Office Mezzanine

The mezzanine office at the ABBCO Bakery in Leichhardt looks down over a factory floor that has been empty for years. Papers sit where someone left them on the desk. Debris covers the surfaces. The room is open to the industrial space below, its walls carrying the grime and weathering of long disuse. The building at Leichhardt was operating as a bakery by at least April 1941, when a Federal Royal Commissioner visited in person to observe the bread-making process as part of an inquiry into a ministerial fine reduction. By August 1973, the Baking Trade Employees' Union of NSW secretary described ABBCO as the biggest independent bakery in Australia. That scale was real: two roll machines producing six thousand dozen rolls per hour, a 65-foot oven, around 100 types of bread, and distribution across Sydney through the company's own 22 retail shops and wholesale channels. Bread moved around the ceiling on conveyer belts through a 50- to 60-minute cooling cycle before it was sliced and wrapped. The company's origins stretched back further. The Automatic Bread Baking Company grew out of the NSW State Bakery, a government operation established at Stanmore in 1914 to regulate bread prices and prevent wartime profiteering. When the state sold the business around 1925, the McLeod family took it over and built it into the operation that would occupy this Leichhardt site. By the time Brett Patman photographed the building in 2015, the factory floor was long quiet. The basement held old mattresses and furniture, and flooded when it rained. Upper levels were filled with dumped doors and building materials. The office block, including this mezzanine, showed signs of squatter occupation. The building has since been demolished, and a Dan Murphy's liquor store now occupies the site.