M50s

A single conveyor rises from the Morwell Open Cut and runs the full length of this hall at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories. Its skeletal steel framework casts sharp shadows across a concrete floor where sunlight breaks through broken window panes on the right. Red pipes run low along the wall beneath wire mesh glazing. A metal grate sits embedded in the floor in the foreground. The space is stripped back to its structure, the long diagonal run of the conveyor framing the room and the daylight that falls between its members.

Coal entered the briquette factories at this point. Conveyors of this kind carried lignite from the open cut into the works, and Yallourn coal railed across the interconnecting line also entered the briquette factory here, because the Morwell brown coal proved unsuitable for briquetting given its high alkali and sulphur content. The dredgers and conveyors were Australian built to a Yallourn derived design. Coal arriving this way fed the presses continuously until briquette production ceased in 2014. Brett photographed the conveyor hall on 30 March 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.