Machining Workshop

The floor runs the full length of the building in bare concrete. Steel roof trusses span overhead, rising to clerestory windows that push light down the length of the space in long, unbroken columns. Whitewashed brick lines both walls. At the far end, a row of tall timber doors stands closed. Nothing remains on the floor. The building is empty in the way that industrial buildings go empty: completely, and with no ceremony. The Portland Cement Works Precinct sits on Williwa Street in Portland, City of Lithgow, NSW. The Commonwealth Portland Cement Company registered in December 1900 and began cement production in 1902, drawing on rotary kiln technology that was, at the time, at the leading edge of manufacturing practice globally. By 1912 the company was producing approximately 40% of all Portland cement manufactured in Australia. The peak workforce reached 608 employees in 1911, and the town of Portland grew directly from the plant: named for the cement-making process, gazetted as a village in 1894, and reaching a population of 2,376 by 1911. The precinct's industrial buildings were constructed across the Federation and Inter-War periods in brickwork with steel trusses. This photograph records one of those structures: its trusses still holding, its brick still sound, its floor cleared of everything that once gave the space a purpose. Cement production at the works ceased in November 1991. The limestone quarries remained operational until 1998, supplying material to the Maldon works, before the site was decommissioned and dismantling began. The Portland Cement Works Precinct was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register in 2012 (SHR #01739), recognised across all seven significance criteria. AWJ Civil acquired the site in 2017 with plans for adaptive reuse under the name The Foundations. This photograph was made in 2018, when the buildings stood largely as the last operators had left them.