Stove Heater

A cast iron hopper stove sits bolted to a concrete floor inside one of the workshop buildings at the Portland Cement Works Precinct in Portland, NSW. Whitewashed brick walls surround it on two sides. Sliding timber doors stand open, letting flat afternoon light fall across the floor. The room is otherwise empty. The Commonwealth Portland Cement Company registered in December 1900 and commenced cement production on 4 August 1902. At its 1911 peak the workforce reached 608 people, and by 1912 the company was producing approximately 40% of all Portland cement manufactured in Australia. The plant operated under successive owners, Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers UK from the late 1940s, Blue Circle Southern Cement Ltd from 1974, and Boral Limited from 1992, until cement production ceased in November 1991. Limestone quarrying continued until 1998. The Portland Cement Works Precinct was added to the NSW State Heritage Register (SHR #01739) on 3 August 2012, meeting all seven significance criteria. The Federation and Inter-War period industrial buildings across the approximately 5.9-hectare processing precinct were constructed in brickwork with steel trusses. The stove in this photograph is a small remnant of the working infrastructure that kept a large plant running across nearly nine decades of production. Photographed in 2018, the frame records what the building holds now: the stove, the light, the open doors, and the whitewashed brick. The Portland Cement Works series documents the precinct across multiple structures and spaces.