Raffan Mill Workshop

The Raffan Mill Workshop sits at the older end of the Portland Cement Works Precinct, predating the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company plant by more than a decade. The single-level brick structure measures 15.5 metres long, 12.7 metres wide, and 6.4 metres high. It was built around 1889 as part of the operation run by George Raffan and Alexander Currie under the Cullen Bullen Lime and Cement Company, which that same year became the first firm in New South Wales to successfully manufacture Portland cement. The workshop once housed four 1,200 mm diameter Burr Stone Mills, each fitted with removable timber cogs held in place by wooden pegs. The building and its associated brick bottle kilns are listed separately on the NSW State Heritage Register as item 01738, gazetted on 3 August 2012. The listing recognises the Raffan Mill and kilns as representing the genesis of the Portland cement industry in New South Wales. By the time this photograph was made in 2018, the gears and driveshafts inside the workshop had not turned in decades. They remain in place, coated in accumulated grime, the timber cog mechanisms long since stilled. Light falls through broken window panes across the machinery floor, picking out the texture of metal surfaces and settled dust. Nothing has been moved or arranged. The photograph records the workshop as it stands: brick walls, idle machinery, and the particular quality of light that reaches into a space no longer in use. Portland Cement Works Precinct as a whole ceased cement production in November 1991 after nearly 89 years of continuous operation. The Raffan Mill Workshop, older than the CPCC plant itself, remains one of the most direct physical connections to the industry's origins in the town that the cement works built and named.