Collector Conveyors

Cracked concrete stretches across the launder yard in the foreground at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, tyre tracks and grass breaking through the surface in the mid-ground, with the collector conveyor buildings rising beyond. The collector conveyors were notoriously difficult to maintain, with Bobcat teams working around them full time to manage briquette spills. Briquettes arriving from the launder yard were cut and distributed from this point to packaging, the storage shed, the loading shed, or directly to the char plant, which remained operational at the time of photographing but was due to be mothballed in June 2018.

The collector conveyors sat at the distribution end of the briquetting line, moving finished product through a plant whose presses came from Maschinenfabrik Buckau R. Wolf A.G. of Germany under the 1950 contract. The whole assemblage of wet sections, hammer mills, shaker screens and conveyor cascades is registered as the only intact collection of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery left in Victoria. Briquette flow ran continuously through the multi-level factories until the final feed in August 2014, when the last boiler and turbine were taken off on 8 September. Brett photographed the collector conveyors on 29 March 2017, in the closed complex before the demolition program began.