Electrical Workshop

The electrical workshop at Portland Cement Works is a brick-arched, steel-trussed room that reads like the skeleton of working industry. Corrugated iron spans the trusses overhead. Fluorescent fittings hang from the structure in rows, unlit. The concrete floor is bare. An open timber door draws a shaft of natural light across the space, the only movement in an otherwise still interior. The building sits within the Processing and Administrative Precinct on Williwa Street, Portland, a 5.9-hectare site that the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company began constructing in 1901 and brought into production on 4 August 1902. The precinct was built in phases across the Federation and Inter-War periods, with brickwork and fine steel trusses throughout, the same structural language visible in this workshop. By 1912 the company was producing approximately 40% of all Portland cement manufactured in Australia. Cement production at the works continued until November 1991, when Blue Circle Southern Cement Ltd, then the site's operator, ceased manufacturing after 89 years of continuous operation. The limestone quarries remained active until 1998, when the last was decommissioned and plant dismantling began. The Portland Cement Works Precinct was added to the NSW State Heritage Register on 3 August 2012 (SHR #01739), meeting all seven significance criteria. The site was acquired by AWJ Civil in 2017 and is being redeveloped as a mixed-use precinct known as The Foundations. Photographed in 2018, this image records the electrical workshop as it stood: brick, iron, steel, and concrete, structure intact, the fittings still in place, the floor still holding its form. The door is open. The light comes in. Everything else has stopped.