The People Who Explore Australia's Abandoned Buildings

I think this is why I like the idea of urban exploration – also known as urbex – the community built around sneaking into abandoned, human-built structures. I like the idea that somewhere out there there’s real people venturing beyond the beaten path and discovering what’s out there.

Over the past few years, accounts have popped up on YouTube and TikTok, full of people breaking into abandoned houses, schools, warehouses, and any other shadowy liminal spaces they can find. The creators have amassed followings, but getting this footage isn’t exactly easy – urbexers have to take physical and legal risks to capture it. Some of the older buildings are structurally precarious, and if explorers get caught poking around, they’ll be charged with trespassing.

So, who are the people staring down rotted wood and hefty fines, and deciding to venture out anyway – despite the hazards, or possibly, because of them? Why do they want to go into dusty, crumbling hospitals so badly? What are they looking for? I decided to talk to a few and find out. 

@AbandonedOz

Phil Bates is a 32-year-old Sydney-based explorer who runs the @AbandonedOz account on YouTube, as well as @abandoned_oz on Instagram. 

When Phil was in his early twenties, he used to drive past an abandoned house on a Western Sydney road during his commute to work. Every time he spotted it, it tugged at an old childhood fascination with haunted houses, unearthing memories of Scooby Doo episodes and Stephen King novels.

One day, Phil decided to just do it: he pulled over and stepped inside. He loved the rush that came with being somewhere that not many people get to go, seeing a space that’s hidden from the world. After that, he caught the bug. At one point he was going urban exploring every other day, documenting his discoveries on YouTube and Instagram. Sometimes he’d go alone; sometimes with friends. He’s always seeking out locations with an element of grandness – dilapidated mansions and theatres with winding staircases, structures that rest squarely on the border of luxury and ruin. He says he likes buildings with a history attached to them. 

Sometimes this means exploring a soon-to-be-demolished aquarium that tells the story of an economic recession, but other times, the history comes from his online audience.

 “I get comments like, ‘Hey, my father used to work at that Coles there’,” he says over video call. He also tells me about messages he gets, with strangers sharing lost memories brought to the surface by his videos, like from the people who once rode the roller coasters in the abandoned amusement parks he was now exploring.

In a short video collaboration with @urbexsydney, a voiceover from Phil says, “The natural decay of a place is one of the things I appreciate so much.”

Then there is, of course, the thrill factor.

“I wouldn’t say I feel completely scared,” he says, “but you’re on edge.” You have to consider who else could be in the site, or how well the building will hold up. Once, while exploring a now-demolished orphanage in Goulburn, he saw that the floor was sagging with water damage. He decided to test how weak the wood was by tossing a brick a few feet in front of him and watched as the brick fell straight through. 

“I like the challenge of navigating these places, so, you know, I don’t fall through the floor.”

@urbexsydney – who asked to be identified by her TikTok handle – is a 17-year-old explorer, as well as a professional photographer and occasional ghost hunter. She took oour Zoom call from an unidentified grassy location, explaining that she’d been en route to an abandoned building (or, as she called it, an “abando”) when she realised it was, in fact, actively on fire. She won’t be returning there, because she has no interest in burned buildings: they’re unnecessarily risky, and everything compelling within them has been destroyed.

@urbexsydney came to urban exploration young. Like Phil, she grew up loving stories about haunted houses and old asylums. When she was 10 her dad took her to a birthday party in Callan Park – which, it turns out, was built on the grounds of an old asylum. She only knew one other kid at the party, which meant the whole thing was kind of boring, so the two of them ditched the birthday and spent the day wandering the grounds instead. Two years later, @urbexsydney fell down a research rabbit hole about Callan Park’s history and returned to look around and take photos.

“And I kind of just didn’t stop,” she explained. “My friends from school, they'll go out for dinners and movies. We just explore abandoned places.” She goes urbexing at least twice a week now, sometimes driving for hours to find an interesting location. 

Her favourite site was an old hospital, abandoned for a while, but somehow perfectly preserved. When she made it inside she found that, miraculously, there was no graffiti and not a single smashed window. What followed was the ultimate good feeling many urbexers chase: a sense of real discovery, like she was the first person to be there. “It’s crazy,” she said, “It’s just a beautiful place.” 

One misconception about urban explorers that irks @urbexsydney is the idea that they’re all teenage menaces who want to break into old homes and vandalise them. This is more or less the opposite of what she’s interested in. She prefers spaces left exactly as they were, like the 19th century schoolhouse she found in Sydney. When she walked inside the classroom there was still writing on the chalkboard from the last lesson that took place: a maths problem from over a hundred years ago. 

The school was in the city. Outside of the building life had carried on. People had been growing and dying and falling in love, going to the doctors, writing novels, waking up early for work, buying tomatoes at the grocery store – but, in this room, everything had stayed exactly the same. “It’s like a hands-on version of history,” she said.

I asked how she feels about museums – does she still feel inspired from artefacts and paintings once they make their way into an official setting, or do they lose their magic? She says it’s not the same. Museums are too predictable. You pay for a ticket, go see the famous bits, read the wall panel explaining everything and walk out unchanged. When you’re exploring an abandoned building, it’s entirely different. 

You never know what you’re going to find, and nobody tells you how to piece it together.

To be a teenager right now, forming your identity in a world of smartphones and pandemics, feeling connected to an increasingly isolated and digitised universe is one of life’s big challenges.

But @urbexsydney has built a community of friends (although she’s also had a few relationships tested when she took people who didn’t take safety protocols seriously.) She’s travelled to places and regions she otherwise would have never explored, combed through historical archives, and gained confidence as a photographer. 

How wonderful it would feel to be a 17-year-old – or, honestly, a person of any age – unearthing secret places with your friends, discovering that there is more to the world than commercially-viable forms of adventure. How exciting it must be to experience your city as a place with wonders hiding behind every corner; to grow up knowing that every space you touched was connected to a history of people who had touched the same thing.

It all seemed strangely wholesome.