Power House Crane

The overhead gantry crane of the Portland Cement Works power house runs the full width of the interior, its rusted steel frame suspended from the original truss structure above. Below it, debris covers the floor. Brick walls have shed render and face in long vertical seams. Light pushes through gaps in the roofline and picks out the corrosion built up across decades of exposure. The crane rail, the girders, the connections between them: all of it still in place, in the position it occupied when the plant last ran. The powerhouse was constructed around 1902 as part of the original plant commissioned by the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company under Dr August Wilhelm Karl Scheidel, the German-trained metallurgist who rebuilt the Portland works from the ground up after two earlier ventures had failed. By 1910, what had begun as two separate buildings had been joined as a single structure, its southern end extended concurrently, and the overhead gantry crane extended to run through the entire length. The iron girders carrying that crane were imported from the same English manufacturer that supplied the Eveleigh Street Railway Yards. The Commonwealth Portland Cement Company registered in December 1900 and began cement production on 4 August 1902 [verify against S2/Lithgow Mercury archive]. By 1912, the works were producing approximately 40% of all Portland cement manufactured in Australia. The plant ran through two world wars, a depression that laid off up to 80% of the workforce, multiple changes of ownership, and a shift from dry-process to wet-process manufacturing. Blue Circle Southern Cement Ltd took over in 1974; Boral Limited acquired the business in 1992. Cement production ceased in November 1991. The limestone quarries continued supplying crushing material to the Maldon works until 1998, when the last quarry was decommissioned. The Portland Cement Works Precinct was added to the NSW State Heritage Register on 3 August 2012 (SHR #01739). The powerhouse is recorded in good condition relative to other structures on the site. This photograph, made in 2018, records the crane as it remains: structure intact, the working life long over, the building slowly returning to its component materials around it.