Power of the west

'Urban ghosts' site

Trawling through the Net, I came across a site I haven't encountered before Urban ghosts : forgotten places & urban curiosities, it was the words "south fremantle" on the link which sparked my interest.

South Fremantle Power Station

Power station interiors

Industrial buildings haven’t always been as uninspired looking as they are nowdays.  From the Victorian era through to the mid-twentieth century, factories were often grand and ornate, with commanding facades. The looming beauty of the abandoned South Fremantle Power Station is still magnificent decades after its demise. To some abandoned equates to ugly, to others it is ethereal, strange, confronting and compelling. There is something innately sad about buildings that have been neglected and something definitely eerie. South Fremantle is the epitome of this juxtaposition.
Fremantle, in Cockburn Sound, rose as an industrial centre after a lime kiln was established there in 1831.  A railway, abattoir, and skin drying sheds followed and the area grew to handle much of Perth’s heavy industry.
The art deco style South Fremantle Power Station is heritage listed. The coal-fired electric power generating station first fired up in January 1951. It was the second and largest purpose-built power station in Western Australia, employing over 250 workers, but the decline of coal-fired power and the increased demand for residential housing led to its closure in September 1985, and its machinery was stripped away leaving the building shell.
Its four imposing chimneys were demolished and the building has since been gutted by vandals. However, it has some notable architectural features. Tunnels that run below the station but authorities have sealed and blocked them up. The interior is a curious mixture of vast open spaces and seemingly out of place decorative fixtures, dominated by the sweeping grand main staircase and enormous tall windows, while the omnipresent graffiti that has left no surface untouched adds a counter-intuitively pleasing splash of colour to the scene.
Following the privatisation of electricity generation  in Western Australia, Verve Energy became the owners of the building. The site is apparently being considered for an Arts/Cultural Centre with the focus on a redevelopment of the site, but no action has yet taken place.

The long walk

Their escape was just the beginning, in nine months they trekked over 4,000 miles through some of the harshest regions in the world.

Janusz, a young Polish cavalry officer is sentenced to 25 years in a Gulag forced labour camps in Siberia, for refusing admit he is an anti-communist spy, after the Russians extort a fraudulent statement from his wife.

Determined to escape Janusz  teams up with a cynical American Mr Smith, a hardened Russian criminal Valka, Polish artist Tomasz, a Latvian priest Voss, a Polish pastry chef Kazik (suffering from night blindness), and a Yugoslav accountant Zoran. They plan to break out during a severe snowstorm to cover their tracks, with little food or equipment, and no certainty of their location or intended direction, apart from trekking south to Mongolia.

During a second night Kazik freezes to death after losing his way and is buried but the group. After many days of travel across the snows and steppes of Siberia and at their limits, they reach Lake Baikal and its mosquitoes. They encounter a Polish girl Irena (who conceals a tragic experience), and who is grudgingly allowed to join their quest. Reaching the unpatrolled border between Russia and Mongolia, Valka chooses to remain, as he still sees Russia as his homeland, and Stalin as a hero. The rest continue but find that Mongolia is now also a Communist state, and that India is the closest refuge. They continue south, crossing  the Gobi Desert, suffering from a lack of water, sandstorms, and sun stroke which weakens and tests the group.

The film goes further than the book (which finishes in 1942) and brings the story full-circle.

Based on the book ‘The long walk : the true story of a trek to freedom’ by Slavomir Rawicz, the film version ‘The way back’ is directed by Australian great Peter Weir who has done a superb job with the prison camp and the landscapes.