The first time I walked through a gap in a fence and into an abandoned building, it was this one. Bradmill, Yarraville. I was on my way home from work. There was a section of fence missing. I walked through it. That is where Lost Collective started.
The Bradmill story begins in Sydney in 1927, when Bradford Cotton Mills was established. The company grew into Bradmill Textiles and then Bradmill Industries Ltd, expanding into Victoria from 1940. From 1945, the Yarraville factory was the only facility in Australia manufacturing indigo denim. The first indigo-dyed denim came out of the mill in 1962.
By the 1970s, Bradmill Industries was the largest textile manufacturing company in Australia. Fifteen manufacturing sites across New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland. Around 7,000 employees across the company. The Yarraville factory was consuming 40,000 bales of cotton a year and was the third-largest water user in the State of Victoria.
When the company was pushed into receivership in the early 2000s under pressure from cheap textile imports, Australia ceased to manufacture indigo denim domestically. The factory sat dormant for roughly two decades before Frasers Property Australia and Irongate acquired the site for a mixed-use residential development, now known as Bradmill Yarraville.
I photographed it in the early 2010s. The boiler house was the dominant space, the plant and valve banks still in place, the graffiti already accumulating on every surface. Parts of the building had fire damage. There was a bus parked on the grounds, left over from the operating years. The photographs document a specific window between the factory’s closure and the start of demolition and construction that was already closing by the time I visited. That window is gone.
