 | NO. 1 PUMP HOUSE INSTALLATIONS WITHIN THE FIRST PUMP STATION ON WESTERN AUSTRALIA’S GOLDEN PIPELINE TREATS THE EXISTING BUILDING AS THE GROUND FOR INTERPRETING THE HISTORY OF THE GOLDFIELDS WATER SCHEME.
REVIEW WILLIAM TAYLOR
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No 1 Pump Station, Munadring Weir, by George
Temple-Poole, shortly after completion in 1903.
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Stage 1 of the new musuem
development, an installation in the entry passageway
between the boiler room and the pump house tracing
the path of the pipeline.
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Stage 1 of the new musuem
development, an installation in the entry passageway
between the boiler room and the pump house tracing
the path of the pipeline.
|
Stage 1 of the new musuem
development, an installation in the entry passageway
between the boiler room and the pump house tracing
the path of the pipeline.
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The proposed interpretative machine will
occupy the volumetric space that formally housed the “C”
pump. Image Exhibition services and Mulloway Studio.
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The proposed interpretative machine will
occupy the volumetric space that formally housed the “C”
pump. Image Exhibition services and Mulloway Studio.
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The proposed interpretative machine will
occupy the volumetric space that formally housed the “C”
pump. Image Exhibition services and Mulloway Studio.
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ON 2 SEPTEMBER 1996, an event occurred at the weir at Mundaring in the
hills above Perth that hasn’t happened since – the dam overflowed for the first time
in fourteen years. It was an event noted by the press, having been anticipated following
an unusually wet winter, and the dam site with its park-like setting was packed with
scores of the curious, amateur photographers and relieved lawn reticulators. More
recently, Mulloway Studio Architects have given the public another reason to visit
Mundaring. In consultation with Paul Kloeden, Exhibition Services, Spellbound
Interpretation of Melbourne and Scitech, the Adelaide-based designers have
implemented the first stage of a plan commissioned by the National Trust of Australia to
transform the pump station, museum and natural environs around the dam site into an
interpretive centre explaining the history and significance of the Goldfields Water Scheme.
The installation of a new museum in the adjoining pump and boiler houses prefigures
extensions to the existing structure itself, the construction of a visitor’s centre,
educational facilities, tourist amenities, café and shop. These are designed to emphasize
the visitor’s movement through the dam precinct in anticipation of a longer journey along
the pipeline itself in an effort to encourage tourism in regional Western Australia.
Mundaring is the site of the first of eight steam-driven pump stations that form part
of a vast technological apparatus. Planned in 1895 and fully operable by 1903, the
station supplied the initial force to 23 million litres of water, carrying it each day through
a network of reservoirs, storage tanks and steel pipes to the mining towns of Coolgardie
and Kalgoorlie 560 kilometres away. The Goldfields scheme was by far the largest and
most visionary of its kind undertaken in Australia until the construction of the Snowy
Mountains Scheme half a century later. The pipeline linked not only Perth with
Kalgoorlie, but connected the entire region with industrial and economic developments
occurring worldwide at the time.
Ten years after its decommissioning in 1964, the No. 1 Pump Station at Mundaring
became the C. Y. O’Connor Museum. Its exhibits told the story of the Goldfields scheme,
commemorated the contribution of its chief engineer, and extolled the vision of then State
Premier Sir John Forrest. On announcing the project, Forrest proclaimed that, “Future
generations will bless us for our farseeing patriotism; and it will be said of us, as Isaiah
said of old, ‘They made a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert’.” Since then,
the pipeline has been much enlarged through local mythmaking and stories of derring-do.
In a move characteristic of our times, the current refurbishment of the pump station
and its museum has produced a design that directs the visitor’s attention beyond a
period of heroic engineering towards the broader context of Australian history,
environmental awareness and human ecology. The O’Connor Museum celebrated the
arrival of “rivers in the desert” with extensive and, by modern standards, overly crowded
and humdrum displays. Its rebirth in the current work was initiated by the careful
restoration of the building fabric designed by George Temple-Poole by National Trust
architect Phil Bennett. Conservation work was carried out concurrently with the
development of the new museum plan. Both aimed at producing a building that was
legible and, significantly, one understood as a place of human labour.
