Annex Door

The door stands partially open, its surface carrying decades of paint in various states of separation from the rusted metal beneath. Layer upon layer of colour has lifted, cracked, and curled away, leaving a record of every repaint the building received across its working life. Beyond the threshold, the interior is dim. The decay is total and unhurried. The Munitions Annex was constructed in 1943 at the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company works on Williwa Street, Portland, NSW. By that point the plant had been in continuous cement production for more than four decades, having commenced operations in 1902 under the direction of Dr August Wilhelm Karl Scheidel, a metallurgist from Heidelberg who brought German rotary kiln technology to the NSW Central Tablelands. The annex was a wartime addition to a site that had by then grown into one of Australia's largest industrial operations. The broader works reached peak annual production of 143,803 tons in 1927 and, by 1959, had a combined capacity of 226,796 tonnes of cement and 18,144 tonnes of lime per year. At its height the plant employed more than 600 workers and the company had named the town that grew around it. Cement from Portland was shipped to every Australian state, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands across the course of the twentieth century. Cement production at the works ceased in November 1991. The limestone quarries remained open until 1998, supplying crushed material to other operations, before the last quarry was decommissioned and plant dismantling began. The Portland Cement Works Precinct was added to the NSW State Heritage Register in 2012. A heritage assessment completed for the site noted the Munitions Annex was deemed economically unfeasible for adaptive reuse. The door in this photograph, captured in 2018, records what that assessment left behind.