Transfer House

Broken panes in the lower right of a 40-pane steel-framed window let light fall directly onto yellow-painted structural elements inside the corner station at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories. Grime and rust streaks coat the upper brickwork, and a capped cylindrical fixture sits mounted to the wall beside the frame. The space is a small corner of the conveyor system, its steelwork picked out in yellow against weathered brick, the light flat and direct where the glass has gone. This corner station redirected conveyor travel between the wet section and the power station.

The transfer house was one node in the conveyor cascade that moved material through the complex. The Morwell brown coal proved unsuitable for briquetting, with high alkali and sulphur content, so Yallourn coal was railed across the interconnecting line to feed the Morwell briquette factories. The Victorian Heritage Register lists the plant as the only remaining intact assemblage of mid-twentieth-century briquetting machinery in Victoria, its wet sections, hammer mills, shaker screens, conveyor cascades, raw coal bunkers and storage sheds surviving together. Briquette flow ran continuously through the multi-level factories until the 2014 closure. Brett photographed the transfer house on 15 April 2017, in the closed complex before the demolition program began.