Laboratory

The laboratory sits inside the Portland Cement Works Precinct on Williwa Street, Portland, NSW, a Federation and Inter-War industrial complex that once operated as the largest cement-manufacturing plant in Australia. Its benches hold the remnants of a working quality-control room: glassware, instruments, and the fine dust of decades sitting undisturbed across every surface. Light moves through the space and picks out the detail of what was left behind when the plant closed, a room preserved not by intention but by inertia. The cement works that surrounded this room began as a colonial-era lime operation in 1863, when Thomas Murray constructed the first kilns on the site. By 1889 the Cullen Bullen Lime and Cement Company was producing Portland cement under the Kangaroo brand, the first firm in NSW to do so successfully. The modern works took shape from 1900 onwards under the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company, with Dr August Wilhelm Karl Scheidel, a metallurgist from Heidelberg, directing the construction of a plant that introduced German rotary kiln technology to Australia at a moment when the process was still being refined internationally. At its 1912 peak, the company produced approximately 40% of all Portland cement manufactured in Australia, supplying every state, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. The workforce reached 608 at its height, and the town of Portland, which the company effectively established and named, grew to a peak population of around 3,125 in 1948. Cement production ceased in November 1991. The limestone quarries continued operating until 1998, when the last was decommissioned and dismantling of the plant began. The laboratory, like much of the precinct, was left as it stood. The Portland Cement Works Precinct was added to the NSW State Heritage Register in August 2012. This photograph was made in 2018.