Like most things in Australia the Clackline Refractory came into being more by luck than planning. In 1898 Western Australia was undergoing a gold rush and two blokes by the names of John Ford and James Murray were prospecting in the eastern end of the Darling Range. About 80Km east of Perth they decided to sink an exploratory shaft and instead of finding gold they found fire-clay. Disappointed they moved on. Fast forward a couple of years and it must of dawned upon them that they had stumbled upon a valuable commodity as they decided to extract the clay from what on closer inspection was a limitless supply. Why was the clay so valuable? Well fire-clay is used to make bricks for furnaces and kilns. It is used in the manufacture of crucibles for smelting. Before this discovery Australia was having to import bricks made of fire-clay from Britain at some considerable cost. The refractory was built to produce the bricks and it was found they were more durable than the imported ones. You’d think that having a ready made monopoly would have meant that Messrs Ford and Murray would be laughing all the way to bank. Well no and the refractory changed hands several times before being completely shut down in 1992.

 

 

 

I discovered the Refractory completely by accident. I was cycling along the Kep Track and as I was approaching Clackline I saw an enormous brick chimney rising out of the trees. It was definitely industrial looking so I decided to have a shufty and found this huge post industrial site. It had only been shut for a couple of years at that stage and everything looked pretty intact. I went back a few days later and photographed the place early in the morning and the sunlight shining through the huge kilns was magical. On further research I wasn’t surprised to learn that it had been given a heritage listing.

I didn’t think about the refractory again until a couple of months ago. I just purchased a new to me secondhand camera and I wanted to put a roll of film through it to see if it was working OK. My partner wanted to visit Clackline to get some material for a project she’s working on so I decided that the refractory was where I’d test the new camera. When we got there I wasn’t prepared for how much the site had changed. Everything of value had been stripped out, the buildings were in a dreadful state, there was graffiti everywhere along with drug paraphernalia. To add to the sombre mood we met a family there who were visiting to see where a relative had died just a couple of days previously. You couldn’t more get a more gothic atmosphere if you tried and this suited the black white film perfectly. All in all it was quite a strange experience and we moved on after I had shot the roll.