Drawing Office

The drawing office at Portland Cement Works, Portland, NSW, photographed in 2018. Drafting tables sit where they were left, papers scattered across surfaces and floor, everything filmed in the same grey dust that now covers most of the precinct. Broken window panes let in unsteady light. Nothing in this room has been cleared or arranged. It reads less like abandonment and more like interruption. The room formed part of the Administration Building, constructed around 1902 as part of the plant that Dr August Wilhelm Karl Scheidel, a metallurgist from Heidelberg with a PhD from Freiberg University, designed and supervised from the ground up. Scheidel had been appointed in 1899 by the New Zealand Mines Trust to rebuild the Portland cement operation following two failed ventures, and he brought with him German rotary kiln technology that was, at that moment, at the global leading edge of cement manufacturing. The Commonwealth Portland Cement Company registered in December 1900 and commenced cement production in 1902 under the "Union" brand. By 1903 the works employed 150 people. By 1911 that number had reached 608. By 1912, the company was producing approximately 40% of all Portland cement manufactured in Australia, supplying every state, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. The drawing office would have been the working room behind that growth, the space where production planning and engineering decisions took shape before they reached the kilns and quarries. Cement production ceased in November 1991. The limestone quarries ran until 1998. The Portland Cement Works Precinct was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register in August 2012. The drawing office now holds what was left when the last shift ended: tables, papers, and the particular silence of a room that once had a very specific purpose.