After more than 50 years, the Liddell coal fired power station in the NSW Upper Hunter is being decommissioned. For decades, Liddell has played a central role in meeting energy demand in NSW and has marked and shaped both the Upper Hunter terrain, and the economy and industry of the region. In attending to the future of the place of Liddell, questions of ‘what next’ reverberate for both humans and non-humans alike. As we face the remnants of heavy industry left behind – including its contaminants, pollutants and ecological injury – how can we move towards transition, regeneration and renewal in places like Liddell?
This paper reflects on more-than-human encounters during an Upper Hunter Artist’s Residency that attends to the moment of Liddell’s closure, as well as to its deep past and open futures. In looking to the black swans that live on the lake at the power station's edge, we trace some of the (im)possibilities of Liddell, a place on unceded Wonnarua land which has always been more-than a power station, and always will be. Conceived as impossible in the European colonial imaginary, black swans, and the black swans that make home in/with/as Liddell, point towards the multiplicity, complexity and diversity that has always accompanied places like Liddell – and which can help us move towards and participate in shaping other hopeful openings with/as place. In seeking to think with (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) the black swans at Liddell, we also attend to both the potentiality of our ever emerging, shared, more-than-human futures, and to the tensions of doing this even whilst living with (and through) the ongoing implications and reverberations of the Anthropocene.