Turbine Front

A large spoked control wheel dominates the foreground at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, positioned directly in front of a heavy turbine unit bearing a Metropolitan Vickers manufacturer's plaque. Two curved silver pipes arch over the central machinery, and a second, smaller spoked wheel sits on an orange pedestal to the right. An orange Danger Confined Space sign is fixed to the left-side railing, with rows of gridded windows running along the upper wall above the concrete floor of the turbine hall. The composition is built around the machine itself, the wheels and pipes and the maker's plate all part of one heavy unit.

The plaque names Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Export Co. Ltd. of Manchester, who supplied the turbo-generators under the 1950 contract, two 30,000-kilowatt back-pressure machines with feed-heating plant, joined in the 1954 revised plan by a 20 MW low-pressure condensing turbine. These were the machines that turned brown coal steam into electricity for the state grid. With the demolition of Old Yallourn between 1995 and 1999, the complex became the earliest surviving large-scale Victorian state-grid power station from the SECV era. Brett photographed the turbine front on 14 April 2017, in the closed complex before the demolition program began.