Annex

The Munitions Annex at Portland Cement Works Precinct is one of the later additions to a site with deep industrial roots. Built in 1943, it was constructed during wartime, added to a complex that had already been operating for more than forty years and had grown from a modest colonial lime-burning operation into one of the largest cement manufacturing plants in Australia. The works themselves began producing cement in 1902 under the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company, which had been registered in December 1900 and had taken over a site with an even longer history. Lime kilns had operated here since 1863. By 1904, the Lithgow Mercury was describing Portland as the largest cement-making plant in the Commonwealth, with approximately 200 employees and an initial capital investment exceeding £250,000. By 1912, the company was producing approximately 40% of all Portland cement manufactured in Australia. The Munitions Annex sits within a precinct listed on the NSW State Heritage Register in 2012 (SHR #01739), which encompasses Federation and Inter-War period industrial buildings constructed in brickwork with steel trusses. The annex itself, deemed economically unfeasible for adaptive reuse in a 2003 heritage assessment, has remained largely as the last operators left it. Cement production at Portland Cement Works Precinct ceased in November 1991. The limestone quarries that supplied the plant continued operating until 1998, when the last of them was decommissioned. This photograph, made in 2018, records the annex interior: concrete walls pulling apart along old stress lines, broken windows admitting columns of light across the debris-covered floor. The scale of the room is clear from the height of the remaining walls. The structure is still standing, but only just.