Smoko Area

The smoko area of the Northcote Shoe Factory looks less like a room that was abandoned and more like one that was simply walked out of. Three armchairs sit arranged on a concrete floor, close enough to suggest a conversation circle. Collapsed cardboard boxes lean against the wall. Steel shelving holds plastic crates. A galvanised rubbish bin stands near the door. Fluorescent fittings hang overhead, unlit. Nothing dramatic has happened here. The room is just empty of people. The factory that contained this room was purpose-built in 1926 on the corner of Arthurton Road and Helen Street in Northcote, replacing two earlier, smaller buildings on nearby Eastment Street where the shoe-making operation had started before that. By the 1970s the factory was trading as the Purnell Shoe Company, a name independently confirmed by a pair of brown lace-up shoes in their original Purnell-branded box, held by the State Library Victoria, dated to somewhere between 1970 and 1979. Northcote had been a working-class manufacturing suburb since the 1870s, with brickworks, tanneries, furniture makers, hat manufacturers, and boot and shoe producers all concentrated in the inner north. Employment across Melbourne's footwear industry peaked in the 1960s at nearly 12,000 workers. From the 1980s, tariff reductions exposed Australian manufacturers to low-cost imports, and smaller operations like the Arthurton Road factory closed one by one across the decade and into the 1990s. The exact closure date for this factory has not been confirmed from available records. Lost Collective photographed the interior in 2012 with production equipment and break-room furniture still in place. The building was demolished and the site redeveloped as a residential unit complex in 2016. This photograph is one of the last records of what the factory looked like from the inside.