Silos

The concrete silos at the Portland Cement Works Precinct in Portland, NSW, are among the most immediately recognisable structures on a site that shaped both a town and an industry. Built during the mid-twentieth century expansion of the works, the cylindrical forms served the storage demands of a plant that grew steadily from its founding output of roughly 12 tonnes per day in 1903 to an annual cement capacity of 226,796 tonnes by 1959. Their weathered exteriors, streaked with rust where decades of moisture have worked through the concrete, carry the physical record of that long operational life. The Portland Cement Works Precinct has its origins in 1902, when the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company commenced cement production on 4 August of that year under the "Union" brand. The company had been registered in December 1900, and the works it built at Williwa Street became, by 1912, responsible for approximately 40% of all Portland cement manufactured in Australia. The site operated under successive owners, including Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers UK, Blue Circle Southern Cement Ltd, and finally Boral Limited, before cement production ceased in November 1991. The limestone quarries connected to the site remained operational until 1998. The Portland Cement Works Precinct was added to the NSW State Heritage Register on 3 August 2012 (SHR #01739), recognised across all seven significance criteria. By the time this photograph was made in 2018, the silos had taken on a second life. Artist Guido van Helten painted large-scale murals across eight of the cylindrical silos between April and May 2018, depicting six former workers of the Portland Cement Works: Jack Abbott, Bert Boyling, Herb Coleman, Tommy Fitzgerald, Ernie Jeffree, and Yvonne Hogan. Their faces now look out from the same structures that once held the raw materials of a century of production. The rust and the concrete remain. So do the people, in a different form.