Raffan Mill Boiler House

The Raffan Mill Boiler House at Portland Cement Works in Portland, NSW, is a brick structure that has been reduced to something close to a ruin. The roof line is compromised, the concrete is breaking apart in sections, and the steel machinery inside has been claimed steadily by rust. The machinery remains in situ, in a building that no longer fully encloses it. The broader Portland Cement Works Precinct covers approximately 5.9 hectares on Williwa Street, Portland, and the site's history reaches back to 1863 when Thomas Murray constructed the first lime kilns on the land. The cement works as they are understood today began with the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company, registered in December 1900 and operational by 4 August 1902. Dr August Wilhelm Karl Scheidel, a metallurgist from Heidelberg who held a PhD from Freiberg University, designed the new works and supervised construction. The technology he brought to the site, coal-fired rotary kilns then being developed in Germany, placed Portland at the leading edge of cement manufacturing in the world at that moment. By 1912, the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company was producing approximately 40% of all Portland cement manufactured in Australia. The works supplied cement across every Australian state, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. Peak annual production of 143,803 tons was reached in 1927. The workforce peaked at 608 in 1911. The town of Portland itself was named for the cement-making process and grew around the factory in the pattern of a single-industry company town. Cement production ceased in November 1991. The limestone quarries remained operational until 1998, supplying crushing material to the Maldon works. The Portland Cement Works Precinct was added to the NSW State Heritage Register on 3 August 2012 (SHR #01739). This photograph, made in 2018, records the boiler house as it stood nearly three decades after the last cement left the site: machinery intact, steel rusting, concrete fragmenting, the structure open to the sky.