Vacuum Sealer Front

The front face of this industrial shoe-lasting machine is dense with working parts: cast iron cam arms, actuator rods, and hydraulic fittings packed together in close order, every surface carrying years of grease and fine debris. Blue pneumatic lines run from the machine down toward the production floor below. When Lost Collective photographed the Northcote Shoe Factory in 2012, the machinery remained in place on the floor where it had last been used, undisturbed. The factory at 13-15 Arthurton Road, Northcote, on the corner of Arthurton Road and Helen Street, was purpose-built in 1926. The operation had begun earlier on nearby Eastment Street, in two smaller buildings, before the company purchased the corner land and constructed the Arthurton Road factory to replace them. 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 in the State Library Victoria's collection. The factory was one of many small and mid-sized footwear manufacturers concentrated across Melbourne's inner northern suburbs, an industry that employed nearly 12,000 workers across the city at its peak in the 1960s. The closure came during the 1980s or 1990s, when tariff reductions exposed Australian manufacturers to low-cost imported footwear and businesses across the inner north began locking their doors. The production floor at Arthurton Road was left largely intact: shoe-lasting machinery, a clicker press, sewing equipment, and a smoko-room radio, all still in position. The factory building was subsequently demolished, and the site was redeveloped as a residential unit complex in 2016. This photograph is one of the few records of what the production floor contained.