Press Covers

Two large presses stand in mirror symmetry along the central axis of the briquette factory hall at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories. Their gridded front panels and worn green flanks face a brightly lit doorway at the far end of the hall. Light from the skylights above cuts down through the dusty air, picking out the concrete floor and the overhead tangle of pipes and structural beams. The two machines are set as a matched pair, framing the run of floor between them. Their green paint has worn back with use, and the grid panels face inward toward the doorway and the light beyond it.

The presses were the heart of the briquetting line. The briquetting equipment was supplied by Maschinenfabrik Buckau R. Wolf A.G. of Germany under the 1950 contract, which covered two factories of 2,100 tons per day capacity. The Victorian Heritage Register records the plant as the only remaining intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria. Because the Morwell brown coal proved unsuitable for briquetting, high in alkali and sulphur, Yallourn coal was railed across the interconnecting line to feed these factories. Briquette flow ran continuously through the multi-level factories until the 2014 closure. Brett photographed the presses on 15 April 2017.