I drove past Yallourn Power Station earlier in the year on my way up to Lake Glenmaggie and intended to come back and take some photos.
Yallourn Power Station from John Field Drive
There's something picturesque in its own way about it, especially on a sunny day.
Or perhaps it's just that I have an odd sensibility for old industrial buildings.
The roads that lead up to the power station are quite over engineered, there's a little underpass and everything, it's got a very 1970s road design aesthetic to its design.
The location where I parked was the Graeme Edwards Memorial Garden.
It seemed to be a decently used garden / park, judging by the bin, which I chucked some of my Instax film cartridge into when I was about to leave. I expected the bin to be empty, but it seemed about half full.
The garden is beside Yallourn W power station. And it is picturesque and interesting in its own way. It's very 1970s-style. It's different shades of brown.
Not that anyone is building a coal-fired power station in 2023, but if they were, I doubt this is the colour scheme that you'd be going for if designing a power station.
It's surprisingly noisy as you get closer to the cooling towers, a noise of water is the overerwhelming sound.
I noticed when I was there three guys going up on a lift up the side of one of the cooling towers on a lift like window cleaning lift.
The power station is meant to close in 2028. <source> I think it's something to look at, a piece of Victoria's history that will unlikely to stick around, Hazelwood didn't – that was levelled, I saw it in its latter stages.
One of the cooling towers (not the one the guys were going up) looked like it had a few repairs over the years, with a less than uniform structure to the tower.
The garden itself has some barbecues, picnic tables, and shelters. The grass was well cut, seemed to have been cut a few weeks ago judging by the clippings that remains on the ground.
Same with the grass around the roads and other areas around or near the power station.
Is it worth making a trip out to have a look? Probably not, but if you're passing or in the area, take a little bit of a detour. It's not aesthetically pleasing in a traditional sense, but big industrial elements, be it construction, architecture or even earth moving can have an awe and wonder to it, then Yallourn Power Station also has an element of it. Much like other examples of "era"-architecture, it's very 1970s in its styling and no one is ever going to build something remotely like this again. So in that sense it is worth visiting because once it's gone, there'll be few examples of it standing anywhere else.
