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Revealed: The bill to empty the Powerhouse Museum
By Linda Morris
Taxpayers have spent more than $7 million to empty the Powerhouse Museum at Ultimo and send its contents 37 kilometres to a new storehouse in readiness for the museum’s imminent $300 million rebuild and renovations at its city campus.
But the $7.3 million bill for Australia’s largest museum move in half a century does not include the centrepiece of the Powerhouse collection, which is still to be packed up and placed in storage despite anxiety about its extreme fragility.
The budget for the steam engine’s removal, along with the rest of the decanted objects, has been covered by a one-off $15 million government grant made in June to also cover the cost of separating the functions of the nearby Harwood building from the construction site, management said.
The Boulton & Watt steam engine arrived in Australia from London in 1888.Credit: Dean Sewell
The grant formed part of $81.5 million that Treasury allocated to the museum for 2023-24, about $20 million more than the previous financial year, the museum’s annual report notes. The allocation enabled the Powerhouse to report an operating surplus.
The 1795 Boulton & Watt rotative engine, a rare relic of the Industrial Age, is one of only three that exist in the world.
Some 3000-odd collection pieces have been boxed, crated, catalogued and in some cases craned out of their Harris Street home, but the delicate mechanical antiquity was the lone display object to have been sheltered on site at the CBD museum in a vibration-proof case for the museum’s extensive renovations.
Now the priceless steam engine will be moved in February after a risk assessment cited by Powerhouse management in consultation with engineering specialist Ken Ainsworth, who was involved in the reassembly of the engine in 1988, determined that the best outcome for the mechanical antiquity is to temporarily relocate.
Ainsworth said the risks of damage during the renovation work, from such things as vibration and exposure to dust and humidity, were greater than the risks of relocation.
“These risks far outweigh the risk of any possible damage that may occur during relocation to storage,” he said. “With the correct disassembly techniques, precise lifting with load monitoring and bespoke stillage designs for component transport, the risk of damage can be reduced to zero.”
Chief executive Lisa Havilah said the Powerhouse had been responsible for the engine since it arrived from London by ship in 1888.
She said it was exhibited at the museum’s former Harris Street location, dismantled and relocated to Castle Hill in 1983 and then reassembled in 1988 as part of the Stage 2 opening of the current Powerhouse Ultimo site.
Sydneysiders flocked to the Powerhouse on its final day in February before its closure.Credit: Dean Sewell
“It’s about the methodology,” she said. “We have everything documented from 1988, and we are using that as a guide to relocate the steam engine.”
But moving the Boulton & Watt was a “distressing” prospect, said Emeritus Professor David Miller, a historian in science and technology at the University of NSW.
He said disassembling the machine to move it to Castle Hill would not be attended by the same expertise or care “since virtually all of those who could provide it are dead”.
“The very decision to move the Boulton & Watt is a cavalier act of bad faith given the earlier reassurances that it would not be moved,” he said.
“It would be easier to ensure the engine’s safety in situ than to move it, in my opinion, precisely because instituting defensive methods to protect it is something that those without steam expertise can do, given the will to do so.”
At Ultimo, planning approvals are expected in January to begin demolition of staircases, internal walls and mezzanines within the heritage Boiler House, Engine House, and Turbine Hall, a move which the Powerhouse said would improve circulation but which has been criticised by most public submissions.
Labor’s renovations also call for shopfronts for creative industries to be built along Harris Street and a new city-facing entrance and courtyard. Interiors of the 1988-built Wran building will be removed, and its materials changed.
Separately, a new $915 million museum is going up on the Parramatta riverside to open in late 2026.
The museum’s internationally significant object and star attraction, the Locomotive No. 1 and its carriages, cost $349,000 to shift to their new temporary home in Castle Hill in August.
Likewise, the historic Catalina Frigate Bird II cost $285,250 to dismantle and truck to the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society in Albion Park.
Removing the Boulton & Watt is expected to cost similar to these other objects, and all three will return to Ultimo, Havilah says.
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