Sydney's harbour is easily acknowledged as its heart and its prize.
..But a vital part of it, the old working waterfront, is much undervalued and rapidly disappearing.
The semi-redundant industrial areas west ofthe Harbour Bridge, particularly around Pyrmont,White Bay, and the remains of the old naval dockyard onCockatoo Island - are extraordinary testimony to our recent past. But we can't get rid of them fast enough.
..Great tracts of this waterfront are being swept away annually in the name of residential development.These were extraordinary places, where mountains of coal were converted to electrical power in vast and ever-expanding corrugated cathedrals, and where that power was applied to the heavy engineering trades.
..It was a world of belching smoke, soot and stench, of steam railways, ironships, and continuous wharves.
..These surreal landscapes, which were built, rather than designed, evolved over decades of adaptation and modernization into an environment of massive contraptions of stunning variety. For me they are places of unexpected adventure, and these photographs represent the beginning of an attempt to document and interpret this disappearing industrial fairyland.
..The few buildings that remain - silos, cranes, chimneys and sheds - are massive, purposeful.They demand respect.Very few were finessed in any way, because when these grand visions came to be they were beyond the design regulations and aesthetic considerations that applied to civic and domestic buildings.There was a kind of open slather attitude to waterside constructions.
..They were weird, big, brutal and crude, and these are the qualities I've used in these photographs - to emphasize the oddity, and the oversized strangeness, of an environment that will soon be no more.
Anthony Browell

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..Anthony Browell was born in England in 1945, studied and practised photography in London before emigrating to Sydney in 1969. A life of editorial, corporate, architectural and advertising work, coupled with teaching spells, portraiture and personal work, has been regularly interrupted by forays into old wooden workboats.
..He lives in Sydney, and spends much time on the water around Balmain's industrial waterfront there. His work is seen in several international publications and magazines, and is part of many private collections, as well as the National Portrait Gallery, and the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.

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