Sewing Desk

The sewing desk sits in a corner of the factory floor, dust laid evenly across the machine and the work surface beside it. Fabric scraps remain, faded and flattened. Small tools are still positioned where they were last set down. Light from a grimy window falls across the desk, picking out the grime on every flat surface. Nothing has been moved. Nobody came back. The Northcote Shoe Factory on Arthurton Road was purpose-built in 1926, when the company purchased a corner block at Arthurton Road and Helen Street and constructed new premises to replace two smaller buildings on nearby Eastment Street where the operation had started. The 1933 Jubilee publication for the Borough of Northcote recorded the suburb as "an important, flourishing manufacturing city," with boot and shoe production among the industries concentrated in the area. 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, acquired between 1970 and 1979, an institutional record of the company's output that outlasted the building itself. The sewing desk was one station in a chain that turned flat material into shaped footwear. The production floor also retained a clicker press for die-cutting leather and synthetic components, vacuum sealing equipment, and a dispatch area. Each station required a specific skill. The sewing desk, positioned for upper-stitching work, would have been occupied for most of a working day. Melbourne's footwear industry employed close to 12,000 workers at its peak in the 1960s. From the 1980s, tariff reductions exposed Australian manufacturers to low-cost imported footwear, and small suburban factories across Melbourne's inner north closed in succession. The Northcote Shoe Factory was among them. The Arthurton Road site was demolished and redeveloped as a residential unit complex in 2016. Lost Collective photographed the factory interior in 2012, four years before the building was gone.