Conveyor and Wet Section

Rusted corrugated iron cladding runs the full diagonal length of a conveyor bridge at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, its broken upper window panes open to an overcast sky. Timber structural members are visible through the gaps, showing how the bridge was built from the inside out. At the right edge, brown brick walls and two rectangular windows mark the building the bridge connects to. The brickwork is weathered but intact against the pale grey light, the bridge running off the corner of the building on its diagonal climb.

Bridges like this carried coal and product between the multi-level briquette buildings, part of the conveyor cascade that fed the wet section and the presses. The briquetting machinery was supplied by Maschinenfabrik Buckau R. Wolf A.G. of Germany under the 1950 contract, and the surviving plant is registered as the only intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria, its wet sections, hammer mills, shaker screens and conveyor cascades all part of the listed fabric. Briquette flow ran continuously through these factories until the August 2014 closure. Brett photographed the conveyor and wet section on 15 April 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.