Retort Building Level One

The first level of the retort building at the Bathurst Gasworks holds the working evidence of decades of coal-gas production. A walkway runs around the boiler at the centre of the level, a piece of access infrastructure built for form as well as function: the brickwork that surrounds it is laid in coursed bond of a kind not used in industrial buildings any more. The floor is covered in coal ash and rubble. A hopper at the back of the room has been run off its guide rail and sits at an angle to where it was meant to be. Steel columns frame the space, with brick walls behind them carrying the colour of long industrial use. Light cuts through a gridded vent overhead, picking out the dust and the edges of the steel.

The Bathurst Gasworks made gas by heating coal in retorts, sealed vessels that drove the volatile hydrocarbons out of the coal as gas while leaving coke behind. The retort house was the working centre of the plant: coal arrived at the top, dropped into the retorts, was carbonised at temperature, and the gas was siphoned off to a condenser elsewhere on the site. Council operations ran in this building from 1888 to 1979, with the plant rebuilt around 1960. From 1979 until 1987 the operation was taken over by AGL, which produced gas here by reforming LPG rather than carbonising coal. The retorts were last fired thirty-eight years before this photograph was made.