Main Floor West

The main floor of the ABBCO Bakery in Leichhardt looks, in this 2015 photograph, like a place that stopped mid-sentence. Machinery stands where it was left, surfaces thick with dust, light falling through broken windows in long diagonal cuts across the floor. The high ceilings that once accommodated ceiling-mounted conveyor belts for bread cooling are visible above. The space reads as industrial in its bones: concrete, steel, scale. ABBCO, formally Abbco Bread Co Pty Ltd, traced its origins to the NSW State Bakery established at Stanmore in 1914, a government facility set up to regulate bread prices and prevent wartime profiteering. The State Bakery was sold into private hands around 1925, continuing as the Automatic Bread Baking Company under the McLeod family. By April 1941, the company was operating at this Leichhardt site, drawing enough national attention that a Federal Royal Commission visited the factory floor that year to observe bread baking operations first-hand. By 1973, the secretary of the Baking Trade Employees' Union of NSW described ABBCO as the biggest independent bakery in Australia. The operation ran two roll machines producing six thousand dozen rolls per hour, pushed product through a 65-foot oven, and distributed around 100 varieties of bread across Sydney. Bread rode ceiling-mounted conveyor belts for a 50- to 60-minute cooling cycle before slicing and wrapping for dispatch. 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 city streets by a dozen apprentices and displayed at Martin Place. The Leichhardt building was abandoned by the time Brett Patman photographed it in 2015. It has since been demolished. This photograph is what remains of the main floor.