Workshop

A yellow crane hook hangs from the overhead rail at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, drawing the eye down a long workshop lined with teal metal cabinets and wooden workbenches, their surfaces still stacked with old toolboxes and containers. Gridded windows along the left wall throw rectangular shadows across the floorboards, several panes broken and admitting uneven light. On a vertical beam near the far end, raised lettering reads 'Man Lumea Gold Middlesbrough England', marking equipment that once supplied this maintenance floor. The room is long and low, the bench line and cabinets running back toward the far wall, the tooling left where it stood.

The complex included mechanical workshops registered as part of its significant fabric, where the plant and equipment were maintained. Much of that equipment came from British engineering firms, the cast English maker's mark on the beam being one trace of that supply, with Wright Anderson of England supplying the generator houses. Around 250 single British men came to Australia as assisted migrants from 1951 to erect the British engineering equipment, and the operational workforce was drawn largely from Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and other European countries, many settling permanently in the Latrobe Valley. Brett photographed the workshop on 15 April 2017, in the closed complex before the demolition program began.