Bottle Kiln

Two bottle kilns survive from what was originally a set of eight, constructed around 1889 on the site that would become Portland Cement Works Precinct in the Central Tablelands of NSW. This is one of them. Standing approximately 14 metres high with a body diameter of around 5 metres, the kiln is built from standard brick at 540 millimetres thickness, with steel clamping bands fixed at 700 millimetre intervals along its full height. The banding was structural, holding the form together against the stresses of repeated high-temperature firing. Decades of disuse have left the brickwork deeply scarred, the surface darkened and marked where heat and time have done their work. These kilns were built for the Cullen Bullen Lime and Cement Company, the venture formed by Alexander Currie and George Raffan after reorganising their earlier Cullen Bullen Lime and Marble Works. In 1889, that company became the first firm in NSW to successfully manufacture Portland cement, doing so under the "Kangaroo" brand. The operation was short-lived. By 1895 it had failed, and the kilns fell quiet. The property changed hands twice more before the New Zealand Mines Trust paid for the leases in 1899, appointing Dr August Wilhelm Karl Scheidel to rebuild the works entirely. What Scheidel built from 1900 onwards was a different scale of operation entirely, centred on coal-fired rotary kilns rather than bottle kilns, and capable of supplying cement across every Australian state and into New Zealand and the Pacific. The bottle kilns were left behind as the new plant grew around them. Raffan's Mill and the surviving brick bottle kilns are listed separately on the NSW State Heritage Register as item 01738, gazetted on 3 August 2012. They are recognised as representing the genesis of the Portland cement industry in NSW. The Portland Cement Works Precinct photograph was made in 2018.