Workshop To Powerhouse

Peeling white paint exposes long runs of red brick along the flank of a low industrial building at the Portland Cement Works on Williwa Street, Portland. Broken windows and a boarded doorway mark years of disuse. A tall, unadorned chimney rises clear of the roofline against open sky, with a barren dirt forecourt stretching between the structures. The Powerhouse itself dates to around 1902, built as part of the Commonwealth Portland Cement Company works designed and constructed under Dr August Wilhelm Karl Scheidel, a metallurgist from Heidelberg who had been appointed to rebuild the Portland operation from the ground up. What began as two separate structures was joined into a single unit by 1910, with the southern end extended at the same time. An overhead gantry crane ran the full length of the building during operations. The iron girders were imported from the same English manufacturer that supplied the Eveleigh Street Railway Yards. Numerous internal modifications were made across the operational period as the plant expanded and the manufacturing process changed. The Commonwealth Portland Cement Company registered in December 1900 and began cement production on 4 August 1902. By 1912, the works was producing approximately 40% of all Portland cement manufactured in Australia. The plant ran coal-fired rotary kilns at a time when that technology was at the global leading edge of cement manufacturing. It was nearly self-sufficient, operating its own coal mines, private railway and tramway system, and limestone quarries. At its peak in 1911, 608 people worked the site. Cement production stopped in November 1991 after 89 years. The limestone quarries supplied crushing material to other works until 1998, when the last quarry was decommissioned and the plant began to be dismantled. The Portland Cement Works Precinct was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register on 3 August 2012. This photograph, made in 2018, records the ground between the workshop and the Powerhouse as it stood: paint peeling, windows broken, quiet inside a site that had built a town and supplied cement across Australia and into the Pacific for the better part of a century.