Through the Window

Yellow safety railing crosses the lower half of the window frame at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, above a metal grate floor, looking from the B factory toward the C factory. The multi-paned windows were built to a consistent pattern across the briquette works for a specific reason. In the event of an explosion, the panes would blow outward, releasing pressure without compromising the structural walls. Grime and streaks across the glass mark years without maintenance. An exposed vertical pipe runs along the left wall inside. The view holds at the threshold, one factory looking across to the next through the dirty, deliberate glass.

The windows belonged to the briquette works, 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. These were two of an original plan of four, the third and fourth cancelled after the 1951 to 1953 funding halt. The Victorian Heritage Register lists the plant as the only remaining intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria. 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 until the 2014 closure. Brett photographed through the window on 15 April 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.