Shaker Screen Floor

A long aisle runs between two rows of shaker screens in the wet section of the Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories. The perspective draws toward a large, multi-paned window at the far end, where light enters and catches the concrete floor in the foreground. Yellow-painted steelwork lines the left side of the aisle. Dust covers the horizontal surfaces of the machinery on both sides, settled across the screens and their framing. The room is plain and repetitive, two matched banks of equipment running the length of the floor toward the window.

The shaker screens were part of the briquetting line, whose 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 capacity. The Victorian Heritage Register lists the plant as the only remaining intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria, naming the wet sections, hammer mills, shaker screens and conveyor cascades among the surviving fabric. Morwell brown coal proved unsuitable for briquetting because of its high alkali and sulphur content, so Yallourn coal was railed across the interconnecting line to feed the factories. Briquette flow ran continuously through the multi-level works until the 2014 closure. Brett photographed the shaker screen floor on 30 March 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.