Squatters Bedroom

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D7000
Lens: 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 24mm · f/8.0 · 13s · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

A mattress sits on the floor of a derelict room. Discarded belongings are scattered around it. Daylight enters through a gap, cutting across dusty surfaces. Paint is peeling from the walls. The floor is littered with debris left by a temporary occupant.

Edition

Open edition

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A fixed number of prints exist. Once sold, the edition closes permanently. Each print is individually numbered and signed.

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Colour

Signed, numbered, with COA. Made to order in 5 to 10 business days (unframed). Shipped in protective packaging with edition certificate, paper-stock reference and a printed care guide.

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In situ

Squatters Bedroom at Abandoned Bakery, black-framed print displayed in situ on a wall.

Squatters Bedroom at Abandoned Bakery, raw timber-framed print displayed in situ on a wall.

Squatters Bedroom at Abandoned Bakery, glass print displayed in situ on a wall.

01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title: Squatters Bedroom
Series: Abandoned Bakery (ABBCO Bakery)
Catalogue: ABA-014
Process: Giclée
Captured: 8 November 2015
Camera: NIKON D7000
Lens: 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 13s s
ISO: 100
Focal length: 24 mm
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size: 290 × 200 mm
Location: Leichhardt, New South Wales, Australia
Authenticity: C2PA verified provenance →
Recognised by: Highly Commended in Multimedia at the 2016 National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards

02 LOCATION

Leichhardt, New South Wales, Australia

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

03 THE STORY

About this print

The room is small and bleak. A mattress sits on the floor, surrounded by discarded belongings, the kind of accumulation that forms quickly when someone has nowhere else to be. Sunlight pushes through a gap in the wall or window frame, catching the dust and the debris. The paint is lifting. The floor is bare. It is, unmistakably, someone's temporary bedroom inside an abandoned industrial building. The building was the ABBCO Bakery, formally Abbco Bread Co Pty Ltd, on Darley Road in Leichhardt. Its origins trace back further than the Leichhardt site itself. In 1914, the NSW Government purchased a large brick bakery at Stanmore and established the State Bakery, producing bread for Sydney during wartime to regulate prices and prevent profiteering. Around 1925, the business passed into private hands and continued as the Automatic Bread Baking Company, ABBCO, under the McLeod family. By 1941, the company was operating at Leichhardt, large enough to attract the attention of a Federal Royal Commission inquiring into bread weight violations and a ministerial decision to reduce the company's fine. By 1973, the secretary of the Baking Trade Employees' Union of NSW was describing ABBCO as the biggest independent bakery in Australia. A 65-foot oven. Six thousand dozen rolls per hour from two machines alone. Around 100 varieties of bread in production at any one time, distributed across Sydney through wholesale channels and the company's own retail shops. By 2015, when Brett Patman photographed the site for Lost Collective, all of that was gone. The office block had become a squat. The basement held old mattresses and furniture, flooding whenever it rained. Upper floors served as a dumping ground. The building was demolished not long after, replaced by a Dan Murphy's on land owned by RailCorp. This photograph records what the factory had become in its final years: not industrial heritage, not a ruin in any romantic sense, just a building that had outlived its use and was being occupied, quietly and temporarily, by someone with nowhere better to go.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

A makeshift bed on the floor of the former ABBCO Bakery office block in Leichhardt, photographed in 2015. By that point the factory had been abandoned for some years, and parts of the building had become a squat. Scattered belongings and discarded items mark a recent, temporary occupation. The bakery, formally known as Abbco Bread Co Pty Ltd, had its origins in the NSW State Bakery established at Stanmore in 1914. Sold into private hands around 1925, it grew into what the Baking Trade Employees' Union of NSW described in 1973 as the biggest independent bakery in Australia.

Brett Patman

The series

Abandoned Bakery (ABBCO Bakery)

2015 · 14 photographs

ABBCO Bakery ran at 7 Darley Road, Leichhardt, on the inner-west fringe of Sydney. The site was on the original 1811 Macquarie Gift land grant to Ensign Hugh Piper, adjacent to the former Goods Line freight rail corridor between Sydney Yard and Darling Harbour. Built around 1950, the bakery was, by the early 1970s, the largest independent bakery in Australia. Director and part-owner Bill McLeod ran it with his brother and sister, baking 100 types of bread for distribution across Sydney through ABBCO's own 22 retail shops and through wholesale outlets. The site later passed through State Rail and Goodman Fielder ownership and had brief lives as a limousine hire and furniture manufacturer before falling out of use. The Lost Collective photographs were made during its abandoned period. The bakery has since been demolished. A Dan Murphy's now stands on the site.

View all in this series →

05 SIZE GUIDE

Print sizes

The anatomy view shows what this finish is as a physical object: paper margin, mat band, frame depth, acrylic profile. The comparison strip shows how each size sits relative to the others at true scale. Click a size or a finish to update both.