This is a ball mill. Specifically, the Number Six Raw Mill at Kandos Cement Works, in central west NSW.
The mill is a long rotating chamber. Raw stone is fed in at one end, the chamber rotates, and the load of steel grinding balls inside batters the rock into powder ready for the next stage of cement-making.
The balls live inside the chamber. Periodically the mill is shut down, the chamber opened, and the balls dumped out for maintenance or replacement. That's what's happened here. The whole load is on the ground.
I have a thing about ball mills.
When I was an apprentice, the company I worked for had a shutdown at a zinc refinery. We worked on a ball mill similar to this one. All the balls had been dumped, just like in this picture. Our foreman made the other apprentice and me move the entire pile to a skip by hand. Twelve hours. It was the worst day of my life.
I think about that day every time I see a ball mill. I see a lot of them. The same engineering principle works for cement, ore concentrate, mineral processing, paint pigment, and dozens of other powdered industrial outputs. Half the abandoned sites I photograph have a ball mill or two somewhere on the property.
