Power House Southern Interior

The southern interior of the Portland Cement Works power house presents a scene of accumulated decay. Rusting heavy machinery sits across a bare concrete floor, and the walls, built from the same Federation-era brick that defines much of this precinct, shed their paint in long strips under the natural light that now enters where there were once solid, working surfaces. The structure is open to the sky in places. What was once a controlled industrial environment has reverted to something rawer. The powerhouse was originally constructed as two separate buildings around 1902, as part of Dr August Wilhelm Karl Scheidel's new plant for the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company. By 1910, the two buildings had been joined into a single structure, with the southern end extended concurrently. An overhead gantry crane ran through the entire length of the building during its operational years. The iron girders were imported from the same English manufacturer that supplied the Eveleigh Street Railway Yards. Numerous internal modifications were made across the decades of operation. Cement production at the Portland Cement Works commenced on 4 August 1902 under the "Union" brand, and continued without interruption through two world wars, the Great Depression, multiple ownership changes, and the shift from dry-process to wet-process manufacturing in the early 1950s. By 1959, annual production capacity had reached 226,796 tonnes of cement. Production ceased in November 1991 after 89 years of continuous operation. The Portland Cement Works Precinct was added to the NSW State Heritage Register on 3 August 2012, listed as item #01739. This photograph, made in 2018, records the power house as it stood in the years following heritage listing, with the site under early-stage redevelopment planning by AWJ Civil.