Shaker Screen Floor at Morwell Power Station, six screens to a row, drive motors still mounted in place.
Shaker Screen Floor at Morwell Power Station, six screens to a row, drive motors still mounted in place.

Shaker Screen Floor

Provenance

Camera
NIKON D810
Lens
14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings
14mm · f/8.0 · 1/5 · ISO 100
Paper
Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

Sunlight streams through the perforated shaker screen floor inside Morwell Power Station. Hundreds of holes reveal the layers of dust and debris, remnants of a powerful coal processing operation now silent.

Edition
Open edition

Open edition
Printed to order, no fixed quantity. Each print is hand-signed by the photographer.

Limited edition
A fixed number of prints exist. Once sold, the edition closes permanently. Each print is individually numbered and signed.

$100.00 AUD
Size
Type
Colour
✓
Signed, numbered, with COA. Made to order in 10 to 20 business days (framed). Shipped in protective packaging with edition certificate, paper-stock reference and a printed care guide.
See certificate sample →

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In situ

Shaker Screen Floor at Morwell Power Station, six screens to a row, drive motors still mounted in place.Shaker Screen Floor at Morwell Power Station, six screens to a row, drive motors still mounted in place.Shaker Screen Floor at Morwell Power Station, six screens to a row, drive motors still mounted in place.Shaker Screen Floor at Morwell Power Station, six screens to a row, drive motors still mounted in place.Shaker Screen Floor at Morwell Power Station, six screens to a row, drive motors still mounted in place.
01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title
Shaker Screen Floor
Series
Morwell Power Station
Catalogue
MPS-021
Process
Giclée
Captured
30 March 2017
Camera
NIKON D810
Lens
14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture
f/8.0
Shutter
1/5 s
ISO
100
Focal length
14 mm
Paper
Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size
290 × 200 mm
Location
Morwell, Victoria, Australia
Authenticity
C2PA verified provenance →
Recognised by
National Trust of Australia (NSW), 2016 Heritage Award, Multimedia
03 THE STORY

About this print

The shaker screen floor at Morwell runs across one of the upper levels of the briquette factory, the long open hall fitted with multiple shaker screen units on their mounting frames along the centre line. The screens are aligned in a row, each one a steel-framed unit with its drive motor and discharge chute set to feed the next stage of the production line. The floor is concrete, dust-coated from decades of operation. The hall ceiling is high, with the structural truss visible overhead. Natural light comes from the windows along the side walls; supplementary fluorescent fittings hang from the trusses, most of them out. The floor space between the screens carries the standard operator-access pathways.

Shaker screens sized the crushed lignite as it moved through the briquette factory's production line, with each screen sorting the material by particle size before downstream processing. The screen floor was one of multiple integrated stages between the hammer mills and the presses. The plant operated from 1956 to its final briquette feed on 31 August 2014. Brett photographed the shaker screen floor on 30 March 2017, on his first visit to the complex.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

The shaker screen floor sorted coal by vibration, separating it into size fractions before the next stage. Six screens to a row, drive motors still mounted in place. You can picture the movement from the weight of the things.

Brett Patman

Morwell Power Station

The series

Morwell Power Station

2014 · 79 photographs

The Morwell Power Station and Briquette Works was an integrated cogeneration plant in Victoria's Latrobe Valley, built by the State Electricity Commission of Victoria from 1949 and operated from 1956 to February 2014. At peak it produced 180 MW of electricity and over a million tonnes of briquettes a year for the Victorian solid fuel market. A Boxing Day 2003 fire destroyed the conveyor feeding three of the four briquette plants; the conveyor was never repaired. The plant closed for good after a 12 February 2014 fire. Heritage Victoria added the site to the Victorian Heritage Register in February 2018 as the state's earliest surviving large-scale grid power station, but later granted a permit to demolish the main station while keeping the briquette factories. The two 94-metre chimneys were brought down on 20 February 2021. The site contained more than 10,000 cubic metres of asbestos.

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.

Anatomy · true ratio
07 MORE FROM MORWELL POWER STATION

78 other prints in this series

All prints
Rising Conveyor at Morwell Power Station, the enclosed conveyor carried coal from the storage bunker up to the boiler house.
Rising Conveyor $100.00
Generator at Morwell Power Station, the blade rings inside have the kind of precision that heavy industry does better than.
Generator $100.00
Turbine Floor 3 at Morwell Power Station, a turbine control panel lines the left wall, its rows of analogue gauges.
Turbine Floor 3 $100.00
Turbine Hall Control Room Entrance at Morwell Power Station, the control room sat above the turbine hall floor at one end.
Turbine Hall Control Room Entrance $100.00
08 BY POST · NO SPAM

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