C and D Factory

This is the launder yard between 'C' and 'D' factory at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, the bridge conveyor connecting the two buildings still intact overhead. Across the cracked concrete forecourt, the gap where the equivalent conveyor once linked 'A' and 'B' factory is open to the sky. Brick chimneys rise from the right wing under heavy cloud cover, and dry grass pushes through the seams in the forecourt. The yard is empty, the bridge a straight line above broken ground, the two factories facing each other across the worn slab.

The complex was planned as four briquette factories, but only two were built after the 1951 to 1953 funding halt cancelled the third and fourth. The briquette presses inside these buildings were supplied by Maschinenfabrik Buckau R. Wolf A.G. of Germany under the 1950 contract, and the plant is registered as the only remaining intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria. Briquette flow ran continuously through the multi-level factories until the August 2014 closure. First commercial briquettes had come off the line in December 1959. Brett photographed the launder yard between 'C' and 'D' factory on 29 March 2017, in the closed complex before the demolition program began.