Boiler House Wall

The wall fills the frame. Rust bleeds through grey paint in broad, uneven patterns, the surface recording pressure and heat and time in layers that no deliberate process could reproduce. This is the boiler house at Portland Cement Works, a structure tucked within the Powerhouse building at Williwa Street, Portland, in the City of Lithgow. The Powerhouse dates to around 1902, part of the plant Dr August Wilhelm Karl Scheidel designed and supervised for the newly registered Commonwealth Portland Cement Company. Scheidel, a PhD metallurgist from Heidelberg who had been appointed to rebuild the failed Portland operation in 1899, brought German rotary kiln technology to a hillside 170 kilometres west of Sydney at a moment when that technology was at the global leading edge of cement manufacturing. The Powerhouse was built as two separate structures and joined as a single unit by 1910, with its southern end extended at the same time. An overhead gantry crane ran through the entire structure during operations. Iron girders were imported from the same English manufacturer that supplied the Eveleigh Street Railway Yards. The works these buildings served ran from 4 August 1902 until November 1991, under four successive owners: the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company, Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers UK, Blue Circle Southern Cement Ltd, and finally Boral Limited. At its peak in 1912 the operation was producing approximately 40 percent of all Portland cement manufactured in Australia. By 1959 annual capacity had reached 226,796 tonnes of cement and 18,144 tonnes of lime. Cement production stopped in November 1991. The limestone quarries remained open until 1998, supplying crushing material to the Maldon works. Then those too closed. The photograph from 2018 records what the wall looks like now: the accumulated finish of a long industrial life, peeling back without any particular drama. The Portland Cement Works Precinct was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register on 3 August 2012.