Powerhouse Museum

: Disambiguation: The Powerhouse is also the name of an unrelated museum located on the north bank of the Brisbane River in the inner city suburb of New Farm, in Brisbane, Australia. Like its Sydney counterpart it is housed in a large former electricity station.

History

The Powerhouse Museum's origins date to 1879, when the Sydney International Exhibition was held in the Garden Palace, a purpose-built exhibition building located in the grounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens. At the conclusion of the Exhibition the Australian Museum (Sydney's museum of natural history) appointed a committee to select the best exhibits, with the intention of exhibiting them permanently in a new museum to be sited within the Garden Palace. The new museum was to be called The Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum of New South Wales, and its purpose was to exhibit the latest industrial, construction and design innovations, with the intention of showing how improvements in the living standards and health of the population might be brought about.

Related Topics:
1879 - Sydney International Exhibition - Garden Palace - Royal Botanic Gardens - Australian Museum

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Unfortunately, in September 1882 before the new museum could be opened a fire completely destroyed the Garden Palace, leaving the museum's first curator, Joseph Henry Maiden with a collection consisting of one artefact - a carved graphite Ceylonese elephant statue that had miraculously survived the blaze unscathed despite a 5-storey plunge.

Related Topics:
September - 1882 - Joseph Henry Maiden - Elephant - Statue

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Undaunted, Maiden commenced rebuilding the collection, but for the subsequent decade the new museum found itself housed in a large tin shed in the Domain - a facility it shared with the Sydney Hospital morgue. The ever-present stench of decaying corpses was not the best advertisement for an institution dedicated to the promotion of sanitation, and eventually, after intense lobbying the museum was relocated to a three storey building in Harris Street, Ultimo, and simultaneously given a new name - the Technological Museum.

Related Topics:
Domain - Sydney Hospital - Morgue

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The new location placed the museum in Harris Street, adjacent to the Sydney Technical College, and as such it was intended to provide material inspiration to the working men being trained there. As time passed it also established branches in some of New South Wales' main industrial and mining centres, including Broken Hill, Albury, Newcastle and Maitland. It also quickly outgrew the main Harris Street site and by 1978 the situation had become dire, with many exhibits literally stuffed into its attic, and left unexhibited for decades.

Related Topics:
Harris Street - Sydney Technical College - Broken Hill - Albury - Newcastle - Maitland - 1978

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On August 23 of that year, New South Wales Premier Neville Wran announced that the decrepit Ultimo Power Station, several hundred metres north of the old Harris Street site (at the time called the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences), had been earmarked as the museum's new permanent home, and it re-opened as the Powerhouse Museum at the new site a decade later. The main museum building encloses a space larger than that of the Sydney Opera House, and today contains five levels, three courtyards, a basement and a storage building - however the size and continually expanding nature of the museum's collection means that sizeable offsite storage facilities are also maintained.

Related Topics:
New South Wales - Neville Wran - Sydney Opera House

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