B to A

Two red fire extinguishers hang on a white brick wall in the Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, beside an electrical box stencilled '15 2 FB', with triangular fire-extinguisher signs mounted above them. Beyond a heavily streaked multi-pane window, a screw conveyor stands in the yard, used to feed dry coal into bulka bags and loaded trucks. The conveyor also served as a pressure-relief buffer when a briquette press tripped, letting coal be diverted around the failed press into a yard pile until repairs were completed. Metal grate flooring runs across the foreground, with exposed conduit and wiring lining the left wall.

This screw conveyor sat at the discharge end of the briquette factory, the only remaining intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria, registered with its presses, hammer mills and conveyor cascades. The briquetting presses were supplied by Maschinenfabrik Buckau R. Wolf A.G. of Germany, and the dry coal that reached this point had been railed in from Yallourn, the local Morwell brown coal being unsuitable for briquetting because of its high alkali and sulphur content. Briquette flow ran continuously through the multi-level factories until the 2014 closure. Brett photographed the view from 'B' toward 'A' factory on 15 April 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.