In defining what this means, the design team was encouraged by the Trust, and its
project manager Anne Brake, in their representation of the No. 1 Pump Station as an
“artefact”. This is a familiar leitmotiv for architects, which is commonly expressed in
restoration work. It coincides with attempts to respond meaningfully to the accretions
that adhere to buildings over time – no less so sites of industrial archaeology. The
redesign of the pump station interior was begun by clearing out the existing displays as
efforts were made to present the machinery as free-standing objects within the large
brick shell of the structure. Likewise, consideration was given to the various openings
left in walls by the removal of fittings and to views outdoors, the intention being to
emphasise the “foreign” character of the structure in the landscape. Inside, visitors are
meant to occupy a space of enterprise emptied of the tangle of pipes and hissing
valves, steam and sweat – the building becomes a lovingly restored, though ultimately
thin, cover, like the cowling on an antique engine.
Unlike the engineers and stoke men of O’Connor’s era, today’s occupants are
burdened with the labour of interpretation. Light and soundscapes replace the glow and
roar of furnaces to create an introspective, almost church-like, space. Visitors are
offered the difficult task of making sense of a story that is less easily understood
through late nineteenth-century standards of patriotism and noble works of industry.
Rather, displays are meant to tell a multifaceted and incomplete story. Given the longterm
impact of the scheme on native landscapes, one could reasonably question
whether it should be commemorated at all. This is one possible conclusion drawn from
displays in the boiler house where visitors are told of the vast timber resources
consumed in the station’s furnaces and then offered a view of the partially regenerated
landscape outside.
Of the three pumps originally occupying the pump house, only one remains and
stands as a museum piece. Fortunately, the great expense required to make the
equipment operational (and entertaining – an all too easy move for curators of industrial
museums) has left its quiet dignity intact and required the designers to find other ways
of capitalizing on our nostalgia for a time when machines actually did things rather than
simply break. The foundations of the second and third pumps are incorporated into the
installation in very specific ways and provide opportunities to use a range of interpretive
techniques and multi-media. The absence of “B” pump creates “the void” over which
visitors can reflect upon or call up for themselves, on computer terminals stories,
historic photographs and oral histories and attempt to suggest the ghosts of people
associated with the Goldfields scheme. The volume of space formally occupied by “C” pump is supplied with another, much larger interpretive installation or “machine” that
details the history of the pipeline itself. These various techniques and media call to
mind efforts aimed at encouraging an “interactive” experience in contemporary
museums. These range from the National Holocaust Museum in Washington DC,
which relies on biography to encourage a form of viewer-identification, to the Museum
of Sydney with its cabinets of curious artefacts that invite the visitor to explore – in a
sense, to invent – the past along with curators.
Between the boiler and pump houses, and forming the main entrance into the
station, is a monumental corridor contained within existing masonry walls. An
illuminated line is made in the raised metal floor reproducing the path of the pipeline
and directing the viewer’s attention to an “altar” formed by a standpipe at the end of
the corridor. This may remind one of that ubiquitous water feature of so many Perth
suburban yards – the reticulation head severed by an aberrant land mower – though
the designers intend a more literal reference to a now-iconic period photograph of
Premier Forrest turning on the tap at Kalgoorlie.
Whatever vision Forrest might have had for the Goldfields Water Scheme, it was
not intended simply to transform the desert into an oasis, but to water the mines and
smelters that were – and remain – the economic engine of Western Australia. As each
segment of the pipeline was completed and its capacity became apparent, thoughts on
how to use this now-abundant resource for other purposes grew. Today, the authorities
responsible for our water supplies no longer openly encourage its use as they once did
in pipeline towns from Northam to Kalgoorlie, but rather its conservation.
It would be nice if the architecture of a museum alone could facilitate the kind of
open-ended storytelling sought in the design of the No. 1 Pump Station. Here,
considerable effort is given to present the complex reality of the Goldfields scheme and
not to obscure it with “a romantic falsity.” But as Anthony Coupe and Paul Kloeden
intimate, this is more than likely impossible. Desires for what any museum plan might
call a “seamless interpretive experience” affords the integration of many, often
irreconcilable programmatic requirements and the necessities of management, safety
and especially, profitability. The viewer is inevitably “positioned” in some way as regards
the interpretive displays. Still, this project is largely successful in fulfilling what most
curators and their sponsors hope for these days: to encourage visitors to think as well
as to be entertained.
DR WILLIAM TAYLOR IS A SENIOR LECTURER IN ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA.
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| Project Credits |
NO1 PUMP STATION, MUNDARING WEIR
Stage 1 Mulloway Studio, Paul Kloeden, Exhibition Services,
Spellbound Interpretation, Scitech. Stage 2 Mulloway Studio,
Paul Kloeden, Exhibition Services. Client National Trust of
Australia (WA), Golden Pipeline.
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