Power House Platform Side Exterior

The platform side exterior of the Powerhouse at Portland Cement Works Precinct presents a wall of weathered concrete and rusted steel beams standing against open sky. The surface carries the slow accumulation of decades without maintenance: rust tracking down steel, concrete softened by moisture and time, the structural geometry of the building still intact but no longer dressed for work. The Powerhouse was originally constructed around 1902 as part of the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company's new plant, built under the direction of Dr August Wilhelm Karl Scheidel, a metallurgist appointed to rebuild the Portland operation from the ground up. By 1910 what had been two separate buildings had been joined into a single structure, with the southern end extended at the same time. An overhead gantry crane ran the full length of the building during operations. The iron girders were imported from the same English manufacturer that supplied the Eveleigh Street Railway Yards. The wider site ran from 4 August 1902, when cement production commenced under the "Union" brand, through to November 1991, when cement production ceased after nearly ninety years. At its peak in 1912, the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company was producing approximately 40 per cent of all Portland cement manufactured in Australia. The Powerhouse stood through all of it: through the peak workforce of 608 employees recorded in 1911, through the Depression-era contractions of the 1930s, through the transition from dry to wet process manufacturing in the 1950s. The Portland Cement Works Precinct was added to the NSW State Heritage Register on 3 August 2012 (SHR #01739). The Powerhouse is assessed as being in good condition relative to other structures on the site. This photograph, made in 2018, records the exterior as it stood more than two decades after the last shift.