Reflections

Water sits in the low points of a cracked concrete floor, still enough to throw back a clean reflection of the walls and machinery above. Dust catches in the shafts of light that reach the interior. The space is large, open, and entirely quiet. This is the factory floor of ABBCO Bakery at Leichhardt, photographed in 2015 while the building stood abandoned. The company behind it, Abbco Bread Co Pty Ltd, had roots going back to 1914, when the NSW Government purchased a large brick bakery at Stanmore to establish a State Bakery, producing bread for Sydney and regulating the market against wartime profiteering. When the government sold the operation around 1925, it passed into private hands and continued as the Automatic Bread Baking Company, with the McLeod family running it as directors and part-owners. By at least 1941, the operation was based at Leichhardt, and by 1973 the secretary of the Baking Trade Employees' Union of NSW was calling it the biggest independent bakery in Australia. The scale the photograph now silently records was once genuinely industrial. Two roll machines turned out six thousand dozen rolls per hour. Bread moved through a 65-foot oven, then travelled on ceiling-mounted conveyer belts for a cooling period before slicing and wrapping. Around 100 varieties of bread were produced and distributed across Sydney through 22 retail shops and wholesale channels. In September 1974, the bakery baked what was claimed to be the longest loaf of bread in the world, on a 140-foot tray, for the Freedom from Hunger Campaign. By the time Brett Patman photographed the building in 2015, the machinery had gone quiet and water was coming in through the floor whenever it rained. The building has since been demolished.