Main Floor East

The eastern section of ABBCO Bakery's main production floor, photographed in 2015, holds the machinery of an operation that ran at industrial scale for decades. Dust covers every surface. Light enters through broken windows and crosses the floor in the particular way light moves through buildings that have stopped being maintained, finding edges and surfaces that no longer serve any purpose. ABBCO Bakery operated at Leichhardt, New South Wales, as Abbco Bread Co Pty Ltd. The company's origins trace to the NSW State Bakery, a government-owned facility established at Stanmore in 1914 to regulate bread prices and prevent wartime profiteering. The State Bakery was sold into private hands around 1925 and continued as the Automatic Bread Baking Company, with the McLeod family running the business through the following decades. By 1941, the bakery was operating at the Leichhardt site and producing bread for both civilian and military markets. That year, a Federal Royal Commission investigated the reduction of a fine imposed on the company, with Mr Justice Maxwell visiting the Leichhardt factory in April 1941. By 1973, the Baking Trade Employees' Union of NSW secretary described ABBCO as the biggest independent bakery in Australia. The production figures from that period give a sense of the floor's former pace: two roll machines producing six thousand dozen rolls per hour, bread running through a 65-foot oven, around 100 varieties distributed across Sydney through 22 retail shops and wholesale channels. The ceiling above this floor would have carried the conveyer belt cooling system that moved bread through a 50- to 60-minute cooling cycle before slicing and wrapping. In September 1974, the bakery baked what was claimed as the longest loaf of bread in the world for the Freedom from Hunger Campaign, a 140-foot loaf carried through the city streets by bakers' apprentices and displayed at Martin Place. By the time of Lost Collective's 2015 photography, the building was abandoned. It has since been demolished.