Cooling House

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 14mm · f/8.0 · 1/25 · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

A conveyor gallery at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, brick walls and yellow safety railings framing a multi-tiered roller system that fills five storeys of height. Window openings to the left have lost most of their glazing, daylight falling across a dust-covered concrete floor. These coolers reduced the temperature of the coal before it passed on to the dryers.

Edition

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In situ

01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title: Cooling House
Series: Morwell Power Station
Catalogue: MPS-055
Process: Giclée
Captured: 15 April 2017
Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 1/25 s
ISO: 100
Focal length: 14 mm
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size: 290 × 200 mm
Location: Morwell, Victoria, Australia
Authenticity: C2PA verified provenance →
Recognised by: Highly Commended in Multimedia at the 2016 National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards

02 LOCATION

Morwell, Victoria, Australia

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

03 THE STORY

About this print

Brick walls and yellow safety railings line a conveyor gallery at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, where a multi-tiered roller system fills the right side of the frame across five storeys of height. Large window openings to the left have lost most of their glazing, and daylight falls across a dust-covered concrete floor that stretches toward a small opening in the far wall. The rollers step up tier on tier, the gallery tall and narrow, the floor empty beneath the run of windows. These coolers reduced the temperature of the coal before it passed on to the dryers.

The coolers sat within the briquetting process, conditioning the coal between stages on its way through the multi-level factory. The briquetting equipment was supplied by Maschinenfabrik Buckau R. Wolf A.G. of Germany under the 1950 contract, two factories rated at 2,100 tons a day, and the plant is registered as the only remaining intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria. Briquette flow ran continuously through these multi-level factories until the final feed in August 2014. Brett photographed the cooling house on 15 April 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

Three vertical bays of steel-framed glass rise the full height of the façade, divided by pale cream brick pilasters. Many panes are intact but clouded with grime. Others are missing, exposing steel gantries and yellow safety railings inside. A rusted pipe stub punctures the brickwork at lower right. The grid of glazing bars is relentless, dozens of small rectangles stacked tight. Flat overcast light presses evenly across the surface.

Brett Patman

The series

Morwell Power Station

1949-2014 · 79 photographs

The State Electricity Commission of Victoria built Morwell as the centrepiece of its postwar plan to sever Victoria's reliance on black coal from New South Wales. Construction ran from 1949 to 1959; electricity production commenced in December 1958 and the first commercial briquettes followed in December 1959. With the demolition of Old Yallourn between 1995 and 1999, Morwell became the earliest surviving large-scale Victorian state-grid power station, registered on the Victorian Heritage Register as H2377 on 1 March 2018.

View all in this series →

05 SIZE GUIDE

Print sizes

The anatomy view shows what this finish is as a physical object: paper margin, mat band, frame depth, acrylic profile. The comparison strip shows how each size sits relative to the others at true scale. Click a size or a finish to update both.