Descent

Yellow safety railings form a crisscross grid across stacked grated platforms, rising through the interior of Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories toward a ceiling of structural beams and exposed conduits. A central metal staircase connects each level, its surfaces heavily corroded. The platforms read as one tall shaft of steelwork, the railings repeating level over level, with painted markings worn to near nothing across the grating.

This multi-level steelwork ran the briquette process, part of the only remaining intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria, with its wet sections, hammer mills, shaker screens, conveyor cascades, raw coal bunkers and storage sheds stacked through the factory. The presses were supplied by Maschinenfabrik Buckau R. Wolf A.G. of Germany under the 1950 contract, for two factories rated at 2,100 tons per day. Briquette flow ran continuously through these multi-level factories until the 2014 closure. Brett photographed the staircase and platforms on 30 March 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.