Radio

A rust-coated radio on a grimy workbench. It is a small object in a large silence. When the Northcote Shoe Factory was operating, this radio would have sat in the smoko area, the staff break room where the machinery noise dropped away and the shift paused for a few minutes. Nobody came back to collect it when the factory closed. The building at 13-15 Arthurton Road, on the corner of Arthurton Road and Helen Street, Northcote, was purpose-built in 1926. The company had started earlier on nearby Eastment Street in two smaller buildings before purchasing the corner land and constructing the factory that would define the site for the next several decades. By the 1970s the operation was trading as the Purnell Shoe Company, a name independently confirmed by a pair of brown lace-up shoes held by the State Library Victoria in their original Purnell-branded cardboard box, dated to between 1970 and 1979. Northcote was a working-class manufacturing suburb, and shoe and boot production had run through Melbourne's inner northern suburbs since the mid-19th century. Employment in Melbourne's footwear industry peaked in the 1960s at nearly 12,000 workers. Then came tariff reductions under the Hawke government's economic liberalisation programme, and cheap imported footwear moved through the same retail channels that Australian factories had supplied for generations. The Northcote Shoe Factory closed somewhere in the 1980s or 1990s, one of many small and mid-sized manufacturers that locked their doors across Melbourne's inner north during those years. When Lost Collective photographed the factory interior in 2012, the production floor still held press levers, sewing equipment, vacuum sealers, and filing cabinets. The smoko area held this radio. The factory building was demolished in 2016, and the site at 9-13 Arthurton Road was redeveloped as a residential unit complex. The radio in this photograph is what the building looked like in the years between.