On Christmas Day 1983, the lights went out for good at Australia’s White Bay Power Station. Nestled in an industrial part of the Sydney suburbs, southwest of the iconic opera house and tucked under a busy bridge, the building fell into disrepair. Windows broke, cobwebs settled and decades passed — until an unexpected bidder came to town with an ambitious plan: Disney Wharf.

Disney’s foray into Australia is one of its shortest-lived and least-publicized big swings. Dreams of opening a Disney complex in Sydney, code-named “Project Lester,” lasted just about a year, from 2007 to 2008, before reported pushback forced the company to retreat.

In 2007, Disney was rapidly changing. A few years prior, polarizing CEO Michael Eisner had been pushed out in favor of his second-in-command Bob Iger. Eisner had prized expanding the theme park division, but Iger went further, embarking on an acquisition spree unprecedented in Disney history. In just his first few years on the job, the company bought Pixar and Marvel. Quietly, it was also looking into opening an international theme park once again. 

On its face, the move made sense. The two closest Disney parks to Sydney, in Hong Kong and Tokyo, were over nine hours away by plane. Pixar had also relatively recently had a massive hit in “Finding Nemo,” which counts Sydney as one its primary settings. But, unlike Eisner, who had big, public failures in his park expansions, Iger chose to clandestinely test the waters. 

Sometime around 2007, Disney reached out to the officials in the New South Wales government. This contact, the Sydney Morning Herald would later report, was “unsolicited.” What Disney reportedly pitched was something called “Disney Wharf at Sydney Harbour,” at the site of the old power plant. 

Long before a power plant was built on the shores of White Bay, the area was populated by Aboriginal people, who valued its caves and sandstone geography. In 1912, the city of Sydney broke ground there on a plant to power the tram system; by 1958, White Bay Power Station was providing electricity to the city. It was officially decommissioned in 1984 and, although designated as a heritage site about 15 years later, sat empty and derelict. 

Disney’s vision was well shy of a full-fledged theme park. According to planning documents viewed by the Morning Herald, the area would be redeveloped with themed hotels, Disney Springs-like retail and restaurants, multiple light rail stations, a “Fantasia Gardens” with Disney-character topiary hedges and an entertainment district. Concept art shared by former Disney Imagineer Jim Shull shows a Mark Twain-esque riverboat and an old-fashioned sailing ship in the waters of White Bay. Rides might have included a version of Peter Pan’s Flight and the iconic flying Dumbo elephants. The company even floated the possibility of a Disney-run hospitality school. 

The project’s “most enthusiastic” backer among government ministers, according to the Morning Herald, was politician Ian Macdonald. Around the same time as Disney’s Australia foray, Macdonald was allegedly busy on a number of backroom machinations, including accepting meetings in exchange for sexual favors and fraudulently awarding licenses to businesses he favored. Although there’s no indication Macdonald had any corrupt dealings with Disney, he was hardly the morally upright supporter the famously kid-friendly company would have wanted. (Macdonald is currently serving a jail sentence for misconduct while in office. He’s up for parole in 2027.)

Although talks were reaching high levels of the NSW government, the Morning Herald reported politicians felt “mixed” about Disney’s proposition. There was concern it “‘wouldn’t have gone down at all well with the denizens of neighboring Balmain and Rozelle.’” And then there was the cost: a reported $500 million investment by the state government in the infrastructure needed to revamp the abandoned industrial site. “When they started looking at the infrastructure costs, they just went cold,” one senior official told the outlet. 

In February 2008, when it had all gone south, a spokesperson from Macdonald’s office went on the record in the press to confirm the project’s existence. Although they gave no further details, they did admit there were talks with Disney “about the redevelopment of White Bay.” But nothing had been agreed upon, and, as of that moment, there were no “active concepts” in the works. 

There’s one last baffling remnant online. On the website of what appears to be a defunct developer called JPI Global, there is a page for its “Disneyland Australia theme park” project. Unlike the fairly small White Bay project, this mock-up, which can be seen in screenshots captured by the Wayback Machine in 2011, touts a sprawling resort “set within the $2.7 billion Star Land Project located on the Gold Coast Highway and rail-link between Brisbane and the Gold Coast in South-East Queensland.” Although there’s no way to know if JPI Global really was involved in a possible Australian Disneyland, it claims on the site it was “Nominated by Walt Disney Attractions,” which was indeed the name of Disney’s Parks, Experiences and Products division until 2008. 

As for the station, its fate was up in the air until just a few weeks ago: White Bay Power Station is now being refurbished to open to the public in 2024. Along with the chance to walk through one of Sydney’s most historic buildings, the revitalized space will include arts and community events — although, sadly for Disney fans, no Dumbo rides.