Power Station Window

A grid of small industrial window panes sits in the facade at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, several panes broken and one in the lower section punched through with a large irregular hole. Riveted corrugated metal cladding runs to either side of the window grid. The wall around it is asbestos-clad, which identifies this as the power station itself rather than the briquette factory. The briquette factory was built in brick, so the cladding here is the marker that separates the two halves of the complex. The damage is concentrated low in the grid, where the hole interrupts an otherwise regular run of small panes.

The power station was the electricity-generating half of the complex, built and operated by the State Electricity Commission of Victoria in the Latrobe Valley, on Gunaikurnai Country. It ran on brown coal, or lignite, raised from the adjacent open cut. The whole complex was built as the centrepiece of Victoria's postwar policy to sever the state's reliance on black coal from New South Wales. Construction ran from 1949 to 1959, and electricity production commenced in December 1958. With the demolition of Old Yallourn between 1995 and 1999, Morwell became the earliest surviving large-scale Victorian state-grid power station from the SECV era. Brett photographed the power station facade on 15 April 2017.