Rear Workshop

The concrete floor of the rear workshop at the Northcote Shoe Factory holds hundreds of pale blue plastic shoe lasts, each one a mould around which leather or synthetic material was once shaped into a finished shoe. They are scattered thickly, not stacked or sorted, just left where the last shift ended. Workbenches remain at their positions along the floor, pressing machinery still sitting on top of them. Two red fire extinguishers are mounted in place on the wall. At the far end, a roller door is closed. The factory was built in 1926 on the corner of Arthurton Road and Helen Street in Northcote, replacing two smaller buildings on nearby Eastment Street where the operation had begun. The new premises were purpose-built for footwear manufacturing, part of a wave of industrial construction across Melbourne's inner northern suburbs in the interwar period. Northcote in 1933 was described in the Borough's Jubilee publication as "an important, flourishing manufacturing city" with a population of 36,129; boot and shoe production was among its established trades alongside brickworks, tanneries, and furniture making. By the 1970s the factory was operating under the name Purnell Shoe Company. A pair of brown lace-up shoes in their original Purnell-branded cardboard box, acquired by the State Library Victoria between 1970 and 1979, independently confirms the manufacturer's name. Employment in Melbourne's footwear industry had peaked at nearly 12,000 workers in the 1960s; from the 1980s, tariff reductions under the Hawke government's economic liberalisation programme exposed local manufacturers to low-cost imported footwear. The Northcote Shoe Factory closed somewhere in that contracting decade or the one that followed, the exact date unrecorded. When this photograph was made in 2012, nothing had been cleared. The shoe lasts, the machinery, the workbenches and the fire extinguishers were all still there. The factory was demolished in 2016 and the site consolidated into a residential unit complex. The shoe lasts in this frame are the most complete record of what the room held.