.
The power station is rapidly establishing itself as one of Sydney’s most ambitious new cultural venues, a space capable of hosting events that match its scale and drama.
Among those already announced:
- Art After Dark (Vivid Sydney): Transforms the site into an atmospheric night-time experience, pairing sound, light and performance within the industrial halls
- Live music performances, including internationally recognised artists, bringing a new dimension to the space
- Ministry of Sound: Testament series, reimagining large-scale club culture inside one of the city’s most extraordinary architectural settings
- Sydney Philharmonia Choirs – VOX, where classical performance meets industrial grandeur
This is programming designed not simply to fill a venue, but to activate it
Sydney’s future
White Bay Power Station sits at the heart of the broader Bays Precinct redevelopment, one of the most significant urban renewal projects in the country.
But unlike many such developments, this is not about replacing the past. It is about integrating it.
There is a moment, standing beneath the turbines, when you look up and realise just how much this building has seen.
White Bay Power Station is something so much more enduring , so much more powerful than the events taking place under its roof.
See more here.
