Fire Escape

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 70.0-200.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 200mm · f/8.0 · 1/500 · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

A blue standpipe runs down the exterior fire escape of one of the briquette factories at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, feeding firefighting hoses at any level once a ground-level foam tank was connected and pumped. The number '3524' is painted in red on a heavily rusted grated platform, with a bare bulb hanging beneath the level above.

Edition

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In situ

01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title: Fire Escape
Series: Morwell Power Station
Catalogue: MPS-060
Process: Giclée
Captured: 15 April 2017
Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 70.0-200.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 1/500 s
ISO: 100
Focal length: 200 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

A blue standpipe runs down the exterior fire escape of one of the briquette factories at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, part of the site's firefighting infrastructure. A foam tank would be brought to ground level, connected to the pipe, and pumped to deliver pressure to hoses at any level of the building. The number '3524' is painted in red on one of the heavily rusted grated platforms, and a single bare bulb hangs from the underside of the platform above it. Beige brick wall rises to the right, with open sky to the lower left.

The fire escape climbs the side of one of the two briquette factories, the only remaining intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria, with its wet sections, hammer mills, shaker screens, conveyor cascades and storage sheds inside. The presses were supplied by Maschinenfabrik Buckau R. Wolf A.G. of Germany under the 1950 contract, for two factories of 2,100 tons per day, of an original plan of four; only two were built after the 1951 to 1953 funding halt cancelled the third and fourth. Brett photographed the fire escape on 15 April 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

Three levels of steel-grated landing platforms climb the pale brick face of the boiler house. Yellow safety railings have dulled to ochre. Rust bleeds from every bolt and bracket. A vertical cable drops straight through each platform opening. Corrugated metal panels line the underside of each level. Faded numbers, hand-painted in red, mark the uppermost landing. Open sky fills the gaps between treads.

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.