Shaker Screen No 6

The 'No 6 shaker screen' sign, white lettering with a directional arrow, marks the wall above the wet section walkway at the Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories. Heavy curved pipes run along the left wall, carried on brackets, while yellow railings line the right. A grated metal floor extends toward a bank of multi-pane windows at the far end. Orange-brown rust and peeling paint cover much of the wall surface between the pipe brackets. The walkway is narrow and direct, a service route through the machinery rather than a room, the windows ahead the only open light in the frame.

This walkway threaded the wet section of the briquette works, where the 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 plant is registered as the only remaining intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria, its wet sections, hammer mills, shaker screens and conveyor cascades surviving as a set. 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 screens. Briquette flow ran continuously through the multi-level factories until the 2014 closure. Brett photographed No 6 shaker screen on 30 March 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.