Clicker Press

A clicker press is a simple machine with a specific job: a hardened steel die is set, the head comes down under hydraulic pressure, and a sheet of leather or synthetic material is punched into the shape of a shoe component. Toe caps, heel counters, insoles, uppers; each piece begins on a press like this one. The machine in this frame stands on its column mount, hydraulic fittings corroded to an orange crust, a blue pneumatic line still coiled from the head as though someone left mid-shift. A green steel door behind it carries layers of graffiti tags. White-painted brick. No workers. The Northcote Shoe Factory began on Eastment Street, Northcote, in two small buildings before the operation outgrew them. In 1926, the company purchased land on the corner of Arthurton Road and Helen Street and built a purpose-built factory at 13-15 Arthurton Road. By 1933, Northcote was described as "an important, flourishing manufacturing city" with a population of 36,129; boot and shoe production was one of several industries concentrated in the suburb alongside brickworks, tanneries, furniture making, and hat manufacturing. By the 1970s the factory was operating under the name Purnell Shoe Company. The State Library of Victoria holds a pair of brown lace-up shoes in their original Purnell-branded cardboard box, a physical record of what came off this production floor. Melbourne's footwear industry employed nearly 12,000 workers at its peak in the 1960s, most of them women. From the 1980s, tariff reductions as part of the Hawke government's economic liberalisation programme exposed local manufacturers to low-cost imported footwear. The effective rate of assistance to clothing and footwear had reached 240% in 1984-85 before falling sharply. For a small suburban manufacturer on Arthurton Road, that shift had one outcome. The factory closed, the clicker press stopped, and nobody came back to collect it. Lost Collective photographed the production floor in 2012. The press, the sewing desks, the vacuum sealers, the dispatch area, and the smoko-room radio were all still in place. The factory was demolished in 2016 and the site consolidated and redeveloped as a residential unit complex. This photograph is what remains of the cutting room.