Machine Shop Door

The door stands inside the machine shop at Portland Cement Works, its surface worked through by time into a record of its own maintenance history. Layers of industrial paint have lifted and curled away from the metal beneath, exposing earlier coats, each one applied during a different decade of the works' nearly century-long operational life. The surrounding brickwork is bare, the render cracked and receding, and the quality of light inside the space is the flat, steady kind that comes through a building no longer trying to keep the weather out. Portland Cement Works occupies a 5.9-hectare processing and administrative precinct at Williwa Street, Portland, in the City of Lithgow. Construction of the modern plant began under Dr August Wilhelm Karl Scheidel, a metallurgist appointed in 1899 by the British-owned New Zealand Mines Trust to rebuild an operation that had already failed twice under previous owners. The Commonwealth Portland Cement Company was registered in December 1900. Cement production commenced in 1902 using coal-fired rotary kilns, technology that was at the global leading edge of cement manufacturing at the time. The works expanded steadily through the Federation era and into the mid-twentieth century, passing through successive owners: Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers UK assumed control in the late 1940s, followed by Blue Circle Southern Cement Ltd in 1974, and then Boral Limited in 1992. Cement production ceased in November 1991. The limestone quarries that supplied the plant remained operational until 1998, when the last quarry was decommissioned and dismantling of the plant began. The machine shop and the door within it are what remain of that operational life. The precinct was added to the NSW State Heritage Register as Item 01739 on 3 August 2012, recognised across all seven significance criteria. This photograph was made in 2018, during the early years of the site's transition toward the redevelopment now known as The Foundations.